British Journal of Psychiatry (1991), 158, 593—601

Lecture

Jealousy: The Pathology of Passion PAUL E. MULLEN

Emotions may be rooted in biology but the process of cultural construction gives those emotions form and a language for their expression. The changing construction of jealousy in Western societies has transformed a socially sanctioned response to infidelity into a form of personal pathology which is the mere outward expression of immaturity, possessiveness and insecurity. This is a history of the stripping away of social, ethical and finally interpersonal meanings from an experience, to leave it as a piece of individual psychopathology. Fidelity and jealousy are constructed as they are because of the nature of the social and economic realities which drive our culture. The erosion of the area of human experience which could be identified with normal jealousy leaves the boundary between the pathological jealousy of psychiatry and normal experience increasingly problematic.

Jealousy can confront the psychiatrist in a variety of guises. Convictions about the partner's infidelities may form the content of psychopathological pheno mena such as delusions (Jaspers, 1910; Lagache, 1947; Shepherd, 1961; Mullen, 1990a). When jealousy arises not as a symptom of obvious underlying disorder, but as a reaction to some understandable threat to the relationship, then the distinction between the responses of those ‘¿normally' and those ‘¿pathologically' jealous can present formidable problems (Vaukhonen, 1968; Retterstol, 1967; Tiggelaar, 1956; White & Mullen, 1989). These problems are compounded by the absence of any clear notion of what constitutes normal jealousy and where the boundaries of that normality, in terms of both behaviour and experience, should be drawn. It is accepted that jealousy is a common, if not universal, experience, but despite this, its status as ‘¿normal'is in increasing doubt. Eliot Slater argued that psychiatrists could, and should, apply their particular perspective to issues of social and cultural importance to contribute to the common pool of understanding. This paper examines jealousy as a construct which is altering with the changing cultural contingencies of Western societies in the hope of shedding some light on why normal jealousy has become problematic. The manner in which jealousy is regarded and ex perienced has changed repeatedly over the history of Western societies. The changing cultural construction of jealousy has gradually transformed it from a socially sanctioned response to infidelity into a personal pathology. In the 17th century jealousy was a passion, albeit one that could cause problems.

This paper is based on the 1990 Eliot Slater Memorial

Today jealousy is a problem which can stir up damaging and embarrassing emotion. Jealousy was once a passion which had a role in expressing and maintaining individual and social values which, admittedly, if uncontrolled could usher in pathology. Today jealousy is often regarded as a pathology which offends against the ethics of liberal individualism and its free market in goods, ideas and people. Jealousy is riven by contradictions. At one extreme it embodies a longing for an ideal in human relationships and a cry of protest at the loss of that dream of sustained commitment and fidelity. At the other, it has always been contaminated by the attempt to impose the desires and priorities of one person upon another. The changing balance between destructive possessive ness and disappointed hope is central to jealousy's history. The path that jealousy has travelled from the zealousness of the Renaissance to become a hallmark of personal immaturity is examined here in terms of the changing construction of emotion and the alterations in patterns of sexual behaviour. There are a number of assumptions implicit in interpreting emotions as being in part cultural construction. One is that we are subject to a multiplicity of emotions and desires but we only have names for some of them and, by and large, only the grosser examples. Jealousy, as a self-description, covers a wide range of potential experiences, a range which alters according to the constructions of the individual and the wider culture. In speaking of emotions and desires we are limited by the language of our culture and perforce we fit our experiences as best we can into the available vocabulary. Over time this vocabulary changes. Finlay-Jones (1983)

Lecture.

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described the disappearance of the emotion accidie from Western culture, but more importantly, claimed that a group of those who now call themselves depressed, would have found better expression for their state of mind within the lost language of accidie. The relationship between experience and the words used to expres@ that experience is a two-way process and in our culture of prefabricated feelings, words and phrases increasingly give birth to reality (Adorno, 1973). To begin to know about a person's emotions and desires it is necessary to embark on an archaeology both of their own personal develop ment and their culture's words. The changing face of jealousy can be introduced by looking at some of the virtues and vices attributed to jealousy in different historical periods. The word ‘¿jealousy'carried with it in the 14th century the connotation of eagerness, devotion and zealousness

