ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses four of Klein’s seminal papers. The papers are “Notes on schizoid mechanisms”, “The origins of transference”, “Some theoretical conclusions regarding the emotional life of the infant”, and “Envy and gratitude”. Klein now posits that the negative factors that occur have their pathway through envy, which occurs as an affect in the earliest parts of orality. Envy leads to the phantasy that the deprivation the infant experiences is a result of the breast keeping its supplies for itself, thus increasing the infant’s sense of frustration. Envy is a factor whether or not the breast-feeding experience is satisfactory. Since the breast is the first object and it is the source of gratification and symbolic of all goodness, primary envy involves envy of the mother’s breast. In “Envy and gratitude”, as well as in most of her other theoretical papers, Klein talks about the oscillation of paranoid–schizoid and depressive positions occurring several times during childhood.
