Envy and gratitude: Fluctuations of creativity and hope in the psychic world

This article aims to discuss Melanie Klein’s seminal text, “Envy and gratitude” (1957), in order to articulate it with the phenomena of hope, hopelessness, creativity, and destructiveness. In ours readings, we observed that envy is a fertile soil for the growth of hopelessness and destructiveness. While the ability to have gratitude can lead an individual to be hopeful and have a creative life. Would the opposite be possible? To be envious and at the same time creative and hopeful? Based on Freudian Dualism drive, which Klein did not give up in the construction of her metapsychology, we answer yes, primarily from the introjection of the good object, which allows the elaboration of envy, an element that we will emphasize from the figure of the analyst in the clinical process. To elucidate each of these elements, we will use the short story “The foreign legion” by Clarice Lispector (1999) as a guiding thread throughout the text.

Key words:
Envy; gratitude; hope; hopelessness; creativity; destructiveness