§ 181
Jealousy is treated by Ellis in a vein apparently unaware of the contribution made to this subject by Freud, who shows that the man is jealous because he is either physically or psychically impotent. If the husband either knows or thinks that he is unable to lift his wife into the empyrean, the thought inevitably comes to him that there must be some other man who can do it. If this thought is an unconscious one it is manifested in every restrictive measure taken to prevent his wife from meeting other men, for which measures he assigns not the real cause, for he does not know it, but all sorts of reasons developing through the unconscious mechanism of rationalization, either that she is not attending to her duty, or neglecting him and his interests or spending too much money, or what not. This condition of jealousy is all the more likely to exist in the husbands who are so ignorant of love that they are unaware that there is any such thing as the woman’s acme of pleasure in the love episode. This form of jealousy, primarily due to the husband’s ignorance, is all the more painful to him because he does not understand, and all the more tragic in its irony.
It seems, too, quite probable that part of the jealousy of women is due to a corresponding situation of their own erotic life. A woman who fails to apperceive in consciousness the overwhelming somatic reactions which occur at the climax of the love episode is in a condition quite analogous to that of psychic impotence in man. If man’s jealousy, as has been shown by psychoanalysis, is really caused by his psychic impotence, i.e., his anesthesia, woman’s jealousy is evidently also caused by her anesthesia which is a form of psychic impotence.