ABSTRACT
Envy and Gratitude was written in the last decade of Melanie Klein's life. It is mainly based on the analysis of adults but has a background in her earlier analytic work with children. In Envy and Gratitude Klein combined her analysis of the clinical phenomena of envy and its obstruction of gratitude with her theories of the part it plays in infantile development. She allocated envy to the earliest paranoid- schizoid stage, where, she thought, it complicated the establishment of a good object and the necessary primal splitting between good and bad experience. Like love, anxiety, loss, and guilt, envy, and fear of envy, is ubiquitous. Theologians of various religions, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, have accorded more central importance to envy as a source of destructiveness than many analysts. If envy is a compound, it may come into existence at any stage when its elements combine and disappear when they dissolve.
