Part 9
The motives of his conduct are clear. We have here a pronounced case of homosexuality manifesting itself as jealousy of other men. The thought that this or that other man had possessed her is precisely what constituted the woman’s highest charm in his eyes. When the man declares that he would have been happy if he could have met this woman in her virgin purity, he is mistaken. He will always seek the street walker, the disreputable woman. She is the more charming because she is older than he. For he is longing for the mother _Imago_ and therefore he is most happy, too, when she mothers him. Like most homosexuals he is strongly attached to the mother. But unlike the overt homosexuals he has not carried out his flight all the way to the male, but has fled, instead, to the _puella publica_, the dishonored woman....
He would like to get rid of this woman. But he has become more deeply enmeshed with her through his feeling of guilt on account of the wound he had caused her and which had left an ugly scar on her face. Since he wishes she were dead in order to be free of her, his conscience indissolubly binds him tenfold to his victim. His criminal fancies center continually on the poor tortured woman and her former lovers. Under the mask of his jealousy he gives free rein to his criminal fancies. In addition, like most artists he is very superstitious and believes that the woman had brought him good luck. Since he has her, he has created his best work and under the inspiration of the strong excitement, he has achieved his best results. It thus seems that the relationship is fixed for life and he may never be able to give it up....
Naturally there are also other forms of jealousy. But when it appears in this pathologic form, it is never difficult to trace the homosexual factor and with it the criminal tendencies back of it. The last case given above is particularly convincing and the friend’s behavior very characteristic.
Our subject feels impelled to think of the woman’s lovers driven thereto by his homosexual longing. He thinks of them in a roundabout way, so to speak, through and around the woman. Jealousy enables him to dwell on the picture of the naked man; he thinks of the _phallus_ of his rival, compares it with his own; he drinks in the bliss which his beloved must have tasted through another man; he places himself entirely in the woman’s rôle, so that, in his fancy, he is the woman. He hates the woman in himself and transfers that hatred upon his second self, his beloved. He hates the woman also because she cannot successfully substitute the man for him. Before that liaison he spent his nights in cafès and wine rooms in the exclusive company of men. He no longer does that. He does not leave his beloved alone any more, thus lacking the excitation of manly company. He tortures his mother as he does his beloved whenever he goes home for a few days. He loves her so dearly that he cannot live through a day without calling her up from Vienna all the way to Berlin, where she lives, to talk to her. If he is somewhere where he cannot be reached by telephone his mother must wire him daily. It is very interesting how this love of the mother covers the deeper love of the father. He plays the love of his mother as his trump card against the father. He flees from the sexual love of the father, while yet he has been repeatedly conscious of his incest phantasies towards the mother. He always adds to his mother _Imago_ some kind of a father. He was most jealous of an attorney, already grey haired and a married man, who therefore stood as a symbol of the father. He has even gone so far as to look up that man to demand an explanation from him, thereby making himself ridiculous. His jealousy was particularly suitable as a means for his latent sadism to become manifest. It enabled him to dwell on bloodcurdling phantasies, it made it reasonable for him to injure his beloved sweetheart, and to justify that insane deed as due to excess of love. The analysis brought about a distinct improvement in the situation. He joined again his comrades at the public houses and peace was seldom disturbed after that.
How difficult it is at times to ferret out the homosexual root of jealousy in such situations is shown by the next case, in which jealousy is again masked before the subject’s consciousness.
76. Miss K. N. consults me for a peculiar trouble about her sleep. She is extremely sensitive to noise. She lives with her sister who keeps a very small apartment where one little room is rented to a gentleman. Her nervousness consists of uncontrollable reflections, as soon as evening begins, about the lodger’s return home. If he returns and goes to sleep early, she herself is soon quiet and sleeps well through the night. But if he is away, she cannot sleep. She may fall into slumber but sleeps so lightly that she is awake at the least noise until she hears the lodger return at last to his room. Then a terrible feeling of dread comes over her and her heart begins to beat fast. Other noises also seem to disturb her. The house in which she lives is near a railroad track. But the trains do not disturb her, nor the electric cars. But voices in the next room, and the sound of steps on the floor above, keep her awake.
