has any one counted the victims of jealousy? daily a revolver cracks somewhere or other because of jealousy; daily a knife finds entrance into a warm body; daily some unhappy ones, racked by jealousy and life-weary, sink into fathomless depths. what are all the hideous battles narrated by history when compared with the endless slaughters caused by this frightful passion! it enslaves man as no other passion does; degrades him, humiliates him, and makes him taste the hell of many other passions, such as envy, mistrust, revengefulness, fear, hate, anger, and poisons the meagre pleasure-cup that imparts a touch of sweetness to bitter life.
what is jealousy? whence flow its tributaries? is this the danaidean gift to humanity? is it the twin sister of love? do we acquire it or is it born with us? it is surely worth while to consider every one of these questions and to attempt to determine the nature of this unholy passion.
to understand jealousy we must go far, very far back into the history of man’s origin. yes, far beyond man, as far as the animal world! for certain animals, intelligent animals, show [pg 66]clearly evidences of jealousy. pet dogs resent it if their masters pet another dog. they are even jealous if the master caresses human beings. there are dogs who begin to whine if their master plays with or fondles his children. very much the same thing is told of cats. who of us on reading freiligrath’s gruesome ballad, “the lion’s bride,” has not felt the terror of the beast’s furious jealousy?
our observation of animals has taught us one of the fundamental characteristics of jealousy. animals know very definitely what is theirs. they have a fine perception for what is theirs. most dogs snarl even at their masters if they attempt to take their food from them. their jealousy is the mood in which they express their possession, the egoism of their share. they defend as their possession even the affection to which they think themselves solely entitled.
the emotional life of the young shows the same phenomenon. they too do not know the distinction between thine and mine. what they happen to have in their hands is theirs and will defend it with their weak powers and loud howls. many psychologists, including percy, compayné, sully, anfosse, schion, ziegler, consider the child an unmitigated egoist. even in its love it is out and out egoistic and therefore extremely jealous. young children’s jealousy may attain an incredible degree of intensity. a little two-year-old girl cried incessantly if her mother took the baby brother in her arms. [pg 67]a little boy was so jealous of his younger sister that he used to pinch her leg at every opportunity; having been smartly punished for it on one occasion he spared the little girl thereafter, but became afflicted with a peculiar compulsion neurosis: he pinched the legs of adults. such experiences are of profound significance. they give us a glimpse of the primitive times when man had no idea yet of altruism. the whole world was his as far as his power, his strength, went. man’s jealousy developed out of this primary ego-feeling, out of his right to sole possession. before man could be civilised this tremendous barrier had to be overcome. the first community, the first social beings, were the first stages of altruism and civilization.
from this period emanate the subterranean sources from which jealousy is fed. we have probably all become more or less altruistic. but always in conflict with ourselves, in conflict with the beast, in conflict with the savage within us. even to this day the whole world belongs to each one of us. our desires extend our property to infinity. what would we not own? what do we not desire? the wealth of the rich, the honour of the distinguished, the triumphs of the artist, to say nothing of his sexual triumphs. the less we can fulfil these desires the more do we cling to what we have, or, somewhat more accurately, could have had. for jealousy does not concern only what one actually possesses. women may be jealous [pg 68]of men they do not love and do not even possess. they simply begrudge the other woman her conquest. don juans know this very well. the best way of conquering a woman is still the old, old way: to make love to her friend. in this case wounded vanity plays a part, of course. but what is vanity but the over-estimation of the me, the striking emphasis laid on one’s own value? and thus we again come back to the root of all jealousy: the pleasure in one’s own possession, in one’s embellished egoism.
jealousy need not always have a sexual motive. a woman may be jealous of her husband’s friend because he has been more successful than her husband. her husband is her possession. he ought to be the foremost, he ought to have achieved the others’ successes, so that his fame should revert to her too. pupils are jealous of one another even though not a trace of a sexual motive may be demonstrable. we may be jealous of another’s horses, dogs, furniture, virtues, honours, friendships, responsibilities, etc. behind it there always is our brutal egoism, the desire for another’s possessions, or at least the fear of losing one’s own possession.
