Envy occupies a richly contested position within the depth-psychology corpus, traversing clinical, mythological, philosophical, and developmental registers. Melanie Klein’s foundational contribution situates primary envy at the very origin of psychic life: the infant’s envy of the feeding breast is, for Klein, an innate destructive impulse that spoils the good object before gratitude can consolidate it, thereby threatening the foundations of all subsequent object relations. This Kleinian axis — envy opposed to gratitude, destructiveness opposed to love — constitutes the dominant clinical frame. Thomas Moore, working from a Jungian-archetypal perspective, treats envy not as pathology to be eradicated but as a shadow formation harboring creative potential; its corrosive quality, he argues, signals a depth of soul longing that demands imaginative engagement rather than moral suppression. David Konstan brings classical philology to bear, tracing the Greek phthonos and its distinction from nemesis, jealousy, and emulation (zelos) through Aristotle and the Stoics, revealing envy as a socially embedded, ideologically contested emotion whose moral valence shifts with class position and democratic ideology. Across these traditions, key tensions persist: envy as innate constitutional factor versus socially produced sentiment; envy as vice versus envy as signal of desire; and the precise boundary between envy, jealousy, and indignation. The term’s centrality to questions of gratitude, idealization, devaluation, and the spoiling of goodness makes it indispensable to any depth-psychological concordance.