Based on Jungian symbolic psychology, this book attributes an archetypal foundation to the ego defense mechanisms of psychoanalysis and describes the possibility that all psychological functions are creative or defensive.

Analyzing Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, Byington describes envy as functioning creatively and defensively in the relationship between Mozart and Salieri. He demonstrates how psychoanalysis followed the biblical book of Genesis and the Christian doctrine of original sin and “scientifically” stigmatized envy. He asserts that this bias originated in severe cultural pathology, which greatly distorted the Christian myth by repressing creative envy because of its extraordinary revolutionary potential for individual and cultural development.