CHAPTER XV
Jealousy
Jealousy has been subjected to the distortion which every sexual manifestation suffers under the influence of our modern puritanical civilisation. It has to be concealed and lied about and derives from that fact an immense obsessional power. It becomes a mask for other feelings and, in its turn, may masquerade in the guise of other feelings.
Both its presence and its absence may denote normality or abnormality. Intense jealousy may be the projection of our feelings into another individual and be a symptom of paranoia. On the other hand, the entire lack of jealousy of a husband who enjoys the sight of his wife caressed by another man, certainly reveals a most morbid masochism.
Hunger, thirst, erotism always find their satisfaction at some time. Intense pain deadens itself thru its very intensity. Jealousy on the contrary feeds on itself. It can be aroused by the unseen as well as by the obvious. In fact, like many neurotic elements, it thrives best on the invisible and the unreal.
Jealousy based upon unseen things, hunches, intuition, borders dangerously on hallucinatory states. The absolute blindness of some husbands, on the other hand, reveals a form of egotistical cocksureness closely allied to delusions of greatness.
Rules for Husbands. Forel, in some ways very old fashioned and unimaginative, has summarised as follows the proper rules of conduct for "reasonable husbands" suffering from jealousy.
"An intelligent husband," he writes, "should quietly find out thru the usual agencies whether his suspicions are justified or not. For what is the use of being jealous? If his suspicions are unfounded, he can only annoy his wife and make her unhappy thru his jealous behavior. If he was right in suspecting her, there is only one of two things to be done: either an otherwise excellent wife has yielded to the attraction of another man and may feel perfectly miserable over it. She should be forgiven and led back into the right path. Or a wife has no affection left for her husband or she is an unworthy, characterless deceiver, and in such cases, what is needed is not jealousy but a divorce."
Instead of "reasonable" husbands, Forel should have written, husbands "free from complexes," for jealousy is little besides a neurotic mask for an unrecognized feeling of inferiority.