(Oxford English Dictionary, 1971). It implied a solicitousness to preserve something possessed or esteemed. The adage attributed to St Augustine that who is not jealous does not love (“Quinon zealat non amat―) surely speaks more to the enthusiasm of love than to possessiveness or suspicion. The potential for any solicitousness and devotion in jealousy to give way to suspicion and distrust has long been recognised. Thus in Othello (1694) Shakespeare has Emilia tell Desdemona: “¿They are not ever jealous for the cause, but jealous for they're jealous. Tis a monster begot upon itself, born on itself―. Jealousy, despite its attendant darker side, was accorded a role in preserving social esteem in societies ruled principally by concepts of honour. Honour, at least as an ideal, involves an uncompromising pursuit of the good which puts aside individual advantage in preference to moral and social principle. Where monogamy is a moral and social imperative, jealousy is regarded as a protector of the integrity of the family. Gonzales-Crussi (1988), in an essay on male jealousy, which harks back nostalgically to a Spanish culture still ruled by codes of honour, claimed the modern era “¿turnsa sanctimonious eye― on jealousy, seeing it as “¿but a sign of sociopathic or psychological maladjustment― and fails to credit that “¿jealousy is not without worthy elements― for it “¿stems at bottom from a concern for the inviolate perfection of others―. The balance between the perceived virtues and vices of jealousy has shifted at different historical periods to culminate in the modern view of jealousy as compounded of vices mitigated by little, if any, virtue. Stearns (1989), in his pioneering work on the evolution of jealousy in America, put the position succinctly when he wrote, “¿for over 60 years all the evaluations of jealousy,

scholarly and popular, supportive of, or hostile to, conventional monogamy condemn the emotion―. Jealousy is now described as a disaster to be avoided whenever possible (Fisher, 1990). The ‘¿official' view of jealousy does not necessarily reflect the attitudes and practices of those currently living in Western societies, let alone members of different cultures. In a recent survey of jealousy nearly half the respondents agreed with the proposition that jealousy is an inevitable part of love and only a tiny minority disclaimed any experience of the emotion in their sexual relationships (Mullen et a!, in preparation). Jealousy survives, if not thrives, in our societies. To understand how it is constructed and experienced at the end of the 20th century it is necessary to briefly examine the conceptualisations of emotions in general. There is a wide range of views on what constitutes an emotion. At one extreme, emotions are regarded as conditioned or unconditioned reactions to stimuli in which reason and judgement have no part. MacNaughton (1989), in his book on the biology of the emotions, coyly disclaimed any desire, or necessity, to define emotion, but finally stated emotions are “¿in essence any state, or set of states, of the organism which involve the co occurrence of specific patterns of response of more than one of the skeletal, autonomic and hormonal systems―. In such an interpretation the conscious mind is in absence. At the other extreme, the American philosopher Robert Solomon (1980) claimed “¿emotionsare defined primarily by their constitutive judgements, given structure by judge ments, distinguished as particular emotions (anger, love, envy etc.) by judgements―. Here cognition is all, and biology together with instincts and automatic reactions are nowhere. I do not attempt to resolve the conflict between such formulations but give a passing glance at how two such very different constructions emerged and how they impact on our view of jealousy. Maclntyre (1988) made elegant use of the Homeric poems and subsequent translations to illustrate the perceived relationship between practical reasoning

and emotion at different historical periods. The trans lators of Homer's epic poems project the traditions and discourse of their own age back onto the Homeric template, thus providing an accessible record of the changing understanding of what constitutes emotion. If we take the example of the passage in the Iliad where Achilles is subjected to a public insult from Agamemnon, according to Macintyre's rendering of Homer he suffers a momentary indecision as the passion of anger infects, or is inflicted on, his ‘¿humus' (spirit, the force which propels the person toward action) before his ‘¿arete'

