Chapter 7 Varieties of Envious Experience

Envy is disturbing – a disturbing feeling and a disturbing concept in psychoanalysis. Freud's idea of penis envy has aroused anger in many women, especially feminists. Klein's idea of constitutional envy evoked a storm of protest by many analysts. In this chapter I discuss envy as defined and used by Klein herself and by later Kleinian analysts, but I also describe clinically two ways of experiencing and expressing envy that I think show qualitative as well as quantitative differences. I then describe a model of the conscious and unconscious feelings accompanying processes of giving and receiving, not only because I believe that these processes are central to understanding envy but also because I have found them to be clinically useful.

Freud was the first analyst to use the concept of envy both in the idea of penis envy and in the idea that the members of a group can forego their envious rivalry with one another in a common idealization of the group leader (Freud 1921). Abraham (1919) uses the idea of envy to explain a destructive attack that certain patients make on psychoanalytic work. Eisler (1922) notes that envy derives from the oral instinct. In 1932 in ‘Jealousy as a mechanism of defence’ Joan Riviere regards pathological jealousy as a mechanism of defence against unconscious oral envy of the parents in coitus. Melanie Klein, however, was the first analyst to make the concept of envy central to her psychoanalytic theory.

Klein had used the idea of envy in much of her earlier work (Klein 1929a, 1929b, 1932b, 1945, 1952c, 1955b) but towards the end of her life she wrote about it much more systematically in Envy and Gratitude: ‘I consider’, she writes, ‘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’ (1957: 176). A

little later she describes it as ‘… the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something desirable – the envious impuls