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I have for many years been interested in the earliest sources of two attitudes that have always been familiar—envy and gratitude. I arrived at the conclusion that envy is a most potent factor in undermining feelings of love and gratitude at their root, since it affects the earliest relation of all, that to the mother. The fundamental importance of this relation for the individual's whole emotional life has been substantiated in a number of psycho-analytic writings, and I think that by exploring further a particular factor that can be very disturbing at this early stage, I have added something of significance to my findings concerning infantile development and personality formation.
I consider that envy is an oral-sadistic and anal-sadistic expression of destructive impulses, operative from the beginning of life, and that it has a constitutional basis, These conclusions have certain important elements in common with Karl Abraham's work, and yet imply some differences from it. Abraham found that envy is an oral trait, but—and this is where my views differ from his—he assumed that envy and hostility operate at a later period, which, according to his hypothesis, constituted a second, the oral-sadistic, stage. Abraham did not speak of gratitude, but he described generosity as an oral feature. He considered the anal elements as an important component in envy, and stressed their derivation from oral-sadistic impulses.
A further fundamental point of agreement is Abraham's assumption of a constitutional element in the strength of oral impulses, which he linked with the aetiology of manic-depressive illness.
Above all, both Abraham's work and my own brought out more fully and more deeply the significance of destructive impulses. In his ‘Short History of the Development of the Libido, Viewed in the