GeistHaus

Inner Life

Envy and Gratitude

Envy is the feeling almost nobody admits to. Anger has its uses, fear is sympathetic, even hatred can be dignified, but envy is small and ashamed of itself. It is the pang when a friend gets the thing you wanted, the urge to find a flaw in the person who helped you, the strange reluctance to enjoy a gift. Gratitude is its opposite and, according to Melanie Klein, its cure: the capacity to take in something good, enjoy it, and want to give something back.

Klein’s late book Envy and Gratitude (1957) made a startling claim: that envy is among the earliest feelings, directed in infancy at the very source of life and comfort, and that the balance between envy and gratitude set in those first months shapes a lifetime of relationships. Many analysts rejected the timetable. Almost none disputed the observation that envy spoils what it touches, including the capacity to receive, and that gratitude is what makes receiving possible.

Core Ideas

How It Shows Up in Everyday Life

How Different Thinkers See It

Klein: Envy and Gratitude

Klein distinguished envy from jealousy and greed. Jealousy is three-cornered, the fear of losing a loved person to a rival. Greed wants more than it needs and more than the other can give. Envy is two-cornered and destructive: it wants to spoil the good thing because it belongs to someone else (Klein, 1957). She placed its origin in the infant’s relation to the feeding mother, and argued that strong early envy makes it hard to build a good internal object, since the good is attacked as soon as it is found. Gratitude, in her account, grows from experiences of being fed and comforted that are not spoiled, and it is the foundation of generosity, of the depressive position, and of the wish to repair.

Defenses Against Envy

Klein catalogued the ways envy hides. Idealization lifts the envied person out of reach. Devaluation makes them not worth envying. Confusion between good and bad blurs the comparison. Flight into another relationship, stirring up envy in others, and attacks on one’s own capacities (“I could never do that”) all serve the same purpose. Several of these are described on this site as general defenses, and the pairing of idealization with devaluation is one of the most reliable signs that envy is in play.

Kernberg: Envy and Narcissism

Otto Kernberg made envy central to his account of pathological narcissism. The narcissistic person, in his view, cannot depend on anyone without unbearable envy of the person depended on, and so devalues them, which leaves an inner world empty of anyone worth having (Kernberg, 1975). The grandiose self is partly a defense against needing, and the chronic boredom and emptiness that narcissistic people describe is what remains when every good object has been spoiled. See the narcissistic style.

Rosenfeld and Joseph: Envy in the Consulting Room

Herbert Rosenfeld described patients who had to defeat the analyst’s help because being helped felt like humiliation, and who formed a kind of internal gang that attacked any dependence (Rosenfeld, 1971). Betty Joseph described the subtle ways a patient can make progress disappear, forgetting an insight, flattening a session, in order not to feel the envy that being helped would stir (Joseph, 1975). Both saw the capacity to be helped as itself an achievement.

Social Psychology: Benign and Malicious Envy

Research outside psychoanalysis distinguishes benign envy, which motivates a person to improve, from malicious envy, which motivates pulling the other person down (van de Ven, Zeelenberg & Pieters, 2009). The benign kind is close to admiration with a sting; the malicious kind is Klein’s. Studies of gratitude, meanwhile, have found it associated with wellbeing, which Klein would have predicted, though she would have said the causation runs both ways (Emmons & McCullough, 2003).

Critics

Winnicott and the Independent analysts thought Klein attributed far too much to the infant’s constitution and too little to how the infant was actually treated. Where Klein saw inborn envy, Winnicott saw a response to a caregiver who could not meet the child. The disagreement matters for how one hears an envious person: as someone whose hatred of the good is their own, or as someone who was given reason. Most clinicians now hold both.

Examples

These are composite vignettes, not real people.

The Promotion

Dara’s closest colleague is promoted over her. Dara is gracious in public and, that evening, finds herself listing the colleague’s faults to her partner with unusual energy. By morning she has decided the promotion was political. A week later she notices she has stopped asking the colleague for advice, which she had done for years and valued. The envy has cost her the one thing it was about: access to something good.

The Gift

Ben’s sister pays off a debt for him, quietly and without strings. He thanks her and then, for months, cannot be in a room with her without feeling small and faintly irritated. He finds himself thinking she did it to look good. He had not known, until then, how hard it was for him to be given something.

The Teacher

Lucia has a mentor she describes as brilliant, extraordinary, in a different league. She also never does the exercises the mentor suggests. Idealization has put the mentor so far above her that learning from her would be absurd; nothing can be envied that cannot be approached. When Lucia begins to see the mentor as merely very good, she also begins to improve.

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Jealousy
Fear of losing someone to a third party. Jealousy wants to keep; envy wants to spoil. The two often appear together and are often confused in ordinary speech.
Greed
Wanting more than one needs, regardless of the cost to the giver. Greed exhausts; envy destroys.
Admiration
Enjoying someone’s excellence without needing to possess or spoil it. Admiration is what envy becomes when gratitude is possible.
Healthy competition
Wanting to do as well or better, while leaving the other person’s achievement intact. Close to the benign envy of the research literature.
Indebtedness
Feeling that a gift creates an obligation. Gratitude in Klein’s sense is free of this; the wish to give back comes from pleasure, not debt.

History

Freud discussed envy mostly in one narrow form and did not make it central. Karl Abraham described envy as a feature of certain characters in the 1920s. Klein’s Envy and Gratitude (1957) made it a foundational emotion and deepened a division in British psychoanalysis that has never fully closed. Rosenfeld, Joseph and the post-Kleinians developed its clinical use in the 1960s and 1970s, while Kernberg brought it into the American understanding of narcissism. From the 2000s, social psychologists took up envy and gratitude as research topics, confirming some of Klein’s observations in very different language.

Sources