ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates some of Mrs Melanie Klein's ideas on envy, splitting, and pathological projective identification. In Envy and Gratitude Klein defines envy as an expression of destructive impulses that are operative from the beginning of life and represent the "most potent factor in undermining feelings of love and gratitude at their root". Following Klein's ideas, Rosenfeld showed how invasive projective identification is often motivated by envy and an intolerance of separateness. Rosenfeld pointed out that by means of narcissistic and perverse mechanisms the underlying destructiveness can become covered up as a longing for harmony, timelessness, and endless peace. He described these phenomena as "pathological fusions" between the life and the death instincts and showed how they can be linked together to build up pathological organizations of the personality. The chapter illustrates how a near-delusional romantic system manifests itself in the transference, and especially how the analyst's interpretations are silently transformed and incorporated into the patient's sanitized universe.
