ABSTRACT
Envy has come into its own. Contemporary psychoanalysts are actively discussing and debating the varieties of envious experience and their origins and influence (see, for example, Britton 1989, 2001, Frankiel 2000, 2001, O’Shaughnessy 1999, Spillius 1993). That it has not always been so is well known. For many years, envy had been locked up in a box called penis envy. The box now opened, envy is being conceptualized in a manner both more complex and more wideranging in implication. Among the factors responsible for this change, two stand out: the creative work of Melanie Klein (1957) in her classic “Envy and Gratitude” and the critical acuity of scores of feminists who have wanted to free psychoanalysis from its phallocentric bias. It is from Klein’s classic that many of the ideas set forth here are drawn. To these I will add some thoughts and observations of my own, together with those to be found in many instructive feminist writings. With envy finally being seen by analysts to be the ubiquitous problem it is, the beneficial analytic consequences of this enriched insight cannot be overestimated.
