ABSTRACT
It has been 50 years since Melanie Klein published Envy and Gratitude. For Klein, the conflict between envy and gratitude was a crucial battleground of development, and development proceeded in an approximately normal fashion if gratitude was able to revive the good internal object repeatedly. Klein believed that envy was dangerous because it prevented the good object from being fully enjoyed, which, in turn, prevented the subject from experiencing gratitude for what the object brings. From Bion's point of view, envy is deadly because it is one species of a more general phenomenon-attacks on linking. For Bion, envy poses a danger to development because it embodies a hatred of reality, which cuts one off from the experience of the object. The destructiveness of the destructive instinct consists of its tendency to drive one to attack links to real external and internal objects and thereby to cut oneself off from external and internal reality.
