The color of envy: a socio-cultural perspective

This collaborative paper has grown out of the discussions of a virtual study group consisting of four women of ethnically and geographically diverse backgrounds, from San Francisco, Austin, and New York City. Racially/ethnically, the members are of South Asian, African and European descent. We have been exploring a range of subjects, including envy. We have been discussing the emergent envy in these clinical vignettes from the perspective of the Kleinian approach which centers on internal mental states, unconscious conflicts and internalized objects as well as exploring envy from a social, cultural, and racial angle as historically represented by the humanistic and interpersonal schools, and more recently by relational psychoanalysis. These orientations may seem to be incompatible but, in fact are always inseparably interconnected as we all have psyches and we all also live in the social-cultural realm.