CREATIVE ENVY
Book: CREATIVE ENVY – The rescue of one of civilization’s major forces
Wilmette: Chiron Publications, 2003, 144 pp.
Autor: Carlos Amadeu Botelho Byington*
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By analyzing the relationship between Mozart’s genius and Salieri’s creative insecurity, the author goes back to Genesis, to the concept of original sin in Christianity and to psychoanalysis to show that envy has been disdained and repressed in the history of humanity by the fear we have of our creative power. Envy is a sister of ambition.
Both strive equally for development. Ambition stimulates the Ego, and envy covets what belongs to the other. Traditional Consciousness is manichaeistic and radically divides psychic functions into Good and Evil, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly. This obliges Consciousness to become unilateral, repressing the side it judges to be bad. The repressed contents form an intense shadow in the Unconscious, which are projected onto others and treated with hostility. This is the ternary and paranoid history of Humanity, in which the Ego sees Good and Evil in Others and not in itself.
At the heart of Carlos Byington’s thinking is his description of the Alterity Archetype. This is a four-sided pattern of Individual and Collective Consciousness in which the Ego becomes aware of the Consciousness-Shadow polarity in itself and in the Other. The Alterity Archetype is the paradigm of Love, Creativity, Social Democracy and Sustainable Economics. It enables us to see all psychic functions, including envy, acting for Good or for Evil, in Consciousness and the Shadow of Individuals and Culture.
This book defends the thesis that envy is a normal and important function for the development of individual and Cultural Consciousness, and that it only becomes destructive when its creative function is frustrated.
The author attributes the fact that envy has always been seen in such a negative light to the immense creative, challenging and revolutionary power of the function. According to Byington, we disdain envy
because we fear the creative potential of our fundamental instinct, which Jung named the Individuation Instinct, which fascinates us and propels us towards God – or, if preferred, towards Totality.
Puritanism has distorted our perception so badly that we have come to view human suffering as the result and proof of the innate perversity of man. This distortion justifies and reiterates the repression and guilt that prevents us from admiring and loving the miraculous vastness of our creativity.
Attachment to the conquests of the Ego is the major cause of stagnation in individual and social development. It is not by chance that detachment is considered to be just as important as compassion in Buddhism and Christianity. By stimulating the attraction towards the new by means of desire, covetousness and greed, envy acts as an incentive towards Individuation by facilitating detachment of the individual and of society from previous attachments.
Those who deny envy also deny desire, and condemn themselves to stagnation
*CARLOS AMADEU BOTELHO BYINGTON is a doctor. He went to secondary school in the United States of America, qualified in medicine and psychiatry in Rio de Janeiro and completed his post-graduate studies at the Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. On returning to Brazil, in 1965, Byington expanded Jung’s archetypal concept to include Individual and Collective Consciousness. In 1983, by studying the socio-cultural transformation process in Latin America, he formulated the Archetypal Theory of History, based on the ideas of Hegel, Jung, Bachofen, and Erich Neumann’s Mythological Theory of Consciousness. According to Byington, all psychic functions are archetypal structuring functions of Consciousness. He attributes a central position to envy, as important as sexuality, love, strive for power, jealousy and fear.
Author of Byington is the author of many books and articles, two of which have been translated to English and published by Chiron:
EDUCATION FROM THE HEART: A Jungian Symbolic Perspective, and JUNGIAN SYMBOLIC PSYCHOLOGY: The Voyage of Humanization of the Cosmos in Search of Enlightenment.
