To Have and Have Not: Clinical Uses of Envy

Jane Kite introduced the panel by highlighting how envy “as an idea and as an experience is infinitely older than psychoanalysis.” The concept, she noted, had long been approached from a religious and moral perspective, but only after Freud would it become the subject of scientific inquiry. She cited general agreement that envy is a hostile feeling, culminating in ill will and malice, that stems from the perception of superiority or advantage held by another. A precondition then, for the feeling is the perception of difference, a situation in which some have and others have not. (The panel's title is that of Hemingway's novel, which contrasts the life of the rich, the haves, with that of the generally more appealing characters, the have-nots.)

For Freud, such feelings of envy and ill will related specifically to gender, primarily as an expression, in the girl, of her narcissistic humiliation and hostile feelings about boys' possession of the penis. Quoting Freud's “On the Sexual Theories of Children” (1908), Kite went on to emphasize that his idea of envy involves first a cognitive event, a conception she contrasted with Klein's idea of envy as being first an affect, which is only then linked to a perception.

Kite next cited the contributions of Horney and Jones, particularly their responses to the authoritarian tone taken by Freud in his later writings. There he described the lifelong character and superego pathology of women, which he saw as the consequence of penis envy in girlhood. In Roy Schafer's critique (1994) of Freud, these theories are viewed in the context of a commitment to Darwinism and the consequent need to demarcate clearly feminine and masculine roles.

Klein's ideas presented a radical revision: for her, envy was genderneutral and central in the relationship with the mother. Kite quoted