ABSTRACT
Melanie Klein's Envy and Gratitude represented a crucial breakthrough in understanding. Klein has suggested that what is particularly envied is the relative absence of envy in others. She suggests, envy is exacerbated by deprivation and, indeed, also fuels feelings of deprivation because of the way in which it prevents the subject from benefiting from that which is available. Klein stresses that deprivation of good mothering increases envy. There are other environmental factors too, including the projection of envious feelings into the child by parents or siblings. Because envy is felt to be so reprehensible an emotion, the infant would experience the other as the "non-envious" preferred one, and this would intensify jealousy as well as envy. In psychoanalytic literature there has been considerable debate about the negative therapeutic reaction. An interesting question is the degree to which this is promoted by envy or by guilt.
