Creative Envy

Based on Jungian Symbolic Psychology, this book attributes an archetypal foundation to the ego defense mechanisms of psychoanalysis and describes the possibility of all psychological functions being creative or defensive. Analyzing Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, Carlos Amadeu Botelho Byington describes envy functioning creatively and defensively in the Mozart-Salieri relationship. He goes on to demonstrate how psychoanalysis followed Genesis and the Christian doctrine of original sin, scientifically stigmatizing envy. He considers this a prejudice originated in the severe cultural pathology, which greatly distorted the Christian Myth by repressing creative envy due to its extraordinary revolutionary potential for individual and cultural development.