“After that father avoided me and my sisters. But the proposed marriage did not take place,—I had accomplished that much. I went no longer to his house when he had suddenly a light stroke and was forced to appeal to us children. Then we had a complete family reconciliation and since that time I have again my father. Now I see him daily, we children take turns in looking after him.”
“Have you no feeling of guilt and did you never think that your father fell ill because you wished it? Did you not want him to be so crippled and reduced to your care that he should be able no longer to carry on?”
“I don’t feel guilty and I have no regrets. Only satisfaction.... I wished it to be that way and it has come out as I wished. For now I have once more a father of whom I need not be ashamed. But you must not think that I was jealous on my own account. I only felt myself the representative of my mother.”
“You are not jealous of your sister?”
“Yes ... when father is very demonstrative with her, I feel the same wild jealousy come over me, but I control myself....”
Here we see jealousy rising out of an incestuous wish first directed upon a man, then transferred to the whole environment. This transference of jealousy to every one serves more effectively to cover the genuine jealousy of the father. The death of the mother left this young woman in a critical position. Obviously her wish as a child was: “When mother dies I will marry father.” A wish which so many girls entertain and even openly express. With the death of the mother the new situation presented itself. A place close to father was vacated and now other women filled it. The old father’s behavior showed that he was still a man. But one thing stood against this fancy: her husband. So long as he lived she could not go to live with her father. Her husband’s illness brought matters prospectively nearer to an issue. The physician had declared that he could not live long, his heart trouble was serious. She might yet be free! Her agitation explains a number of peculiar dreams she had. She dreamed repeatedly of quarreling with her husband and of striking him. Several times already she has beaten him up and she has even shot him in her dreams. She is also unfair to the child, turning against it with hatred on slightest provocation.
We see that the jealousy of the husband also has the rôle of legitimizing a hatred which has its roots in other causes. For she confesses that during her fits of jealousy, when she thinks that her husband is unfaithful, she feels a bitter hatred against him and could murder him.... The husband is in the way, her hatred corresponds to the idea that he is a hindrance. During the night the hatred breaks forth but during the waking hours it is rationalized as due to jealousy. For she admits that she has really never fully loved her husband. Her affection goes to her father. She imagines that she is fighting for the preservation of her mother’s pure memory; that furnishes an ethical cover and masks the true motives.
The relationship of this jealousy to homosexuality is interesting. It furnishes an excellent proof of our findings concerning homosexuality. One must bear in mind, first of all, that many factors contribute in this instance to bring about the regression to the infantile level: her husband’s serious illness, his relative impotence and abstinence, her mother’s illness, the father’s change to a devil-may-care attitude, showing her that one may change even in late years, and that it is never too late fully to enjoy the fruits of love. Her homosexuality was always ready to break forth in her. She identified herself with her father looking at women through his eyes. She had protected herself at first by a passionate love for her husband and minor various trivial homosexual traits of her childhood were thus readily overcome. Her swing to heterosexuality was very successful with the aid of her husband. Her homosexuality was repressed, only to reappear at the beginning of the menopause,—woman’s critical age. The involutive processes taking place in the genital glands, and the general physical changes in woman at the time play a certain rôle in that connection. Her husband’s impotence and the friend’s exciting example of her attractive friend, with whom she herself was secretly in love, again roused her homosexual feelings, though the attitude showed itself only under the guise of jealousy. But the father’s conduct, since her father was the deepest cause of her aversion against man, was what really made her lose her balance. She might have become an urlind, had her father remained the old, kindly, bland and quiet gentleman. But since he abandoned the mask after the death of the mother, he roused all the daughter’s evil instincts. Not only the infantile erotic predisposition but the infantile criminal tendencies as well. In her dreams she murdered her husband who prevented her from turning entirely to her father and fulfill an infantile wish to become her father’s wife. She also repeatedly killed the children and her beloved friends. This woman during her critical period displayed not only the craving for love but also the aboriginal emotion, the primordial stuff, out of which everything beautiful and great has evolved: hatred.
Hatred against the other sex and against her rivals, hatred against the children whom she could have killed when anger seized her soul....
74. This is the case of a 30-year-old woman, victim of a remarkable form of jealousy. She is jealous of her home, watching over it like one might watch and protect a beloved. She has an older sister who has been married for five years past and lives outside Vienna. That sister was more to her than her mother or any other friend. She looked upon her as a second mother, confided all her secrets in her and allowed herself to be guided and advised by her at every step. She was supremely happy in her companionship and desired nothing better. She loved only that one sister,—towards the other members of the family she was more or less indifferent. Suddenly the family decided to marry off that sister and an aunt brought a suitor to the house. She found that suitor ridiculous, unsuitable for the sister, and fought with all her limited powers against the match. But the mother showed the greatest eagerness for an early marriage. Then it happened that the girl awoke suddenly in the night. Like a thunder a terrible thought flashed through her mind: “You must do away with your mother!” (It was the last desperate soul cry in the attempt to hold on forever to her sister. The mother was the original cause of her misfortune. She could not live without the sister.) The thought so shocked her, the subsequent regrets over it kept her in a very depressed mood. She developed a severe neurosis, consisting chiefly of a series of punishments and expiations to which she deliberately subjected herself. And shortly after that she developed her jealousy of the home. Her sister lived outside Vienna at a small place in Hungary and occasionally came to Vienna. It was natural that she should find a place in the comfortable old home of seven rooms which the family occupied alone. But the girl could not tolerate the sister’s presence in the house. She became depressed, began to cry, found that the furniture was being abused and ruined, could not sleep nights, and daily asked her sister: “How long are you going to stay in town?” so that the sister cut her visit as short as possible.