Death, Taxes, and Envy: Treating Creative Patients

CREATIVE MINDS: Psychotherapeutic Approaches and Insights

“Art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.”

-Louise Nevelson

Envy is the dirty little secret of the creative life. Except it is the worst-kept secret there ever was. It can also be the source of deep psychological pain, reflecting core issues regarding talent and entitlement, and the accompanying shame of self-recrimination. The Buddhists say that comparisons are “odious,” but in a competitive marketplace, where success and failure are clearly (and often unfairly) delineated, it is the rare artist who does not compare themself to others who have succeeded in the same field.

This is important to keep in mind when treating creative patients. Their envy is primarily directed at peers, those who work in the same media, genre, or craft, because the envied artist’s success is experienced as a concretized representation of their own self-worth. For better or worse, and usually for the latter. With debilitating consequences.

I am thinking of a screenwriter patient I saw years ago. Despite some reasonable success in Hollywood, he felt his work—more importantly, his view of his work—was continually undermined by his envy of other writers.

“Want to know how I’m dealing with it?” he said during one session. “I’m removing the source. No more reading the trades online, no more scanning Deadline’s industry updates every day. No more ‘Entertainment News’ on the local TV channels. Total news blackout.”

He went on to explain that learning of lucrative writing deals being made by others angered and deflated him. Further, he had grown increasingly self-critical about his work habits—normally a source of pride and satisfaction—since hearing rumors about a well-known screenwriter’s penchant for “knocking out a script” in 2 weeks.

It had reached a point where learning of a friend’s having lunch with a studio executive or landing a new agent could trigger a serious depression. And, of course, his awareness of the effects of his envy only contributed to the shame he felt for experiencing it.

“It’s killing the joy of writing I used to have,” he said sadly.

Which reminded me of a quote I had once read by noted author and editor Joseph Epstein: “Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.”

That said, I could make the case that envy is a natural byproduct of the achieving life. And never more acutely felt—as are most things—than by creative people. Those whose contact with their interior worlds is the source of their art, a world alive with memories both good and bad, feelings both pleasurable and painful, assumptions formed by their unique vision of how life works. A particular and personal mythology birthed years before in their family of origin and then either validated or not by experience.

(As I have mentioned before, most of our striving, most of our efforts in both our personal and professional realms, are in service to either confirming or refuting something that, consciously or not, is the major contributor to our self-concept.)

Throughout the family dynamics that made up our childhood, and then

when in our schools, and ultimately in the adult world, we strive to achieve in a matrix of others who are striving to achieve—such that comparison is not only inevitable but the only standard by which to measure that achievement.

In the words of psychologist Leon Festinger, envy is triggered when we make an “upward social comparison” to someone we consider a peer. Hopefully, with time and a certain amount of psychological maturity, creative people can develop the self-awareness (and self-acceptance) to measure themselves by more internal monitors. To enjoy the day-to-day expression of their artistic talent for its own sake. But, like everyone else, creative people live in the real world and, with rare exceptions, need the validation of that world. In other words, that means living with envy.

Which is not easy. As author Robert Greene points out, “Envy creates silent enemies.” And if not understood and grappled with, those relentless, noiseless battles can have crippling consequences for the creative person.

In my view, the key to coexisting with envy, as with all such feelings evoked by the stress of the achieving life, is to acknowledge it. By that, I am not referring merely to the fact that you are envious, but also the meaning you give to it.

For example, if a creative person sees envy as a sign of moral weakness or a character failing—a view, as mentioned previously, often engendered and reinforced in childhood—the effect on their work can be quite dispiriting. Which makes the effort to banish it so acute, so desperate. So seemingly necessary.

As actor Jim Broadbent candidly put it about the Academy Awards: “An Oscar clears the deck of envy…You think, ‘Well, I’ve got that. I can relax now.”

Unfortunately, such a meaning only reinforces the belief that envy can somehow be overcome by effort that leads to success, rather than as an aspect of one’s inner world of experience that needs to be understood and worked with.

Equally harmful is seeing one’s envy as a disparaging comment on one’s work. I once had a young patient, a struggling novelist, try to disavow her envy of another author’s success, lest it be a confirmation of a lack of faith in her own writing.

“If I let myself feel envy,” she told me more than once, “it means I don’t believe in the possibility of my own success.”

In other words, to acknowledge her envy of another’s work meant devaluing her own. Which, as we discovered in treatment, mirrored her actual belief about it, a shameful truth she would do anything to avoid.

Another patient, a moderately successful graphic artist, bravely insisted that “envy is counterproductive.” So terrified of anything that might derail his firmly held trust in “positive thinking,” the meaning he gave to envy—as well as any other so-called negative emotions—was of an insidious obstacle on the path of his forward momentum.

It is only by investigating what having envy means to the creative patient that they can risk acknowledging it. But that meaning can be quite elusive, particularly if the patient’s envy is denied or disguised as something else. In my practice, I have encountered many patients whose contempt for or moral objections to the work of successful peers is such a mask. It is a position that offers only a transparent and ineffective shield against shame born of a sense of creative inadequacy.

As Erich Fromm observed, “There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy to be acted out under the guise of virtue.”

Acknowledging envy, and exploring its origins in the artist’s interior world, is not only beneficial therapeutically but can enliven and make more personally relevant the artist’s work.

Envy often points to unlived or suppressed potential. That is why many patients exhibiting envy are so bitter and resentful, and, in my experience, even more so when they deny that envy. I have often encountered creative patients who claim of others’ success that it was due to pure luck and/or the influence of powerful connections. At the same time, complaining with unmediated sincerity that they themselves are intrinsically unlucky, did not know the right people, never got the breaks, etc.

As one of my patients, disheartened by his career setbacks, put it: “To make it in the arts, the stars have to align. Mine never have.”

Calling to mind Jung’s famous injunction: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Given these myriad meanings underlying the professional or creative envy that burdens most artists, it is difficult to remind them that it is just a feeling like any other, which means it is data. Important information. An urgent bulletin from the front lines of the artist’s psyche.

If nothing else, envy informs the creative patient of how important their goals are. It reminds them of the reasons they undertook the creative life in the first place. And, when understood and reframed in this way, can challenge them to commit once again to its rigors and rewards.

Because, after 30+ years treating creative patients, there is one thing I know. For an artist, to coin a phrase, nothing’s certain but death and taxes…and envy.

Mr Palumbo is a licensed psychotherapist and author in Los Angeles. His email address for correspondence is dpalumbo181@aol.com.