Chapter 19 On Gratitude

Envy and Gratitude, published in 1957, is one of Melanie Klein’s last writings before she died in 1960. She begins the Preface to this marvellous short work by saying: ‘I have for many years been interested in the earliest sources of two attitudes that have always been familiar – envy and gratitude’ (Klein 1957: 176). The work is a distillation of reflections from her working life-time, and her reflections, in their turn, concern a whole life-time. She continues:

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 her work she examines the role of envy more fully than gratitude, though this does not mean she thinks envy is more important than gratitude. Like Atlas carrying on his shoulders a whole world, envy and gratitude both bear a terrible weight: envy ‘interferes with the building up of a secure relation to the good external and internal object’ (Klein 1957: 239), and gratitude ‘is essential in building up the relation to the good object and underlies also the appreciation of goodness in others and in oneself’ (Klein 1957: 187).

In this chapter, about Klein’s ideas on gratitude, I explore, in the circumstances of a psychoanalysis, some forms of the emergence of gratitude and also some of its problems. First, I would like just to note that there is no rule that envy must manifest itself before gratitude. Sometimes, in relation to the analyst, gratitude emerges before envy.

After his very first session, an 11-year-old boy left the playroom and went away. I was still in the room, putting away his box of toys, when I became aware he had returned and was standing at the door. I turned round to him, and he said with great seriousness ‘Thanks. Thanks. Thank you’, and went away. What was he thanking me