Freud - Complete Works (648 page)

3898

SOME
NEUROTIC MECHANISMS IN JEALOUSY, PARANOIA AND HOMOSEXUALITY

(1922)

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SOME NEUROTIC MECHANISMS IN
JEALOUSY, PARANOIA AND HOMOSEXUALITY

A

Jealousy is one of those affective states,
like grief, that may be described as normal. If anyone appears to
be without it, the inference is justified that it has undergone
severe repression and consequently plays all the greater part in
his unconscious mental life. The instances of abnormally intense
jealousy met with in analytic work reveal themselves as constructed
of three layers. The three layers or grades of jealousy may be
described as (1)
competitive
or normal, (2)
projected
, and (3)
delusional
jealousy.

   There is not much to be said from
the analytic point of view. It is easy to see that essentially it
is compounded of grief, the pain caused by the thought of losing
the loved object, and of the narcissistic wound, in so far as this
is distinguishable from the other wound; further, of feelings of
enmity against the successful rival, and of a greater or lesser
amount of self-criticism which tries to hold the subject’s
own ego accountable for his loss. Although we may call it normal,
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 ego; for it is
rooted deep in the unconscious, it is a continuation of the
earliest stirrings of the child’s affective life, and it
originates in the Oedipus or brother-and-sister complex of the
first sexual period. Moreover, it is noteworthy that in some people
it is experienced bisexually. That is to say, a man will not only
feel pain about the woman he loves and hatred of the man who is his
rival, but also grief about the man, whom he loves unconsciously,
and hatred of the woman as his rival; and this latter set of
feelings will add to the intensity of his jealousy. I even know of
a man who suffered exceedingly during his attacks of jealousy and
who, according to his own account, went through unendurable
torments by consciously imagining himself in the position of the
faithless woman. The sensation of helplessness which then came over
him and the images he used to describe his condition - exposed to
the vulture’s beak like Prometheus, or thrown bound into a
nest of serpents - were referred by him to impressions received
during several homosexual acts of aggression to which he had been
subjected as a boy.

Some Neurotic Mechanisms In Jealousy, Paranoia And Homosexuality

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   The jealousy of the second layer,
projected
jealousy, is derived in both men and women either
from their own actual unfaithfulness in real life or from impulses
towards it which have succumbed to repression. It is a matter of
everyday experience that fidelity, especially that degree of it
required in marriage, is only maintained in the face of continual
temptations. Anyone who denies these temptations in himself will
nevertheless feel their pressure so strongly that he will be glad
enough to make use of an unconscious mechanism to alleviate his
situation. He can obtain this alleviation - and, indeed, acquittal
by his conscience - if he projects his own impulses to
faithlessness on to the partner to whom he owes faith. This strong
motive can then make use of the perceptual material which betrays
unconscious impulses of the same kind in the partner, and the
subject can justify himself with the reflection that the other is
probably not much better than he is himself.¹

   Social conventions have wisely
taken this universal state of things into account, by granting a
certain amount of latitude to the married woman’s craving to
attract and the married man’s thirst to make conquests, in
the expectation that this inevitable tendency to unfaithfulness
will thus find a safety valve and be rendered innocuous. Convention
has laid down that neither partner is to hold the other accountable
for these little excursions in the direction of unfaithfulness, and
they usually result in the desire that has been awakened by the new
object finding satisfaction in some kind of return to faithfulness
to the original object. A jealous person, however, does not
recognize this convention of tolerance; he does not believe in any
such thing as a halt or a turning-back once the path has been
trodden, nor that a flirtation may be a safeguard against actual
infidelity. In the treatment of a jealous person like this, one
must refrain from disputing with him the material on which he bases
his suspicions; one can only aim at bringing him to regard the
matter in a different light.

  
¹
Cf. Desdemona’s song:

I called my love false love; but what said
he then?

If I court moe women, you’ll couch
with moe men.

Some Neurotic Mechanisms In Jealousy, Paranoia And Homosexuality

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   The jealousy that arises from
such a projection has, it is true, an almost delusional character;
it is, however, amenable to the analytic work of exposing the
unconscious phantasies of the subject’s own infidelity. The
position is worse as regards jealousy belonging to the third layer,
the true
delusional
type. It too has its origin in repressed
impulses towards unfaithfulness; but the object in these cases is
of the same sex as the subject. Delusional jealousy is what is left
of a homosexuality that has run its course, and it rightly takes
its position among the classical forms of paranoia. As an attempt
at defence against an unduly strong homosexual impulse it may, in a
man, be described in the formula: ‘
I
do not love him,
she
loves him!’ ¹  In a delusional case one
will be prepared to find jealousy belonging to all three layers,
never to the third alone.

B

  
Paranoia
- Cases of
paranoia are for well-known reasons not usually amenable to
analytic investigation. I have recently been able, nevertheless, by
an intensive study of two paranoics, to discover something new to
me.

   The first case was that of a
youngish man with a fully developed paranoia of jealousy, the
object of which was his impeccably faithful wife. A stormy period
in which the delusion had possessed him uninterruptedly already lay
behind him. When I saw him he was only subject to clearly separated
attacks, which lasted for several days and which, curiously enough,
regularly appeared on the day after he had had sexual intercourse
with his wife, which was, incidentally, satisfying to both of them.
The inference is justified that after every satiation of the
heterosexual libido the homosexual component, likewise stimulated
by the act, forced an outlet for itself in the attack of
jealousy.

