Romantic Jealousy: Causes, Symptoms, Cures (9 page)

We Were dancing so provocatively, practically making out, that I don't think there was anyone at the party who didn't notice that something was going on. Anyone besides his wife, that is. She was (halting with her friends, smiling at us from time to time. I know she doesn't like to dance and her husband .says she doesn't like sex either; so she simply doesn't see when he is making out with other women. Since he insists that he has to have sex every single clay, and for her once every three months is more than enough, [here's a lot for her not to see. Who knows, maybe she is relieved that someone else is doing her "dirty work."

The Psychodynamic Approach to Jealousy

The Psychodynamic approach emphasizes the unconscious forces operating in jealousy. It assumes that deep in their psyches all people carry drives, desires, fears, and traumatic memories of which they are not consciously aware. Every conscious feeling and thought is accompanied by its unconscious counterpart, which is often its opposite: One may be consciously disgusted by things to which one is unconsciously attracted; one may consciously love people one unconscioush' hates.

The emphasis on innate drives and unconscious motives explains behaviors that are otherwise difficult to understand, such as why some people stay with a male who is continuously unfaithful to them and why some people drive away a mate they love dearly with groundless jealousy. The psychodynamic approach assumes that people play an active (even if unconscious) role in creating their life circumstances as well as their intimate relationships. It wasn't people's bad luck that lanclccl them in a relationship with a "pathologically unfaithful" or a "pathologically jealous" mate. They chose their mate very carefully to fill that role.

People's earliest childhood memories, traumas, and deprivations, most of them unconscious, have a powerful influence on the way people experience and respond to the world. Childhood experiences also have a great influence on their choice of a mate. That choice is never arbitrary. Most often people choose a person who is best suited to fulfill emotional needs that were not fulfilled in their childhood.

When one finds such a person, one projects onto him or her the internal image that was shaped during one's childhood. A man who saw his mother cheating on his father may, for example, project his internalized image of an unfaithful wife, which was shaped by the childhood trauma, onto his chaste and faithful wife. Couples have complementary needs. Fach mate chooses someone who represents a repressed part of himself or herself. A man who had to repress the emotional part of himself, for example, marries an emotional woman who had to repress the logical part of herself Their internal conflict becomes externalized as a marital conflict ("Why isn't he more emotional?" "Why isn't she more logical?"). Conflicts between mates, around issues of jealousy as well as all other issues, are a reenactment of inner conflicts. If, for example, infidelity is a recurring issue in a certain couple's conflicts, chances are that both partners have some internal conflict about it.

Childhood experiences of jealousy (10 not "cause" the adult jealousy. They are reevoked in similar situations and determine how easily and how intensely people will respond to jealousy triggers. The goal of therapy is to bring the unconscious into consciousness. A therapist can help the person suffering from a jealousy problem gain insight into the "true" causes of their jealousy by making the connection between past experiences and present problems. Once people come to understand the roots of their jealousy-that is, which past events are replayed in their current jealousy-and what they are gaining by holding on to it, they are considered cured.

The Roots of Jealousy According to Freud

Freud believed that it is "easy to see" that jealousy is composed of:

■ grief, the pain caused by the thought of losing someone we love

■ the painful realization that we can't have everything we want, even if we want it very badly and feel we deserve to have it

■ feelings of enmity against the successful rival

■ greater or lesser amount of self-criticism that hold us accountable for our loss

"Although we may call it normal," Freud added, "this jealousy is by no means completely rational, that is, derived from the actual situation, proportionate to the real circumstances and Under the complete control of the conscious ('go." In other words, even in normal jealousy-the kind we all experience-there are always some irrational components. The reason is that jealousy "is rooted deep in the unconscious, and is a continuation of the earliest stirrings of the child's affective life" (Freud, 1922/1955, p. 225).

As noted in chapter one, (luring the discussion of jealousy and envy, Freud believed that jealousy is rooted primarily in childhood events associated with the Oedipal conflict. This takes place during the phallic stage, when the sex organ is becoming the child's center of interest and enjoyment.

Since boys' and girls' sex organs are different, the issues they have to work through are different. Freud acknowledged the importance of this fact for boys' and girls' psychosexual development in his famous dictum: "Anatomy is destiny."

Children spend most of their time with family members. Consequently, family members are their most accessible objects of love and identification. It is only natural for them to direct their first sexual feelings toward someone in the family. For a boy, most often, that someone is Mother; for a girl, it is Father. The sexual feelings are accompanied by enmity against the person whom the child perceives as a rival. This rivalry is the root of the Oedipal complex in boys and the Electra complex in girls.[

Oedipus and Electra are tragic heroes of Greek mythology. Oedipus, unbeknown to himself killed his father and married his mother. Electra loved her father and haled her mother, who betrayed him and caused his death. To avenge her father's death, Electra persuaded her brother to kill their mother. According to Freud, every child experiences some of Oedipus and Electra's pain. The boy is "in love" with his mother; the girl is "in love" with her father. But both have a formidable rival-for the boy, his father; for the girl, her mother. The boy is afraid of his father's anger at discovering that his son covets his wife. lie escapes this anxiety by identifying with his father and becoming a man like him. The girl envies her mother's advantage, and overcomes it by identifying with the mother. The grief, the pain of loss, the powerlessness, the realization that they can't have every thing they want, the enmity against a successful rival that children experience when they "lose" in this original triangle are all engraved on their psyches and reemerge in adulthood when they find themselves in a similar love triangle.

Projected and Delusional Jealousy

Freud distinguished "normal" jealousy from "projected" and "delusional" jealousy-both of which he viewed as pathological.