JEALOUSY: THE PATHOLOGY OF PASSION (virtue, duty to fulfil his proper role) reasserts itself. He is helped in this by the prompting of the goddess Athena. Passion, for Homer, is external and infects the individual, bringing blind infatuation, or in this case, blind rage, but it also has a social and moral dimension. It brings with it the danger of being diverted from the lawful path, from the path of destiny. The concept of passion as external and penetrating is common in early Indo-European societies where emotions are often likened to illnesses which invade or insinuate themselves into us (Crespo, 1986). A surviving image from such emotionologies is that of Cupid firing his dart into the love-struck victim and we still speak of being infected by jealousy. What then of the jealousy of Menelaus confronted by Helen's infidelity. Homer tells us little of his immediate responses, but the whole Trojan War stems from the duty Menelaus accepted to avenge this public humiliation. The infidelity was an insult to his person, to his kingship and to the morality of the society. It placed upon him the duty to avenge the affront and gave him the right to call all Greeks to his assistance. Homer has Helen castigate herself for the adultery as “¿a whore and a nightmare of a woman― and she attributes the infidelity to “¿harlotryin me and madness [in Paris] “¿ (Fitzgerald's translation, 1984). This is an infidelity with associated jealousy which can only be understood in terms of moral imperatives, honour and adherence to one's social role. If we turn to Chapman's translation of Homer from the late 16th century, dominated intellectually as it was by the rediscovery of Aristotle, Achilles is transformed from Homer's publicly humiliated hero infected by anger into a prototype for an Aristotelian debating society, in which, for Chapman, Achilles “¿at this stood vexed―, his heart “¿Bristled in his bosom and two ways did draw his discursive part If from his thigh his sharp sword drawn, he should make room about Atrides person slaughtering him, or sit his anger out And curb his spirit. While these thoughts strived in his blood and mind . . .“ There stands indecisive Achilles immersed in an internal debate about the correct course to follow. Anger is presented as an event separate from the rational mind which can be thoughtfully considered and then acted upon as reason dictates. Passion, emotion as we know it, has almost disappeared, buried under the discursive deliberations of an educated rationality. Cognitions are all and biology given no place. This however represents only one of the constructions of emotion current at that time,

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for a biological view of passion also had adherents through the penetration into the wider culture of Galenic humeral theory. Hobbes (1677) translated the same passage: “¿This swelled Achilles choler to the hight And made him study what to do were best To draw sword and Agememnon kill, Or take some time his anger to digest.― Here the model of passion is based in the physiology of the humours, although reason also plays a part in studying “¿what to do were best―. Note the resolution of the anger appeals to a physical process of digesting the excess of anger. For Chapman reason is paramount, but for Hobbes it is secondary to the rise and flow of the humours. Jealousy is, for Shakespeare both in Othello (1604) and The Winter's Tale (1610), a consuming passion driven onward by a sense of affronted honour, but in both instances based on error. By the simple expedient of making the jealousy unjustified, Shakespeare becomes subversive of the social and ethical imperatives associated with jealousy. He shifts the passion from its social role into the product of an individual's error which flourishes on the basis of personal vulnerabilities. There is little of Aristotle's educated rationality in the jealousy of Leontes or the Moot. Camillo likens the jealousy of Leontes to a sickness (I, ii, 380) and it certainly has a sudden onset based on a flash of false insight heralded by palpitations (I, ii, 110). Once in motion, these jealousies of Shakespeare are characterised by their imperviousness to reason, at least until after they reach their fatal conclusion. In the Sonnet (number 147) which deals with love and jealousy, Shakespeare also uses the image of emotion as infection which reason like a physician tries to treat, but without success. Shakespeare's jealousy does have something of Homer's infection diverting the sufferer from the path of destiny and duty, but it is a jealousy stripped of any morally or socially redeeming features. This can be contrasted with jealousy as portrayed in the work of Shakespeare's great Spanish contemporary Calderon (1630—81), where the passion is both justified and rational, being as morally admirable as it is murderous. In Alexander Pope's 18th-century translation of Homer, a view of passion is articulated in which there are two entirely separate realms, that of passion and that of reason, both contending for attention: “¿Distracting thoughts by turns his bosom rule'd Now fired by wrath and now by reason cool'd: That prompts his hand to draw the deadly sword, Force through the Greeks to pierce their haughty lord; This whispers soft his vengeance to control―.

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Achilles now stands buffeted between the twin discourses of reason and passion. Passion prompts violent action, but reason counsels control. In 17-century and early-l8th-century Europe, a common view of passion was of what we might now term a ‘¿motivating force', which aroused by an event, drove the affected individual towards action. Passions could cause acts, but such actions were likely to be uncontrolled and inconsistent outbursts. In contrast, when reason governed the response it was likely to be measured and effective. Reason, for most Christians at this time, partook of the divine and had the advantage over passion of being modifiable by experience and open to the direction of education. Passion and reason occupy different realms of

discourse and govern alternative modes of responding which lead to different and potentially opposing actions. This view of passion and reason as alternative and opposing still informs much of the commonsense folk psychology of emotion. Jealousy in this construction is entirely separated from reason. Passion was, for an educated person in the 17th century, best avoided, and reason cultivated as an independent alternative. The view of passion changed during the 18th century: a change which was both influenced and articulated by European philosophers. Hume offers an example. He clearly stated his view of the relationship of reason to passion in A Treatise

