Maybe there is a link between envy and performance anxiety – will I be up to it? Can I include all of me in this relationship – if not what will I have to leave out? Perhaps, there is a particular envy of attunement – that you ‘know’ me better than I know myself – or at least there are things about me that you know that I cannot know except through you. You make me value the difference between us.
There seems to be a connection between the them of envy and exclusion. Adam Phillips discusses Lacan in Equals…on refusing to join in….
‘Lacan refers….to what he calls, with a certain archness, the “noli me tangere” that one finds more than frequently at the root of the medical vocation, no less than that in the man of god and the man of law. Indeed, these are the three professions which assure a man that he will find himself in a position in which superiority over his interlocutor is guaranteed in advance..… in psychoanalysis there is no touching, and it is, as it were, the redemptive wishes that are to be analysed….neurotics, like these great and legitimate professionals, need to exclude themselves from something, need to reject something in advance. They must, in one way or another, be untouchable. It is, to exaggerate, as if their lives depended upon their not having equals. It is some notion of equality that they are phobic of.
‘The analyst, Lacan will later famously say, is the one who is supposed to know; the person, perhaps, in whom the patient delegates his superiority. In other words, for Lacan, psychoanalysis is about the way the individual suffers – and loves to suffer – his terror of equality. Psychoanalysis addresses how an individual excludes himself, exempts himself, distances himself from certain kinds of association as though the modern, the “civilised form” of what anthropologists call participation mystique, is a horror of participation mystique.’
In refusing to join in, I am in effect saying ‘I know in advance that you are not like me, irrespective of the new experiences we might have.’ Perhaps this helps explain the ‘chasm’ in the adoption of innovation. At the core of resisting innovation is an intimate desire to exclude myself from the possibility of something new; and rob the future of its capacity to surprise – indeed its capacity to be any different to the past.
Slingshot