Projected jealousy, according to Freud, is derived either from actual infidelity or from impulses toward infidelity that have been repressed. A man who has been unfaithful, or desired another woman but didn't act on it, may "project" that infidelity onto his innocent wife-blaming her for the things he (lid or wanted to do, and then responding to the projected threat with jealousy.

"It is a matter of everyday experience," Freud wrote, "that fidelity, especially that degree of it required in marriage, is only maintained in the face of continual temptations." Even a person who denies these temptations in himself experiences them. How can such a person relieve his guilt over the impulse or the actual infidelity? One way is to "project his own impulses to faithlessness on to the partner to whom he owes faith. He can then justify himself with the thought that the other is not much better than himself" (Freud, 1922/1955, p. 224).

The jealousy that arises from such projection, says Freud, has an almost delusional character. (Delusion is a belief that persists even with no basis in reality.) Projected jealousy, however, unlike delusional jealousy, often responds well to therapy.

When the jealous person realizes that his jealousy is a result of his own suppressed impulses toward infidelity and that his or her partner has been faithful, the insight is usually enough to solve the jealousy problem. In the case of delusional jealousy, the solution is not so easy.

Delusional jealousy is a form of paranoia. It too has its origin in suppressed impulses toward infidelity, but according to Freud, the object in these cases is of the same sex as the jealous person. (As we will see later, modern psychoanalysts tend to disagree with Freud on this point.) Freud believed that babies and young children are bisexual. Only with maturity and the pressures of socialization, sexual preference (most often heterosexuality) develops. Young children, prior to the Oedipal stage, are attracted to the same sex parent as well as the opposite sex parent. These feelings are repressed, but may emerge again in the form of conscious or unconscious attraction toward one's rival in adult jealousy. This kind of homosexual attraction, according to Freud, is the primary cause and feature of delusional jealousy. In an attempt to defend himself against his unduly strong homosexual impulse, the jealous man says, in effect, "I don't love him, she loves him." Since the homosexual impulse produces much more anxiety than the heterosexual impulse the defense against it is more likely to involve a serious distortion of reality.

Freud presents as an example of delusional jealousy a young man whose object of jealousy was his impeccably faithful wife. The jealousy came in attacks that lasted several days and appeared regularly on the day after he had had sex with his wife. Freud's inference was that after satisfying the heterosexual drive, the homosexual drive that was also stimulated by the sexual act "forced an outlet for itself in the attack of jealousy."

The jealous attacks were focused on minute gestures in which his wife's "quite unconscious coquetry, unnoticed to anyone else, has betrayed itself to him." She had unintentionally touched the man sitting next to her; she had turned too much toward him, or had smiled more pleasantly than when at home with her husband. The husband was unusually sensitive to all these manifestations of her unconscious and knew how to interpret them. In this he was similar to people suffering from paranoia, who cannot regard anything other people do as indifferent. They too interpret every minute gesture-a person laughed to himself, looked with indifference, even spit on the ground-as directed at them personally.

The jealous husband perceived his wife's unfaithfulness instead of his own. By paying careful attention to hers and magnifying it enormously, he was able to keep his own unfaithfulness unconscious. Similarly, the hatred that the persecuted paranoid sees in others is a reflection of his own hostile impulses toward them.

As expected, Freud finds the reasons for the husband's delusional jealousy in his early childhood history. The husband's youth was dominated by a strong attachment to his mother. Of her many sons he was her declared favorite and developed a marked "normal" jealousy toward her. When lie got engaged, his desire for a virgin mother expressed itself in obsessive doubts about his fiancee's virginity. These doubts disappeared after their marriage. The first years of his marriage were free of jealousy. Then he became involved in a longterm affair with another woman. When the affair was over, his jealousy attacks started again. This time it was projected jealousy, which enabled him to relieve his guilt about his own infidelity. The fact that his father had little influence in the family combined with a'humil- iating homosexual trauma in early boyhood" are described by Freud as the roots of a strong sexual attraction he felt toward his fatherin-law, which eventually became a "fully formed jealous paranoia."

Most clinicians working with people who have a jealousy problem agree with Freud that jealousy can vary in degree of pathology all the way from normal to delusional jealousy. They also agree with Freud that delusional jealousy is a form of paranoia and is the hardest to treat and cure. Many do not agree, however, that delusional jealousy is primarily the result of repressed impulses toward homosexuality.

An example of a modern psychoanalytic use of Freud's ideas about jealousy is provided in Dr. Emil Pinta's analysis of the dynamics of pathological tolerance (Pinta, 1979).

Pathological Tolerance

Like pathological jealousy, pathological tolerance (those rare cases described as "abnormally nonjealous") has its origin in the Oedipal conflict. In both, the individual recreates an early family situation and unconscious Oedipal wishes. In the triangle involving John, Sharon, and Michael, John felt, at the birth of' his younger brother, that he had been replaced in his mother's love. A similar relationship has been reenacted in his marriage, with Sharon representing his mother and Michael his brother. In the triangle involving Lana, Jack, and Marilyn, the similarities to Lima's family history are even more striking. Jack and Marilyn work and take on the role of surrogate parents while Lana assumes a "big sister" role to Marilyn's children. In therapy, Lana said she felt just the way she used to feel with her siblings. Also, Jack was openly unfaithful to Lana, just as her father was openly unfaithful to her mother.

Another mechanism seen in pathological tolerance that Freud noted in delusional jealousy is the projection of unconscious homo sexual impulses. In the first triangle, John's physical attraction to Michael was quite evident. They established a considerable intimacy, sometimes to the exclusion of Sharon. In the second triangle, Lana had a history of homosexuality, and her attraction to Marilyn was evident. The close proximity in which sexual relations occurred in the triad strongly implies the gratification of unconscious homosexual impulses.