One form of jealousy which has absolutely nothing to do with love in the normal sense of the word, and one which not infrequently leads to acts of violence, to the "love tragedies" of newspaper headlines, is simply one of the first symptoms of paranoia. In Delusional Jealousy, the patient suffering repressed homosexual cravings, projects his own desires into the personality of his life mate. An unconsciously homosexual husband, attracted sexually by every man in his environment, assumes that his wife is also subject to the same attraction and suspects her of having sexual relations with every man who arouses him. An unconsciously homosexual wife imagines that her husband has a liaison with every woman who appeals to her perverse fancies.
The paranoiac being at times very clever and convincing, that form of jealousy, insane as it may[Pg 148] appear to the man or the woman who is the victim of it, may deceive the outsiders. In certain cases, the delusional character of it is obvious to everybody, including the jealous person.
A paranoiac told me that every night he "saw" a man entering his wife's bedroom thru a window protected by solid iron bars so close to one another that a cat could have squeezed thru them only with difficulty.
This was, of course, a case of hallucination, pure and simple.
Homosexualism. Other cases are more complicated. Dr. S. Ferenczi, of Budapest, reports two of them which illustrate well the mechanism of insane jealousy due to unconscious homosexualism.
He had a housekeeper whose husband, a man of thirty-eight, also busied himself about the house in his spare time. He was constantly cleaning Ferenczi's rooms, putting fresh polish on the doors and floors, pottering around, evidently anxious to show his good will and his devotion to his wife's employer.
This man was very intemperate and beat his wife on several occasions. Altho she was most unattractive, he constantly accused her of infidelity with Ferenczi and every male patient treated by him.
[Pg 149]
When the woman revealed those facts to Ferenczi, he gave the couple notice but decided to have a serious talk with her husband.
The man denied having beaten his wife, altho this had been confirmed by witnesses. He maintained that his wife was a real vampire, whose lust was sapping his life strength. During this explanation, he impulsively took Ferenczi's hand and kissed it, saying that he had never met anyone dearer or kinder than the doctor.
A talk with the woman revealed to Ferenczi that the man had always been very distant in his attitude to his wife. He would often push her away brutally, calling her all sorts of opprobrious names.
When he learnt that Ferenczi had given her notice, the insane man abused and hit his wife, and threatened to throw her out on the street and to stab "her darling." Ferenczi at first paid no attention to those threats for the man remained very devoted, respectful and well behaved. When he learnt, however, that the man was sleeping with a sharp kitchen knife under his pillow and when he woke up one night to find him standing in his bedroom, he notified the authorities and the maniac was committed to an insane asylum.
[Pg 150]
"There is no doubt," Ferenczi writes, "that this was a case of alcoholic delusion of jealousy. The conspicuous feature of his homosexual attachment to me, however, allows the interpretation that the jealousy he felt of every man, was only the projection of his own desires for the male sex. Also, his lack of desire for his wife was not simply impotence but was determined by his unconscious homosexuality.
"To him alcohol played the part of an inhibition-poison and brought to the surface his crude homosexual erotism, which, as it was intolerable to his consciousness, he imputed to his wife.
"It was only subsequently that I found a complete confirmation of this. He had been married before, years ago. He lived only a short time in peace with his first wife, began to drink soon after the wedding and abused his wife, tormenting her with scenes of jealousy until she left him and secured a divorce.
"In the interval between his two marriages, he was said to have been a temperate, reliable and steady man and to have taken to drink only after his second marriage. Alcoholism was not the deeper cause of his paranoia; it was rather that, in the insoluble conflict between his conscious hetero[Pg 151]sexual and his unconscious homosexual desires, he took to alcohol, which brought the homosexual erotism to the surface, his consciousness getting rid of it by way of projection, of delusions of ............