Sometimes two males combine their efforts in the sexual killing of women. Each brings a damaged history and personality. The combination then shows such additional features as male bravado, bonding and loyalty. In the best-known cases, one of the pair is the junior partner and the other the senior. This chapter looks at the lives of two such pairs: (1) Leonard Lake and Charles Ng and (2) the so-called Hillside Stranglers, Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi. Leonard Lake was disturbed by being abandoned by his mother. Charles Ng was subject to harsh discipline. Lake, who exhibited murderous sibling rivalry, formed the senior partner of the two. They aimed to collect a population of sex slaves. Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi both had disturbed backgrounds, Buono being the senior partner of the two. Bianchi was shunted around before being adopted. They sexually abused and tortured women before killing them.

Envy is often confused with jealousy, because they are both rivalrous painful emotions, which are directed at a competitor and are concerned with a good. But envy is about the potential or actual lack of the good, while jealousy is about the potential or actual loss of the good. This distinction is not always clear cut, as a section devoted to ambiguous, hybrid, and transitional cases shows. In the end, envy is defined as an aversive response to a perceived inferiority or disadvantage vis-à-vis a similar other, with regard to a good that is relevant to the sense of identity of the envier.

This chapter starts with a description of Adler’s personal and family backgrounds, including growing up in the shadow of a high-achieving and popular older brother; life-threatening and disabling illnesses during his childhood; struggles to enter and complete his medical school education; dissatisfaction with academic medicine focusing on diseases instead of patients; his egalitarian medical practices; and his involvement in social and public health reform. It also includes narratives of Adler’s marriage with his Russian Jewish wife, who had strong socialist commitments, as well as their relationship with various communist revolutionaries. It then describes Adler’s association with Freud and their eventual separation, the evolution of Adler’s theories and practices, the differences in the temperament and orientations between Adler and Freud, and the continuing mutual influences between Adler and Freud even long after their break-up. It ends with a discussion of Adler’s role in and contribution to the field of psychotherapy and the mental health movement.