Whether one is alone or with others, whether one rages or is silent, berates one’s mate with questions and accusations or refrains from berating one’s mate with questions and accusations, the internal drama remains the same: the will has become fixed in a rigid orbit of injury - it spins and burns, but cannot escape its tiny, terrible sphere. On the other hand, the obsession is the condition of the will - simultaneously assertive and impotent, simultaneously frenzied and paralyzed. On the one hand, one wills one’s obsession to disappear, thereby ensuring its perpetuation. What sets jealousy apart from other possible responses to real or imagined infidelity - such as rage or grief - is its quality of obsession… Literally, obsession means being oppressed or besieged, as if by an evil spirit. (Available as a print.)Įvery jealous person knows jealousy to be a brutally degrading experience and resists with all his might revealing the extent of his degradation.ĭefining the central animating spirit of jealousy as “a state of virtual paralysis in which the will races around a single point,” Farber investigates its most salient psychological characteristic and its relation to the will: One of Aubrey Beardsley’s radical 1893 illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome. The complex psychological underpinnings of jealousy, and what they might reveal in the way of relief, and how they might illuminate the most hopeful frontiers of love, is what the pioneering psychiatrist Leslie Farber (July 12, 1912–March 24, 1981) explores in his 1973 essay “On Jealousy,” found in his altogether penetrating collection The Ways of the Will ( public library).
“Jealousy,” wrote the Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel in his insightful treatise on love, “is precisely love’s contrary… the most passionate form of egotism, the glorification of a despotic, exacting, and vain ego, which can neither forget nor subordinate itself.” And yet jealousy is also one of the commonest human experiences - one that visits upon even the noblest heart, warping reality and reason beyond recognition. There is but one emotion that claws at the heart with the twin talons of anger and shame, savaging self-regard with haunting ferocity that feeds on itself.
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