This case, like the former, illustrates the inner relations between jealousy, homosexuality and sadism. For during her fits of anger she entertained terrible thoughts of revenge. She thought of burning down the home; of killing her sister, as well as herself, by turning on the gas in the room; she tried to secure a revolver, supposedly as a protection against thieves. Her dreams show a criminal personality in sharp contrast to her customary mild character. Emotionally the criminal in her was much more powerful than her cultural self, she could have assaulted her sister and once actually drew a knife. After such emotional outbreaks she crumpled and became again the quiet, soft girl, beloved of everybody on account of her good nature.
IV
JEALOUSY AND PARANOIA—JEALOUSY AS PROJECTION OF ONE’S OWN INADEQUACY—FREUD’S RESEARCHES ON PARANOIA—THE INVESTIGATIONS OF JULIUSBURGER—THE JEALOUSY OF A PARANOIAC—JEALOUSY DELUSION OF A MERCHANT—JEALOUSY AND ALCOHOLISM—THE EVOLUTION OF MANKIND FROM BISEXUALITY TO MONOSEXUALITY—METAMORPHOSIS SEXUALIS PARANOICA—THE MONOTHEISM OF SEXUALITY—JEALOUSY AND CRIMINALITY.
Die Eifersucht wird immer mit der Liebe geboren aber stirbt nicht immer mit ihr.
—La Rochefoucauld.
IV
Jealousy always arises with love but does not always die out with it.
—La Rochefoucauld.
It is very striking that the feeling of jealousy breaks through all the barriers of culture. Extraordinarily frequent are suspicions of incest,[[18]] of homosexuality, of masturbation, and zoöphily. Women accuse their husbands of relations with their daughter; or they accuse the man of homosexual relations with a friend. Men bring similar accusations against their wives. All such accusations are projections of subjective sexual tendencies upon the object of their jealousy. Beaussart (La Jalousie; Annales Psychiques, vol. LXXI, 1913), who maintains erroneously that morbid jealousy is more frequent among men than among women, brings out very strongly this peculiarity of jealousy and bases it on the absence of true motivation. But the motivation is transparent enough. Among the cases reported by him I note that of a 75-year-old woman who tortured her husband to death with her groundless jealousy and who, in a rage, one day, attacked him with a razor. Jealousy is clearly a rationalization of hatred, it harks back to the primary egoistic attitude of the aboriginal man. The phyletic raw sexuality and criminality corresponds to man’s primary ontogenetic attitude towards his environment.
Other jealous persons see their criminal tendencies reflected in the surroundings. A jealous person has the hallucination that the supposed lover of his wife intends to knife him. In this manner the killing of the lover looms up as a logical necessity. Whereas men make use of swords, revolvers, whips, tortures and shackles, woman’s criminality breaks out in such jealousy acts as anonymous letters, libel, poisoning, castration and throwing of acid (Beaussart).