on Human Nature (1740): “¿Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. . . tis only in two senses that any [passion] can be called unreasonable. . . where it is founded on false suppositions or chooses means insufficient for the end―. Hume's concept of the passions did not, like the previous emotionology, place reason into a separate discourse from passion. In terms of what we would call motivation he ceded primacy to passion, but reason was inserted into the chain connecting passions both to their objects and to their consequent actions. Passions were not mere reactions, but had their origin in pre-existing dispositions and arose in relationship to an object. To use the jargon of our age, Hume's passions were intentional. Reason could in this model influence the choice of object, one could reason about the suitability of someone as a love object or whether that was an event which really justified the emerging jealousy. Further, reason was inserted into the process connecting the passion once formed to any course of action. For Hume reason served the passion by deciding on how best to facilitate its expression. Passion as understood by Hume does not translate directly into the modern term ‘¿emotion'. It was more closely allied to desire and to the concept of a

sentiment. It could influence actions and take part in reactions, but was not the elaboration of biologically determined conditioned or unconditioned reflexes. Hume's views of passion appear somewhat more complex when he articulates his model through specific examples. Love, for example, he views as compounded of three elements: the aesthetic appreci ation of beauty, sexual appetite and benevolence. The mixture of these elements may vary, but without

all three the passion is not for Hume one of love. The notion of passion as sentiment is illustrated by the 18th-century novelist Fielding in Tom Jones (1749) when he wrote: “¿but it is with jealousy as with the gout, when such distempers are in the blood there is never any security against their breaking out and that often on the slightest occasions―. This supposes a passion to be a persisting potentiality, in the very blood of the person, a concept close to the current notion of a trait. Emotions during the 19th century increasingly acquired the connotations of the transitory and the organic, at least in the literature of science, both scholarly and popular. They shifted from traits to states. They ceased to be compounded of abiding sentiments and desires and became involuntary reactions independent of morality and of those permanent values which characterise a person. Reason's only remaining roles were in helping the individual to avoid situations or attitudes which could trigger the less appetising of these emotional reactions and in mitigating the damaging impulses they engendered. Instinct and biology, reaction and reflex, these became the words appropriate to emotions. The shift from sentiment to physiological response is only part of the story of how the cultural construction of emotions developed from the 19th century until today. While the scientists, for want of a better word, were exploring ideas of instinct and the biology of emotion, the novelists, quite independently, were redrawing the map of the emotions. Hume's pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic passionate drives were gradually transformed into a complex patterned regularity of dispositional and occurrent feelings, of judgements and actions, such that each element was a necessary part of the whole (Maclntyre, 1988). A recent attempt to deduce a phenomenological description of jealousy employing literary examples derived just such a pattern of dispositions and feelings (Mullen, 1990b). The analysis of this material suggested that the elements contributing to the experience of jealousy included judgements, desires, feelings, fantasies and pre dispositions to behave. The jealousy complex as constructed at the highest cultural level (Tolstoy's

JEALOUSY: THE PATHOLOGY OF PASSION Kreutzer Sonata(1889)and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (1913—22) is far removed from an automatic reaction for it consists of an intentional state of mind in which judgement and fantasy occupy central positions. Reason re-enters with such models into the very substance of emotions in general and jealousy in particular. Part of the current debate about emotions and the emergence of such trends as the judge mentalist and social constructionist views of emotion is about reintroducing, reinjecting this tradition, carried forward until recently largely by novelists, back into the psychological and social sciences. The evolution of today's jealousy also involved a shift from a passion rooted in socially and morally sanctioned values towards an emotion expressive only of personal desires and preferences. Jealousy in the ‘¿honour' societieswas a largely male prerogative connected to public retribution for the damage inflicted on social prestige. In the 18th century jealousy expressed distress at the loss of the person both as a source of gratification and as a possession, but jealousy continued to incorporate a protest against the infringement of ethical and moral values, albeit now more internalised values. The element of loss of property was amply illustrated by the proliferation in 18th-century England of law suits against adulterous wives and their paramours for monetary compensation. Property and marriage had long been intermingled; what was new was the concept of a contract open to renegotiation or a failure to fulfil. The association of jealousy with the treatment of the loved one as a possession has continued as a theme in both popular and scholarly writings. Davis (1936), in his often quoted account of jealousy, claimed “¿in every case [jealousy] is a fear or rage reaction to a threatened appropriation of one's own, or what is desired as one's own, property―. In Western societies at the end of the 18th century there occurred important changes in the attitude to love and marriage, at least among the more privileged social strata. Love received increasing emphasis as a basis for courtship and marriage. There was nothing new in romantic love; what was novel was viewing marriage as the appropriate and preferred play ground for this passion. Love now preceded rather than followed marriage and there was a heightened valuation of heterosexual love and family affection (Gay, 1984, 1986). This is amply illustrated by the family advice manuals which became such a prominent part of middle-class life in the 19th century both in Britain and America (de Gasparin, 1865). In some ways this new emphasis with its idealising of fidelity, particularly female fidelity, would have tended to

