From Envy to Creativity: How Learning to Receive Can Fuel Your Imagination
Have you ever noticed how envy or greed can make you feel restless, frustrated, or even blocked creatively? Psychoanalysis shows that these feelings aren’t just “bad emotions”—they reveal important truths about how we relate to others, to love, and to our own potential.
1. What Envy and Greed Really Are
Melanie Klein described envy as a primitive impulse: a wish to attack or take away the goodness we see in others. Greed, on the other hand, is the urge to consume or possess all the goodness for ourselves, leaving nothing to share.
Think of a child at the breast: the breast is a source of life and nourishment. If the child feels frustrated or deprived, envy arises; if the child tries to take it all at once, greed emerges. Both prevent the child from forming a balanced, trusting relationship with the source of care.
2. Why Creativity Needs Space
Creativity depends on being able to receive, tolerate absence, and recognize that some good things exist outside of us. Bion called this the “no-breast” state: the ability to sit with frustration, limitation, or lack, and still make something new.
When envy dominates, we cannot tolerate absence. The mind becomes trapped in frustration, projection, or self-protection, blocking the flow of imagination, thought, and creative expression.
3. The Role of Gratitude
Klein emphasized that gratitude is what allows love and creativity to survive envy. By learning to receive goodness without attacking or consuming it, we can transform envy and greed into symbolic thinking, art, or problem-solving.
Meltzer described this in relation to beauty and aesthetics: experiencing something wonderful—art, music, ideas—can trigger envy because it reminds us of what we lack. Creativity emerges when we bear that tension, absorb it, and turn it into something new rather than trying to destroy or possess it.
4. Creativity as Connection
Thomas Ogden highlighted that creativity is also relational. In therapy, the analyst and patient can “dream together,” creating meaning in a shared space. In these moments, envy and greed are temporarily set aside, and new possibilities arise. When envy dominates, however, communication becomes rigid, interpretations feel intrusive, and growth is blocked.
5. Turning Envy Into Life and Work
The path to creativity involves facing our own destructive impulses without letting them control us. By recognizing envy and greed, learning to tolerate frustration, and practicing gratitude, we can transform internal tension into imagination, connection, and productivity.
As Klein put it: “Gratitude is the sign of love that has survived envy.” Creativity, then, is not just art or problem-solving—it is the mind’s way of turning past frustrations into something alive, meaningful, and shared.
References (for further reading):
Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.
Klein, M. (1957). Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963. London: Hogarth Press.
Meltzer, D. (1988). The Apprehension of Beauty: The Role of Aesthetic Conflict in Development, Art, and Violence.Perthshire: Clunie Press.
Ogden, T. H. (1994). The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Clinical Facts. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 75, 3–19.
Segal, H. (1952). A Psycho-Analytical Approach to Aesthetics. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 33, 196–207.