One would suppose that she wishes the lodger would come to her and is afraid of that. But she insists that the gentleman is indifferent to her, she would not kiss him if he gave her millions in money for it. She is an unlucky person. She will undoubtedly have to give up her sister’s lodging. She has already had a similar experience. She was the mother’s favorite, petted and fondled in every way. Her mother had a stroke of paralysis and lost consciousness. After she came to herself, she clung to the delusion that her favorite child had turned untrue to her and began terribly to torture the poor child.[17] She reproached her with occurrences wholly imaginary, scolded her as being cold, selfish and indifferent. The girl could do nothing and finally had to leave the house and go to live with strangers. She returned home only after the death of the mother. Meanwhile the father had also passed away. The two girls remained alone in the world and now only had each other. But things were at sixes and sevens between them and they seldom had a quiet hour between themselves.
At last the sister became actually abusive. She begged her sister “with uplifted hands” to dismiss the lodger. She was willing to cover the room rent out of her own pocket. She could not stand it any longer. She could not sleep nights and was going physically and mentally to pieces. But the sister became wild and started to scold her, using the same terrible terms which she had heard her mother hurl at her. They rushed at each other’s hair. She was so enraged she could have strangled her sister at the time.
After that scene she came again to me in despair. I advised her to move out. She cannot have everything her way and she must have quiet. But what was her answer.
“That I cannot do. I cannot.”
“Why not? Does not your sister let you?”
“Oh no, it isn’t that ... only yesterday sister said to me: ‘Move out. I will cherish the day when I will get rid of you.’”
“And you stand for that?”
“I cannot move out because....”
“You are in love with your sister and cannot live without her.”
“That’s it. I cannot live without sister and even her scoldings and her angry words I will put up with rather than stand a day without seeing her.”
“Still you will have to do it.... The conditions are unhealthy.”
“Yes.... Only yesterday I said to sister: ‘_I am going to move out and you can keep your rooms and do with your lodger whatever you want. I won’t protect you any more._’”
Thus it came out clearly that she was watching every night, whether the lodger was going to the sister and that she dreaded moving out because she knew that the sister would then be alone with the lodger in the house and he could go to her every night. I made this clear to her but she did not seem to see it at first. She admitted her homosexual love for the sister....
She moved to other quarters. It was a quiet little room over a garden in the home of an elderly woman living alone. But here also she could not sleep. The old woman snored and she could not stand that. Then the ticking of a clock disturbed her continually and kept her from falling asleep, the striking of the hours even waking her up. She thus continually sought everywhere for the reasons of her unrest which were only in herself. The palpitation of her heart (symbolic substitute for it: the clock) gave her no peace. She looked for other quarters, kept looking and looking but found no place so satisfactory and quiet as the sister’s lodging. She went there every evening returning to her outside lodgings late in the night. She took advantage of a light illness of her sister’s as an excuse and returned to her little room, again shivering with dread whenever the lodger was late coming home. Even after she chose for herself a lover who gave her complete sexual gratification her quiet was temporary. The heterosexual component of her instincts drove her more and more to her lover trying to forget her sister in his arms. But she succeeded only intermittently and her thoughts kept revolving again and again between her sister and that lodger. Finally her sister gave in and the lodger had to move. An elderly young woman became the new lodger. Then she quieted down and was able to sleep once more.
It is interesting that nearly all narcotic drugs not only proved useless but made her worse. She did not want to sleep so as to keep watch over her sister’s virtue.
As in all the cases previously mentioned, here, too, developments led to overt attitudes, the subject stood on the brink of criminal passional deeds. Hatred and love showed intimate relationships. She was also afraid of murderers, barricaded the doors and shivered at every little noise. That was the fear of her own criminal thoughts. Her infantile criminal tendencies arose with her infantile love for the sister.
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_).
In many cases the barrier between jealousy and insanity, between neurosis and psychosis, is hardly to be distinguished. Often jealousy is the first symptom of paranoia.
