Jealousy: The Wish

The literature of our civilization is replete with descriptions of consuming jealousy. In Greek mythology, Hera or Juno, wife of Zeus and goddess of storm, was known for her intense jealousy and was said to have made life pretty miserable for the highest god at one time nearly succeeding in shackling him. The Old Testament describes the jealousy in the disturbed King Saul of the incumbent David. And of course, Shakespeare's Othello is a classical study in jealousy.

Only recently has jealousy been examined as a clinical study. Freud1 stated that analytical work had shown that instances of jealousy revealed themselves in three layers or stages. These are: 1) competitive or normal; 2) projected; and 3) delusional.

Normal or competitive jealousy is thought of as being compounded of the grief of losing the loved object and the pain because of the personal wound, originating however, in the oedipus or family complex of the first sexual period. Thus, the subject experiences again the loss of the person of the opposite sex to the competitor; an old wound is reopened.

Projected jealousy is that type derived from actual unfaithfulness or thoughts of unfaithfulness on the part of the subject which have succumbed to repression. The subject is battling with his own drives of infidelity and salves his own conscience by “giving” them to the object.

The third and most malignant type is delusional jealousy. This is associated with paranoia, and as Freud has stated, is based on repressed homosexuality. Here, as in the projected jealousy, the symptoms have their roots in repressed drives of infidelity but, unlike projective jealousy, the love object is really the intruder.

The now classical Schreber memoirs analyzed by Freud2 demonstrated the latent homosexual mechanism as underlying delusional jealousy and paranoia. Recently Wangh11 has interpreted Iago's actions in Othello as being based on delusional jealousy with Othello as Iago's secret love and Desdemona as the rival.

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