Envy and Gratitude

"Melanie Klein is perhaps the most influential post-Freudian and, where Freud found the child in the adult and saw how all of us carry within us childhood thoughts, feelings and fantasies that have a determining effect on our lives, often unconsciously, Klein found the infant in the child. She developed a form of psychoanalysis that could access the internal life of quite young children. She developed this through the play technique. So, where an adult is asked to free-associate, a child is invited to play with a box of toys or pens and paper. In the playing he expresses his own inner world. In the same way as it was shocking at the time that adults could express repressed desires, Klein’s way of talking to children also draws out sometimes very destructive impulses. In 1920 Freud wrote Beyond the Pleasure Principle , which recognised the potency of man’s self-destructive impulses and Klein takes that very seriously. She has a basic dynamic: the wish to love, which she sees as reparative, and the wish to destroy. There are two views of man, I suppose: Rousseau’s view that we are born innocent but corrupted by experience, and the view that we are born with a wish to destroy already beating in our breast. The idea of original sin expresses something in us all. Klein sees us as delighting in destruction not just because of frustration. She describes this in very bodily ways, devouring, consuming, attacking. The writing has a very bodily feel to it and all our fantasies involve our bodies. Envy and Gratitude is a mature work and more approachable than some of her others. Here Klein expresses the forms that envy and gratitude take. She develops the idea of a polarity between our relations to ‘the object’ (usually the mother). Gratitude is love and the capacity to take from the object and enjoy what we have taken, but, just as basic, is the disposition to envy. This is not ‘I wish I had that car’ but this is a hatred of the good. She quotes Chaucer as saying that all sins are sins against a particular virtue but that envy is the worst because it is a sin against virtue itself. ‘I hate that because it is good.’ I think it’s exactly the opposite. You feel unworthy because of your hatred. You see the object of desire and you hate it because it has what you want. Jealousy is less destructive because it acknowledges the worth of the object but someone else has it – it’s tripartite. But in envy you destroy the good object. It’s like a patient who meets someone that they could have a meaningful relationship with and then denigrates them and undermines them, says they are being manipulated and actually makes the good bad. It’s biting the hand that feeds us. Gratitude is not the only opposite of envy but the capacity to take pleasure in someone else’s achievement is the opposite of envy."