The role of self-esteem in the experience of envy

It is the thesis of this paper that although analysts have always recognized that narcissistic injury may trigger envious feelings, the significance of self-esteem as both a motivator and response to envious feelings has not yet been sufficiently explored. Traditional drive-defense or object instinctual explanations tend to diminish awareness of the importance of self-esteem in the experience of envy. The focus on drives or repetition of early patterns of object relations does not always take into account the significance of the cycle in which damaged self-esteem leads to envy, the component parts of which may cause further damage to self-esteem, leading to more envy, and so on. I am suggesting that it is often an attempt to avoid painful injury to one's self-esteem, as well as the related attempt to maintain a positively colored sense of self, and not a repression of drives or a repetition of some aspect of early object relationships which must be understood in order to fully comprehend both feelings of envy and the need to keep such feelings out of conscious awareness.     

Perceived parental acceptance and female juvenile delinquency

The responses of 62 adolescent females residing at a state training school and 62 high school females on a measure of perceived parental acceptance were compared while statistically controlling for mental age, chronological age, socioeconomic status, social desirability, and family structure. Generally significant (p less than .05) results indicate that incarcerated females viewed their mothers and fathers more negatively than did nonincarcerated females. Slightly more ambivalent results were indicated in the mother-daughter relationship (delinquent girls reported mothers to be more rejecting/neglecting than did nondelinquents, but no significant differences were found between the groups on perceived mother acceptance) than in the father-daughter relationship. Results were discussed in terms of reported parental differences in acceptance-nonacceptance, providing limited support for Ausubel's satellization theory of child development, and the difficulty of inferring causality from retrospective self-report studies using "captive" subjects.