Envy

Klein's comprehensive study of envy, down to its innate unconscious and primary foundations, has no forerunners among psychoanalytical writings, although some precursors may be found among the works of artists and writers. However, in Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937), Freud had spoken of an impenetrable resistance to change and to the actual terminability of analysis which was manifested as “penis envy” or masculinity in women, and as “masculine protest”, or passivity and femininity in men: Freud ascribes these, although not explicitly, to free quantities of destructive drives and, in final analysis, to sadomasochism. At almost the same time, Joan Rivière (1936) had identified envy as a central element in the negative therapeutic reaction. Abraham thought that envy and hostility operated at the stage of oral sadism but in 1919 he had already attributed a particular form of neurotic resistance to the psychoanalytical method to envy, as it appears in those exasperating patients who do not respond to the analyst's efforts or use the latter's capacities to the full. All psychoanalysts agree that envy is the source of impenetrable resistance and the