Envy and Gratitude - A Summary (pg: 176-182)

In this comprehensive paper, Klein begins by highlighting how envy is the

most potent factor in undermining the feelings of love and gratitude since it
affects the person’s relation to its earliest object i.e it’s mother. Klein takes
forward Karl Abraham’s work, which to her surprise did not mention Freud’s
concept of life and death instinct even though Freud’s paper, “Beyond the
Pleasure Principal”, was published four years prior to his.

Klein quotes from one of the Freud’s papers called, “Construction in

Analysis”, and confirms his view from her own experience that the
complexity of a fully grown personality can only be understood if we gain
insight into the mind of the baby and follow up it’s development into later
life.

According to Klein, envy is something which is projection of the life instinct,

onto the external object (the mother in infancy and subsequent objects in
adulthood). This, in her view, gives rise to a number of difficulties in later
life. Like not being able to form fulfilling relationships or in other words, not
being able to fully introject and feel grateful to the object.

She further draws a distinction between envy, jealousy and greed. She
writes that though jealousy is based on envy, it involves a relation to at least
two people. And greed is an insatiable craving which the subject doesn’t
really need but which the object is willing and in a position to give. She
further clarifies that the aim of greed is to rob the object of its goodness
whereas the aim of envy is not just to rob but also to put one’s own badness
into the object.