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IT IS CURIOUS THAT THE word "entitlement" has been incorporated into the psychoanalyst's vocabulary. Its usage is more common in the fields of sociology, political science, and law. The Oxford English Dictionary defines entitlement: "to furnish a person with a title to an estate. Hence generally to give a person a rightful claim to a possession, privilege, designation, mode of treatment, etc." It may be that our current society, so obsessed with materialism and litigiousness, has influenced the incorporation of this word into our clinical language.
In considering entitlement psychologically, it is useful to examine the unconscious experience that may be masked. As Groddeck was so fond of demonstrating, conscious attitudes often belie their unconscious roots, through negation. Where there is conscious hate, there is often unconscious love. Where there is conscious tenderness, there can be unconscious rage. If we are to extend this sort of psychology to entitlement, we shall have to decide: what is the inverse of entitlement?
Is it a question of the amount of entitlement? Levin (1970), adopting what he calls "a quantitative point of view, " distinguishes between attitudes of excessive entitlement and attitudes of restricted entitlement, as well as attitudes of normal entitlement. Such judgments are, of course, dependent on cultural norms. Nevertheless, Levin indicates that the quantity of entitlement unconsciously may be quite the opposite of the conscious attitude.
Perhaps the inverse of entitlement is altruism. The entitled person expects for himself. The altruistic person expects to give to others. We get stuck here though, for we find that altruism merely reverses the object of entitlement. The feeling of "I deserve something" is transformed into "You deserve something." The quality