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increase jealousy fears, but more importantly there developed an increasingly hostile attitude to jealousy which was seen as potentially eroding the love relation ship and undermining the stability of the family. Stearns (1989) points out in his history of jealousy in America that the 19th century was riven by conflicting influences on jealousy. On one hand urbanisation broke down the traditional small communities with their mutual enforcement of fidelity by public scrutiny. America gradually abandoned the institutional enforcement of sexual fidelity through its laws against adultery. At the same time the opportunities for romantic and sexual encounters increased and prostitution flourished. Equally, the rise of commercial codes of behaviour made concerns for honour seem anachronistic. Counterbalancing these various forces, which might have tended to heighten jealous anxieties, was the increasing emphasis on the dangers of jealousy. There was an insistence on true love being incompatible with jealousy. The emphasis on female fidelity, coupled with the acceptance of male infidelity, placed the burden for avoiding jealousy squarely on the woman. Through the 19th century jealousy shifts from being the prerogative of the male to being the problem of the woman. The myth of the ‘¿one great love' central to the 19th-century and early-2Oth century emotionology was in practice gender specific. For women it meant what it said, one love, one partner. For men it was interpreted as meaning you, my wife or lover, are the one great love of my life, so all the little transgressions of monogamy are trivial and neither merit nor justify jealousy. Women were increasingly portrayed as more emotional and less controlled than men and were encouraged to overcome this weakness, particularly to avoid possessiveness and jealousy in the interests of preserving the family. The split between reason and passion reappears embodied in the contrast between the rational male and the emotional female. Jealousy is no longer the expression of offended honour, but of weakness and lack of control stemming from inadequacies of character. Women were increasingly regarded as more prone to emotion, but less prone to carnal desire. Any qualms about double standards with regard to jealousy could be calmed by an appeal to the fortuitous freedom from undue sexual desire which made infidelity for women unnatural and the unfortunate insistence of male urges which made men's indulgence a matter of physical and mental hygiene. The 19th-century view of the bourgeois wife as virtually bereft of sexual desire contrasts with the early-l8th-century view of women as more amorous than men and more likely to consume themselves with their passion (Bouce,

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1982; Flynn, 1987). Advice manuals, usually written by women for women, in the 19th century regularly praised men who took the trouble to conceal affairs for showing due concern for their wives' feelings. Such manuals tended to urge wives not to make any effort to discover that which knowing could only bring them pain and distress (Stearns, 1989). Although jealousy was under severe attack in the 19th century both from the forces of the self-declared progressives and the writers of advice manuals, it did not lack champions. The family, at least in theory, remained central. Marriages were about rearing children and infidelity presented a potential threat. A prominent forensic psychiatrist, Charles Mercier (1918), wrote: “¿the institution of marriage and the instinct of jealousy work for the same end and serve the same purpose. Love selects, jealousy mounts guard to repel third parties from entering the sacred fold―.The 20th century saw even this justification for jealousy eroded as the emphasis in emotional and sexual relationships firmly shifted from the family and children to the quality of the couple's relation ship. “¿Does the relationship satisfy my sexual and emotional needs?―became not just an acceptable question, but the central question for many. Jealousy has little place in satisfying anyone's sexual and emotional needs. Jealousy came under further attack at the beginning of the 20th century from psychologists and psychiatrists who increasingly emphasised that romantic jealousy arose from personal immaturity and reflected a hangover from the sibling rivalries of childhood, with no place in mature adult relationships. Freud and his disciples added to jealousy's burdens with the concept of projection, which emphasises that jealous individuals often had only their own impulses to infidelity to blame which they were projecting onto the innocent partner (Freud, 1955, first published 1922; Jones, 1937). The picture is further complicated by the version of romantic love promoted by 20th-century popular culture. This love emphasises passionate excitement and enthusiasm which is blind to mundane social constraints. Such love is sustained by novelty. Those in permanent relationships are thrown back into the realm of comparison, which is the realm of jealousy (de Rougemont, 1950), but at the same time, their own opportunities for a further chance at the imagined splendours of new love depends on negating their partner's potential jealousy. Jealousy approaches the end of the 20th century as an outcast, a problem best avoided, if not avoided then suppressed, and if you fail to suppress it then you become a suitable case for treatment, well if not treatment, at least counselling. A study of 60

