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In 1943, a series of scientific meetings called the Controversial Discussions began at the British Psychoanalytical Institute. The meetings were an attempt to reduce the polarization of psychoanalytic theories and attitudes that had developed among Melanie Klein and her followers,
Anna Freud and her followers, and psychoanalysts of a more independent inclination. The institute hoped to bring about a less antagonistic atmosphere and a meeting of the minds to repair the fractures that had developed. No meeting of the minds happened, at least not on the scale hoped for. Yet an agreement among Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, and the then-president of the institute, Sylvia Payne—forever known as “the gentleman's agreement”—allowed the various groups a fair but separate existence within the institute.
To this day, the controversies surrounding Klein's theories live on. The arguments with Klein have focused on what she saw as the early and ubiquitous nature of unconscious phantasy in the infant, her position on the innate existence of the death instinct, and her assertions about the depressive position and the appearance of early stages of the Oedipus complex in the last half of the first year of life. Of particular interest for this review, of course, is the controversy surrounding Klein's description of envy as an expression of the death instinct: it is an “oral-sadistic and anal-sadistic expression of destructive impulses, operative from the beginning of life, and … it has a constitutional basis” (p. 176).1
The reader will find material from the 1943-1944 Controversial Discussions inhabiting many chapters of Envy and Gratitude Revisited, but in a muted form. First and foremost, the book is a celebration and an expansion of Klein's enduring work.
According to Gammill , analysts' interpretations of envy in their analytic patients where there was no evidence for it caused Klein to exclaim in frustration, “I don't know if my work will be destroyed by my most fervent followers or