About Jealousy

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

️ Jealousy in one way or another accompanies all love relationships, bringing many difficult and unpleasant experiences to both the jealous one and the one who became its object. What is jealousy, where does it come from and where are the boundaries of its normal and pathological manifestations, we will try to figure it out by analyzing some of the works of the authors of the psychoanalytic school.

Sigmund Freud wrote about jealousy as a normal human experience in his work "On some neurotic mechanisms in jealousy, paranoia and homosexuality" (1922), considering it in three aspects:

▪️ “normal” or competitive jealousy, which consists in the experience of pain, sadness and humiliation due to the loss of a beloved object, and has its origin in a complex of love and hostile feelings towards rivals;

▪️ projected jealousy, the source of which is either the jealous's own infidelity, or his repressed desires and fantasies about her, which are projected onto the partner, thereby alleviating the pangs of conscience for their actions or dreams of treason;

▪️ delusional jealousy, the roots of which lie in the latent homosexual aspirations of the jealous person and in the projection onto the partner of desires for possession of a person of the same sex (“I don’t love him, she loves him”).

What are the origins of early childhood jealousy?

Melanie Klein distinguished between jealousy and envy that a child develops in an early relationship with his mother. So, in her opinion, jealousy implies the fear of losing an expensive object, while envy is aimed at destroying it and appropriating the good that it has or contains. In addition, jealousy is based on the recognition of the presence of a third in a relationship (father, sibling), and the direction of those hostile feelings that were originally intended for the mother object.

Thanks to this redistribution of hatred later, as the child develops and strengthens relationships with these important family members, former rivals can also become objects of love for him, and the relationship with them - a source of pleasure.

Klein wrote that jealousy is based on distrust of the father and rivalry with him for the mother and her love, as well as on angry feelings in response to suspicions about the parental relationship from which the child is excluded.

Dönez Braunschweig and Michelle Phan (1975) introduced the concept of “mistress censorship,” which means that maintaining a loving and sexual relationship between mother and father is essential for the normal development of a child and the formation of his sense of himself as a separate person. After a short period of "fused" relationship between mother and baby, in which his basic early needs are met, the time comes when the mother leaves him to sleep on her own at night and goes to her beloved man.

During the day, the mother loves her child, looks after him, adjusting to his needs, but at night she puts him in a crib and deprives her of her attention in order to have a sexual relationship with his father. Already at the moment of the child's motion sickness before bedtime, she unconsciously seeks to leave the maternal role in order to enter the role of a sexual partner for her husband, due to which the child unconsciously feels excluded from the parental couple. This allows him to form an idea of himself as a separate object, and find peace in his own inner world and in games with his body.

If these relationships are broken (for various reasons), the mother overloads the child with her own anxiety and unfulfilled unconscious sexual desires, which creates great problems for him with the formation of himself as a separate subject. In the future, any attempts to separate with loved ones will cause the child to be extremely anxious. Under these circumstances, it may be difficult to experience any feelings associated with the appearance of a third, which will threaten the person's sense of fullness, and the experience of jealousy will become unbearable.

Donald Woods Winnicott (1960) speaks of jealousy as a normal phenomenon, even as the achievement of the mental development of children, indicating that the child has the opportunity to love. In his opinion, children who are incapable of love do not show jealousy either. Winnicott writes that initially, jealousy is based on the attitude towards the mother, her value for the baby and the unwillingness to share time with her with anyone else; however, later the jealousy extends to the relationship with the father.

According to Winnicott, jealousy cannot arise in a child who is not mature enough, who does not yet distinguish between himself and others, it arises from the desire for possession (when the child feels his mother is valuable enough) and the protection of property. Jealousy is closely related to envy: for example, when a toddler is jealous of a brother who gets the mother's attention.

Later, when the fact of the presence of a third person (father, brother or sister), also claiming to have maternal attention, is no longer possible not to recognize, it is transformed into a painful feeling of one's own "non-exclusiveness." At this time, the child feels like one of those who wants mother's attention, and feels a burning uncertainty that it will go to him and not to another.

At the end of its development, jealousy is experienced as a complex feeling of love, weighed down by destructiveness - hatred with a desire to destroy the rival's bond with the beloved object - and the gradual recognition that the person who takes away the mother is at the same time the object of the child's own affection. This is undoubtedly a complex mixture of feelings that only a child with a sufficiently mature psyche can experience.

How does the processing of jealousy normally take place in a child?

Children become able to go through the jealousy stage by being able to say that they are jealous. Jealousy closely intertwines feelings of love and hate, and a child is often unable to withstand this ambivalence, and therefore sometimes he needs the help of adults. Further discussion with children of their experiences, the reasons for jealousy helps to reduce their torment. And with the appearance of mental resources, which happens with an increase in the amount of good experience of interaction with a beloved object, which becomes the basis for strengthening the Self, children can already overcome this feeling on their own.

One of the coping strategies can be the ability of a child to take the place of a brother or sister who receives the love of his mother (father) and, finding in his own memory memories of his own experience of pleasure, experience it together with a rival, finding joy in it. This ability indicates that the child has accumulated sufficient experience in satisfying needs, his psyche is strong enough to be able to withstand his own aggression, and to identify with the good feelings of another person, experiencing joy for him and with him.

Achieving this ability is impossible without a sufficiently good relationship with the close environment of the child, which is able to withstand the manifestation of his feelings, and help the child to give them meaning.

And vice versa, if in childhood the child did not have support from the environment that would allow him to experience all the difficulties of transforming his feelings on the way of developing jealousy safely and fully, such a child has every chance of becoming an adult for whom the problem of jealousy is overly relevant. Such an adult cannot calmly experience either a feeling of envy that someone has something that is inaccessible to him, or an understanding that a loved one can be liked by other people.

What can the absence of jealousy indicate?

Otto F. Kernberg says that the inability to be jealous may indicate a person's infantilism, his inability to take responsibility in close relationships, as well as an unconscious fantasy about his own narcissistic perfection. The latter implies superiority over all rivals and excludes even the thought of the possibility that the partner might look at someone else.

In other cases, jealousy can talk about the narcissistic trauma that a person receives if his partner left him for another. Such narcissistic jealousy, which is surprising because it flares up after a period of neglect of a person towards his partner, worsens an already shaken relationship. But it can also indicate that a person was able to get out of the closed world of their fantasies of narcissistic perfection, and notice the partner as a separate person for which one must compete with real or imagined rivals.

Normally, we are able to recognize the importance of a loved one for us, as well as the realization that there are other people and activities that claim their attention. Jealousy does not become overly painful and intolerable, but in sufficiently strong and reliable relationships it plays the role of a kind of piquant seasoning that allows the couple's members to remember the value of a partner, the need to protect and develop these relationships, and also to develop in them themselves.

Literature:

1. Freud Z. On some neurotic mechanisms in jealousy, paranoia and homosexuality (1922)

2. Klein M. Envy and gratitude. A Study of Unconscious Sources (1957)

3. Britton R. Oedipus Situation and Depressive Position (Clinical Lectures on Klein and Bion / Edited by R. Anderson)

4. A. Zhibo, A. V. Rossokhin. Psychoanalysis in France or how to learn to live with uncertainty (French psychoanalytic school / Edited by A. Gibot, A. V. Rossokhin)

5. Winnicott D. V. Jealousy (1960)

6. Kernberg O. F. Love relationship: norm and pathology (1995)