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Priscilla Roth, training and supervising analyst at the British Psychoanalytic Institute, and Alessandra Lemma, consultant clinical psychologist at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, have collected together papers by 14 highly regarded psychoanalysts who have all been inspired, in their own way, to explore, examine and expand on Melanie Klein's theory of envy. They ‘illustrate the rich ideas of key psychoanalysts from the northern hemisphere’ (p. xvii) with their thoughts, hypotheses, opinions and conclusions in relation to the psychodynamics of working with envious experiences.
The book joins Karnac's Psychoanalytic Ideas and Applications series, the aim of which is to focus on the production of significant authors whose works are of outstanding value to the development of the field of psychoanalysis. In this context, Klein's object-relations theory decisively marked the transition from classical to present-day psychodynamic research. Her fundamental contribution was to develop a new conception of endopsychic structure. Before Klein, the human psyche was regarded as an apparatus for experiencing and controlling biological instincts originating outside the ego; after Klein, it became possible to see the human psyche as an internal world of a fully personal nature, a world of internalized ego-object relationships, which, partly realistically and partly in highly distorted ways, reproduced the ego's relationships to personal objects in the real, outer world. It was in Klein's work that object-relations first began to replace instincts as the focal point of