   These attacks drew their material
from his observation of minute indications, by which his
wife’s quite unconscious coquetry, unnoticeable to any one
else, had betrayed itself to him. She had unintentionally touched
the man sitting next her with her hand; she had turned too much
towards him, or she had smiled more pleasantly than when alone with
her husband. He was extraordinarily observant of all these
manifestations of her unconscious, and always knew how to interpret
them correctly, so that he really was always in the right about it,
and could furthermore call in analysis to justify his jealousy. His
abnormality really reduced itself to this, that he watched his
wife’s unconscious mind much more closely and then regarded
it as far more important than anyone else would have thought of
doing.

  
¹
See the Schreber analysis
(1911
c
).

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   We are reminded that sufferers
from persecutory paranoia act in just the same way. They, too,
cannot regard anything in other people as indifferent, and they,
too, take up minute indications with which these other, unknown,
people present them, and use them in their delusions of reference.
The meaning of their delusion of reference is that they expect from
all strangers something like love. But these people show them
nothing of the kind; they laugh to themselves, flourish their
sticks, even spit on the ground as they go by - and one really does
not do such things while a person in whom one takes a friendly
interest is near. One does them only when one feels quite
indifferent to the passer-by, when one can treat him like air; and,
considering, too, the fundamental kinship of the concepts of
‘stranger’ and ‘enemy’, the paranoic is not
so far wrong in regarding this indifference as hate, in contrast to
his claim for love.

   We begin to see that we describe
the behaviour of both jealous and persecutory paranoics very
inadequately by saying that they project outwards on to others what
they do not wish to recognize in themselves. Certainly they do
this; but they do not project it into the blue, so to speak, where
there is nothing of the sort already. They let themselves be guided
by their knowledge of the unconscious, and displace to the
unconscious minds of others the attention which they have withdrawn
from their own. Our jealous husband perceived his wife’s
unfaithfulness instead of his own; by becoming conscious of hers
and magnifying it enormously he succeeded in keeping his own
unconscious. If we accept his example as typical, we may infer that
the enmity which the persecuted paranoic sees in others is the
reflection of his own hostile impulses against them. Since we know
that with the paranoic it is precisely the most loved person of his
own sex that becomes his persecutor, the question arises where this
reversal of affect takes its origin; the answer is not far to seek
- the ever-present ambivalence of feeling provides its source and
the non-fulfilment of his claim for love strengthens it. This
ambivalence thus serves the same purpose for the persecuted
paranoic as jealousy served for my patient - that of a defence
against homosexuality.

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   The dreams of my jealous patient
presented me with a great surprise. They were not simultaneous with
the outbreaks of the attacks, it is true, but they occurred within
the period which was under the dominance of the delusion; yet they
were completely free from delusion and they revealed the underlying
homosexual impulses with no more than the usual degree of disguise.
Since I had had little experience of the dreams of paranoics, it
seemed plausible at the time to suppose that it was true in general
that paranoia does not penetrate into dreams.

   This patient’s homosexual
position was easily surveyed. He had made no friendships and
developed no social interests; one had the impression that only the
delusion had carried forward the development of his relations with
men, as if it had taken over some of the arrears that had been
neglected. The fact that his father was of no great importance in
the family, combined with a humiliating homosexual trauma in early
boyhood, had forced his homosexuality into repression and barred
the way to its sublimation. The whole of his youth was governed by
a strong attachment to his mother. Of all her many sons he was her
declared favourite, and he developed marked jealousy of the normal
type in regard to her. When later he made his choice of a wife -
mainly prompted by an impulse to enrich his mother - his longing
for a virgin mother expressed itself in obsessive doubts about his
fiancée’s virginity. The first years of his marriage
were free from jealousy. Then he became unfaithful to his wife and
entered upon an intimate relationship with another woman that
lasted for a considerable time. Frightened by a certain suspicion,
he at length made an end of this love affair, and not until then
did jealousy of the second, projected type break out, by means of
which he was able to assuage his self-reproaches about his own
unfaithfulness. It was soon complicated by an accession of
homosexual impulses, of which his father-in-law was the object, and
became a fully formed jealous paranoia.

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   My second case would probably not
have been classified as persecutory paranoia, apart from analysis;
but I had to recognize the young man as a candidate for a terminal
illness of that kind. In his attitude to his father there existed
an ambivalence which in its range was quite extraordinary. On the
one hand, he was the most pronounced rebel imaginable, and had
developed manifestly in every direction in opposition to his
father’s wishes and ideals; on the other hand, at a deeper
level he was still the most submissive of sons, who after his
father’s death denied himself all enjoyment of women out of a
tender sense of guilt. His actual relations with men were clearly
dominated by suspiciousness; his keen intellect easily rationalized
this attitude; and he knew how to bring it about that both friends
and acquaintances deceived and exploited him. The new thing I
learned from studying him was that classical persecutory ideas may
be present without finding belief or acceptance. They flashed up
occasionally during the analysis, but he regarded them as
unimportant and invariably scoffed at them. This may occur in many
cases of paranoia; it may be that the delusions which we regard as
new formations when the disease breaks out have already long been
in existence.