Rivalry: Benign or Belligerent Sibling of Envy and Jealousy? A Clinical Reflection on the “Winded, not Wounded” Experience in the Countertransference

Abstract

Recognizing rivalry as a discrete concept, adjacent to envy and jealousy but clearly differentiable, has a useful place, in particular, in clinical work. In the transference-countertransference, the analyst feels alive to difference, provoked to fight or duel, embattled but invigorated and alert, sometimes “winded but not wounded.” This contrasts with the deadliness that can characterize the countertransference with the more manifestly envious patients. In rivalry, there is a need to keep the object alive, despite the ambivalent tie to the object. Drawing on Freud's idea of “intimate friend and hated enemy,” I argue that Mitchell's (2003) description of the duality of “simultaneity of adoration and murder” in sibling rivalry is central to clinical conceptualization: this simultaneity links to Freud's (1920) first adumbration of the death drive as rooted in the need “to restore an earlier state of things.”