jealousy is generally regarded as a pre-eminently feminine quality. erroneously so. it would be more nearly correct to say that the heroic side of jealousy is to be found only in men. it is not a matter merely of chance [pg 69]that we have no feminine counterpart to othello, herod and the count in hauptmann’s “griselda.” jealousy in women has received a social valuation from men; it always has a smack of the ridiculous, pathological, or unjustified. it is a subject for satire, and is more often a comedy motive than a tragic reproach. this is due to the fact that woman’s love is monopolised by men, whereas a man’s loyalty is demanded by most women but attained only by very few. a man’s infidelity is not a dramatic reproach because it is a daily occurrence and wholly in accord with the lax conception of the majority. a woman’s infidelity is an offence against the sacred mandates imposed by—men. and therefore the jealousy of a man—be the subject of the passion a fool, a fop, an old man, or some other laughable type destined for cuckoldry—is a struggle for just possession, a conflict which always has an heroic effect, whereas a woman’s jealousy is always a dispute for the sole possession of a man, a right which is disputed by a great majority (namely, the men, and even some women).
but there are men and women who are not jealous even though they love intensely. and with this we hit upon a second and important root of jealousy. only one who contemplates an act of disloyalty against the object of his jealousy, or who, as a result of doubts about his own erotic powers, thinks he cannot gratify that object can be jealous. of course i am not [pg 70]now speaking of justified jealousy based on facts, but of baseless, unjustified jealousy. whence comes the suspicion that attributes infidelity to the beloved being? what is the driving power in these cases? only the knowledge of one’s true nature. only they can be jealous, jealous without cause, who cannot guarantee for themselves. in other words: jealousy is the projection of one’s own shortcomings upon the beloved.
if we find a woman who is all her life torturing her husband with her jealousy, complaining now that he has been looking at some woman too long, now that he stayed out too long, now that he was too friendly with one of her friends, etc., then it is the woman who has seen the weakness of her own character and who, in thought, is guilty of every infidelity which she will not admit even to herself. and in the same way faithless husbands who love their wives make the most jealous husbands. that is the vermuth potion which leaves with them a bitter after-taste as soon as they have made another conquest. their own experiences entitle them to be jealous. bachelors who had been philanderers and can boast of many conquests usually marry plain or unattractive women—alleging, by way of explanation, that they want to have the woman for themselves and not for others, meanwhile forgetting how often they themselves had been caught in the nets of homely women. for almost [pg 71]any woman who will permit herself to do so can find admirers, and ugliness is no protection against dramatic or comic marital infidelities.
the absence of jealousy in cases of intense affection usually, but not always, indicates a nature immune against all assaults. but those who are free from this passion need not therefore be puffed up. we are poor sinners all, and the time may come sooner or later for any of us in which we shall transfer our weaknesses upon others and become jealous. but it also happens that freedom from jealousy is a sign not of security but of stupidity, unlimited vanity. the woman is regarded as a paragon of all the virtues, without a touch of frailty. the husband may be an ideal specimen of an otherwise frivolous species. in these cases one’s inadequacy is so covered up by our over-estimation of our endowments that comparisons are never instituted and projection is impossible.
consequently baseless jealousy and baseless confidence will always be. and therefore we shall not follow bleuler in his estimation of jealousy as one of the “unconscious commonplaces” which makes love valueless as “the plant-louse does the rose-bud.” we shall recognise in it, when it is baseless, a disease of the soul occurring in persons whose cravings and realities do not coincide and who have with a heavy heart been forced to the recognition after cruel inner conflicts that their virtue is only an over-emphatic opposition to their weakness. their jealousy has taken on a pathological [pg 72](neurotic) character because of this repression and this relegating of their own desires into the unconscious. that is why all the logic of realities is effectless when opposed to the logic of the unconscious. one might almost say that jealousy is a cultural disease which results from the restrictions on our love-life imposed by law and morality. if so-called “free love” ever becomes a fact there will be far fewer cases of jealousy than we have to-day. that sounds plausible. but will life be more worth living when there will be no more jealousy? we gladly put up with jealousy if only our costly treasure of love continues secure. would a life free from all jealousy and pain, a life without passions, be worth while? is it not a fact that our possessions are most highly valued by us at the moment when we fear to lose them?... the sweetest harmonies are to be found only in contrasts. the wagon of life rolls with greater tempo over the endless lonely roads when it is harnessed to the passions.
