Concept
Envy
In Melanie Klein's theory, the angry feeling that someone else has and enjoys something good, joined to the impulse to take it away or spoil it. Klein set it out in Envy and Gratitude (1957), expanded from a paper read at the Geneva congress of 1955. There she held that envy is at work from the start of life, aimed first at the feeding breast for the very goodness it gives and later at the parents' sexual union, and that it is in part an inborn expression of the death instinct, made worse by hardship. Unlike greed, which wants to have all of the good, envy attacks the good itself. Because it spoils the good object, envy confuses good and bad, disturbs the splitting on which early security rests, heightens persecution and guilt, and hinders the work of the depressive position. Klein set gratitude, an expression of love and of the life instinct, against it.
Development
1957
introduced by Melanie Klein
Klein first read the theory as 'A Study of Envy and Gratitude' at the Geneva congress in July 1955 and published it in expanded form as Envy and Gratitude (1957). Envy appears in her earlier work on the early Oedipus conflict, but here she makes primary envy of the good breast a concept of its own and pairs it with gratitude.
In Envy and Gratitude (1957)
Relations
- 1957 introduced by Melanie Klein
Klein first read the theory as 'A Study of Envy and Gratitude' at the Geneva congress in July 1955 and published it in expanded form as Envy and Gratitude (1957). Envy appears in her earlier work on the early Oedipus conflict, but here she makes primary envy of the good breast a concept of its own and pairs it with gratitude.
- 1957 opposed by Gratitude
Klein sets gratitude against envy: envy spoils the good object, while gratitude takes it in and builds on it. How strong each is decides whether the good object can be securely established.
- 1959 gave rise to Attacks on linking
Writing two years after Klein's Envy and Gratitude, Bion traces attacks on linking in part to an inborn excess of hate and envy. It is envy of the understanding breast, and of any creative coupling such as the parents' intercourse or the analytic pair at work, that drives the patient to spoil the link.
Works
- 1957
Klein's last major theoretical work, expanded from the paper "A Study of Envy and Gratitude" that she read at the International Psychoanalytical Congress in Geneva in July 1955. It sets out her theory of primary envy of the good, feeding breast, distinguishes envy from greed, and pairs it with gratitude as an expression of the life instinct.
- 1959
"Attacks on Linking" is a paper by Wilfred Bion, published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1959 and reprinted in his collection Second Thoughts (1967). Drawing on the analyses of psychotic and severely borderline patients, it describes the destructive attacks that the psychotic part of the personality makes, in phantasy, on anything it feels to be a link between two objects. Bion takes as his prototype the infant's phantasied attacks on the breast as the link between itself and the mother, and extends the idea to the parental couple in intercourse, to the verbal communication between patient and analyst, and to the patient's own capacities for thought, emotion and perception. The paper proceeds through a series of clinical episodes. In one, a patient's stammer is understood as breaking up his words so that they cannot carry meaning between him and the analyst. In others, the patient's handling of the analyst's interpretations, and of the analytic pair working together, shows how any creative coupling, above all that of the parents, is felt as something to be split, emptied and destroyed out of envy and hatred. Because emotions themselves link one object to another, they too are attacked: the patient comes to hate emotion, reality and the mental apparatus that apprehends them. Bion places these attacks within Melanie Klein's paranoid-schizoid position and her account of splitting and projective identification, but adds a distinction of his own. Projective identification is not only a means of evacuating unwanted parts of the self. In its normal form it is the infant's earliest way of communicating, putting feelings it cannot bear, such as the fear that it is dying, into the mother, so that they can be modified there and taken back in a form it can tolerate. When the mother, and later the analyst, will not receive these projections, the infant resorts to projective identification with ever greater force and frequency, and its development deteriorates. Bion therefore traces attacks on linking to two sources together: an inborn disposition to destructiveness, hatred and envy, and an object that denies the patient the normal use of projective identification. The outcome is a primitive superego that forbids projective identification, and an internal object that intensifies the emotions it was needed to modify. The links that survive are logical, even mathematical, but never emotionally reasonable: they are perverse, cruel and sterile. The paper's account of a mind that cannot take in and transform experience prepares Bion's later theory of thinking and of container and contained.
- 2005
See also
People
References
- Envy and Gratitude1957Evidence for a relation
- Attacks on Linking1959Evidence for a relation
- Linking, Attacks on2005Evidence for a relation