Envy brings the best in you if it's healthy and rational

London, Jan 6 (UNI) If she can buy a luxury car, why can't I? She bought a lovely dress, even I want one -- there is a good side to envy if it's rational and healthy, studies reveal.

Some researches have shown that envy drives people to do good things, to do their personal best cosidering they take it as a motivating force, the Sunday Times reported.

Dr Windy Dryden, a psychotherapist and the author of 'Overcoming Envy,' says an example of healthy envy is when you and your friend go for the same job and he or she gets it. The healthy thought is: ''I would like to have a job like he has, but I do not absolutely have to have one. I am not less worthy because I don't have a job like he has.'' He says the key to turning unhealthy envy into healthy one is by identifying and challenging irrational beliefs by showing yourself that they are false, illogical and self-defeating.

Dr Simon Gelsthorpe, a psychologist thinks that the individual capacity to use envy as a force of good or as something that drags one down is to do with a sense of fairness.

''Some are more sensitive to perceived injustice than others, usually on the basis of things that have happened to them in the past,'' he says.

However, psychoanalyst and author Melanie Klein, writes in her work 'Envy and Gratitude' that envy starts with breast-feeding, the feeding breast presents everything the infant desires.

She says :''I consider that envy is an oral-sadistic and anal-sadistic expression of destructive impulses, operative from the beginning of life, and that it has a constitutional basis.'' UNI XC ARB RAI1049