Envy is usually considered from the angle of its negative intensity; illustrations of this can be found in many narratives or cultural works. This destructive force was theorized by Melanie Klein. She describes it in the earliest stages of life and emphasizes its constitutional basis. The author takes up this conceptualization, but nuances it by drawing on Winnicott’s criticisms of it, which raise the question of the environment and its influence, and offer an understanding of what is being played out in analytic work. A clinical case will illustrate this and show one of the ways in which envy invites itself in analysis. For Julie, it was first and foremost through the variations of her discourse. An interpretive mode, giving flesh to words, marked a turning-point and favoured an elaborative process of envy, via anal elaboration. From projective movements to a possible access to another way of seeing herself, a path was traced, sustained by the transference, towards a desire for, a desire for life.