The next two cases have also pronounced paranoiac features. We are indebted to _Freud_ for his significant contributions to our understanding of the nature of paranoia, or _paraphrenia_, as _Freud_ terms the condition. In his fundamental contribution, _Psychoanalytische Bemerkungen über einen autobiographisch beschriebenen Fall von Paranoia_ (_Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre_, 3rd ed., Franz Deuticke, Leipzig and Vienna, 1913), he has shown that paranoiac insanity is traceable back to the repressed homosexual components of the sexual instinct. The persecution ideas of paranoiacs (by men) is the projection outward of their own thoughts. The subject is pursued by his own homosexual phantasies and out of those fancies he constructs his notion of a pursuer. Love is transmuted by the subject into its bipolar opposite, hatred. _Freud_ states on this point:
“‘I do not love him, in fact I hate him.’ This contrary attitude, which cannot mean anything else in the unconscious does not assume that form in the paranoiac’s consciousness. The mechanism governing the formation of symptoms in paranoia requires that the inner apperception,—the feeling of subjection,—should be replaced by some perception from without. The proposition: ‘in fact I hate him,’ is thus changed through projection into another: ‘he hates (pursues) me which consequently justifies me in hating him.’ The unconscious feeling-motive thus appears as though it were an objective perception, a deduction:
“‘_I do not love him, in fact I hate him, because he pursues me._’”
Observation leaves no doubt that the pursuer is none other than the formerly beloved person.
_Freud_ here overlooks entirely the relations of paranoia to criminality. Having persistently overlooked thus far the tremendous significance of latent criminality in the psychogenesis of neurosis and having emphasized only the sexual factors underlying all psychotic and nervous manifestations, he neglects here also the important rôle of criminality in the dynamics of paranoia. That is the reason why his explanation does not fit all cases. For there is also a paranoia which stands for a flight from criminality, even representing a rationalization of criminal tendencies without any homosexuality. Such cases are exceptional but they do occur. The fear of insanity which oppresses so many neurotics, involves as a polar component the wish to lose one’s mind. For the insane is responsible neither to himself nor before the law. “He cannot help it.” That is why paranoiac conditions break out so often with the commission of some crime. On the other hand the paranoiac turns insane as a defence against committing a crime. We shall yet find that isolation in an asylum for the insane corresponds with many a victim’s hidden wish, because there they find peace of mind and security.
The jealousy of paranoia like every other form of jealousy is an expression of rage. But _it serves to rationalize the anger and lends force as well as a measure of emotional justification to the criminal impulse_. Many crimes of passion, so-called, are caused by the passion for crime. We have as yet penetrated but little through the mask which covers the inner criminal. We are still too anxiously concerned with the superficial motivations which bring about sadism to find the path leading towards the fundamental fact. The best measure of culture is the manner in which the man’s primordial character manifests itself in us, our conscious conduct. That is why the advancement of culture is bound to lead to an increase of insanity in the proportion that the jails are emptied.
I must again point out that _Juliusburger_ was the first to recognize and describe clearly these relations. In fact the credit of having discovered the relations between homosexuality and paranoia belongs to him. In his work entitled, “_Die Homosexualität im Vorentwurf zu einem deutschen Strafgesetzbuch_” (_Allgemeine Zeitschrift f. Psychiatrie_, 1911), he already stated:
“Furthermore we find in the insane the well-known delusion of persecution and its motive is often derived from homosexuality inasmuch as the patients complain that they are pursued with homosexual intent, of which they themselves disclaim any guilt. Or, in their morbid state of mind, they believe themselves victims of persecution because it is proposed that they should be driven into the alleged ranks of homosexuals, something they resent most scornfully. In both cases we see a peculiar psychic process which must be conceived as a projection to the surroundings, to the world of external reality, of unconscious subjective notions. When an individual breaks down mentally complaining to be a victim of watchfulness and persecution for alleged homosexual purposes, the condition may be explained only in the sense that the individual in question actually harbors within himself a powerful homosexual tendency and the latter is projected unto the world of external reality through a peculiar mental mechanism. The old proposition: _ex nihilo nihil fit_ holds true also of the mental sphere and it would be utterly unscientific to fail to recognize in this sphere as well the law of strict causality or motivation. A careful examination of the mental life of our insane man’s unconscious shows that homosexuality is a powerful motive force much more frequently than is ordinarily recognized and this attempt to turn the unconscious subjective feeling of homosexuality into an objective reality, constitutes a pathway for the release of inner psychic tension, so a means for the individual to escape the feeling of guilt roused by his erroneous perception of facts and to pass the responsibility onto other shoulders. Many of the insane notions of our patients become intelligible and we grasp their meaning only when we recognize the powerful rôle which homosexuality plays in man’s unconscious.”
