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This paper was first given at a Tavistock public lecture in November 1985 and was subsequently published in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 2 (1986): 13-22.
It may perhaps seem strange to be writing about envy in everyday life, because, one might say, it is such an everyday emotion, known to everyone. It has always been talked about; we find throughout literature abounding references to and descriptions of envy and its workings. We know about the green-eyed monster from Othello:
Iago: O beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-ey'd monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.
Here Shakespeare uses the word ‘jealousy’, but it is very close to what we would feel to be an essential aspect of envy. I shall come back to the relationship between the two. Yet, in a strange way, psychoanalysis, until about thirty years ago, paid attention to envy but only from a very limited standpoint. Freud talked, almost entirely, about one kind of envy, which he called ‘penis envy’. That was the envy of the woman for the man's penis and his masculine attributes, her resentment at not having one, and so on, but broader ideas about the significance of envy and its ubiquity, or the notion that a man might envy a woman's attributes and capacities, really scarcely entered into Freud's writing. It was probably not until the 1950s, particularly 1957, when Melanie Klein published her book Envy and Gratitude, that the significance of envy became more fully discussed and understood. Anyone who knows this book will see that what I am going to discuss is essentially derived from Melanie Klein's thinking.