_Juliusburger_ also recognizes the significance of sadism and its tremendous rôle in the psychogenesis of the delusion of jealousy. In his contribution referred to previously, “_Zur Psychologie des Alkoholismus_” (_Zentralblatt f. Psychoanalyse_, Vol. III, 1913), he makes the following relevant observations:
“I agree with _Freud_ that the homosexual or homopsychic component of man and woman finds one of its outlets, as sublimation, in the form of companionship and social drinking. But thus far I remain unconvinced that homosexuality or its psychic substitute plays also a similar rôle in the pathogenesis of the delusion of jealousy. Therefore I still adhere to the view expressed by my colleague, _Hans Oppenheim_, in his contribution, “_Zur Frage der Genese des Eifersuchtswahns_” (published in: _Zentralblatt f. Psychoanalyse_, 1911). As formerly I still regard the sadistic-masochistic instinctive cravings as the strongest root of the delusion of jealousy. I found particularly instructive a certain case in which sadism broke forth in a jealous drinker more quickly than I had ever seen that happen before. This man’s sadism manifested itself concurrently in an incredible cruelty to dogs which could be only explained by his sadism. The oft-recorded fact that the jealous drinker is not satisfied and does not release his victim even after the latter, in an attempt to quiet him, submits to some disgusting act, the continual repetition by him of tortures and cruelties, may be explained only as due to a deeply rooted sadistic impulse everlastingly craving gratification. The delusion of jealousy is rooted in sadism, the overstressed images accompanying the morbid feeling of jealousy are generated by the sadistic tendency. Sadism is the fertile soil giving rise to the delusions of persecution of the jealous alcoholics, and intimately linked with sadism stands masochism, upon which the feeling of jealousy feeds and grows.”
“Besides the sadistic-masochistic components the pathogenesis of the delusion of jealousy displays also the transposition of a certain feeling of guilt. In my cases at least it was easy to prove that the jealous drinker who forces his wife to commit some punishable offence, is himself inclined to carry out the incriminating acts and controls himself only with difficulty. I found a similar situation in the case of women, victims of delusions of jealousy. The more or less conscious projection of their feeling of guilt upon the partner brings on mental release and a certain sense of freedom, and at the same time furnishes new fuel for the sadistic impulse. Finally for the explanation of the delusion of jealousy we must take into consideration also another factor which may be explained on the basis of atavism. We shall see later that certain atavistic reminiscences play a great rôle in the psychology of alcoholism. The will to power, the yearning to dominate and subdue woman still lies dormant in man’s soul,—a remnant from old. The soul of the alcoholic is particularly prolific in atavistic remnants which show themselves upon close analysis and, besides, the chronic intoxication rouses the _dormant atavistic trends_ which lie dormant at the bottom of the soul and brings them to surface. The aboriginal tyrannical self awakens in the drinker and flays a controlling whip over the cowering woman; in the case of female victims of the delusion of jealousy the reverse happens and the primordial matriarchal instinct becomes manifest. We learn progressively to see and appreciate how atavistic remnants break to the surface in the psyche of the insane.”
That conception of jealousy as the “projection upon the surroundings of a subjective feeling of inadequacy” was at one time my starting point in my characterological investigations of jealousy. But I soon learned that the problem is much more complicated. When I found that the neurotics represent regressive stages of development, I conceived jealousy to be a primitive feeling of hatred, characteristic of man in his primordial state. Paranoia discloses the primary tendencies which are glossed over by our cultural development. One’s true character betrays itself in one’s emotions. Jealousy shows us the true inner man in all his passionate cravings and his hidden desires.
The next case illustrates all the characteristic features: the delusion of persecution, the morbid jealousy and the brutal sadism. There is no insight into the condition. The feeling of jealousy is adjudged as justified. Ridiculous incidents are held forth as grounds for suspicion in order to remove from self the sense of guilt. All the alleged “persecutions,” which are looked upon as dangerous, lack any objective grounds. Often sadism breaks through, though under the guise of emotional paralogisms.