counsellors in America (White & Devine, 1991) revealed that their predominant views were that jealousy arose from low self-esteem and excessive dependence on the partner combined with feelings of inadequacy as a lover; in short, a character defect. It leads to excessive demands for attention and sexual exclusivity. Their opinions on the inadequacy of their jealous clients was despite the fact that the couples usually presented in the context of an actual, and acknowledged, rival relationship. Jealousy has become a pathology of the person suffering it. Gone are its virtues and its justifications. That infidelity conjured it into existence simply allows the therapist, should they be of an old fashioned bent, to empathise with its emergence before turning to the task of knocking the dependent wimp, who cannot satisfy their partner and is unreasonable enough to demand attention and fidelity, into a shape befitting the late-2Oth-century person. What place does the zeal, once central to jealousy, hold for us today? Rawls (1971), a persuasive spokesmen for modern liberalism, wrote “¿human good is heterogenous because the aims of the self are heterogenous. Although to subordinate all our aims to one end does not strictly speaking violate the principles of rational choice, it still strikes us as irrational or more likely as mad―.Rawls is referring in this passage to the subordination of all one's aims to ideological or theological systems, but presumably the same caveat would apply to the overweening enthusiasm of jealousy which from this viewpoint also disfigures the self. Jealousy is nothing if not a protest at a failure to subordinate all of your, and someone else's, aims within a relationship to one end. Zealousness and the pursuit of exclusivity are clearly anachronisms for the liberal individualist. Another philosopher, Heller (1985), expressed this idea about jealousy directly when she wrote “¿now that freedom has become a universal value idea, hatred felt because of the other's withdrawal of love is irrational indeed―. Current Western society reflects the influence of the market economy, of democratisation, and of the notion of freedom expressed through individual rights. Modernism leaves no place either for jealousy's claims for exclusivity, which offend against individual rights and liberal notions of freedom, or for the jealous person, who is an emotional bankrupt in the market-place of love. Equally, the acceptance of ideas about individual rights as the final arbiter of the good in our society marginalises any claims made on behalf of moral or ethical imperatives which infringe such notions. In the abortion debate, for example, those who oppose

JEALOUSY: THE PATHOLOGY OF PASSION claims made on the basis of the rights of the woman to choose, increasingly make their appeal to public opinion in terms of another set of putative rights, those of the unborn child, rather than in terms of moral or divine imperatives. Debates on ethical or social values are replaced by assertion and counter claim as rights are opposed to rights. Demands for fidelity and exclusivity, central to jealousy, are difficult to sustain on the basis of individual rights, particularly in a liberal society where mutual duties and obligations are dissolved into contracts, actual or implicit. The collective, the social, and even the interpersonal dimensions to which the individual is subject, are lost, to be replaced by the notion of the sovereignty of the individual consumer. If sexual and emotional relationships are about two individuals entering into an implicit contract to augment their sexual and emotional returns, then jealousy brings with it all the vices and precious few virtues. If we accept the estimates derived from Lawson's (1987) research and review of the literature, up to 50% of women and some 65% of men become involved in extramarital affairs, and a good pro portion have multiple affairs. Adultery is now a participation sport indulged in by the masses. Citizens increasingly assume the right to change and vary their erotic attachments. In such a context, and with an ethic in Western society emphasising the rights of fragmented, isolated individuals, how can jealousy be anything but pathology? There is however a different view of liberal in dividualism. Hampshire (1989) writes: “¿A deadening encrustation of conventional classifications of human concerns prevents us looking inwards and from recognising the unnamed exultations and depressions of our inner life for what they are, the revelations of our real nature concealed by our social role―. Building on this model of the individual trying to free their rich inner world from the impoverishing influences of tradition and social roles, he offers this construction of love. “¿Sexual love is associated with a desire to know an individual person with a peculiarly violent curiosity which becomes a desire to enter into another inner world, and to take possession for a time of another person's consciousness, through the body that expresses that consciousness―.There could be no more individual and individualistic con struction. As the pendulum swings from social and ethical imperatives towards individual freedom so jealousy moves closer to pathology. He is clear that love is no product of reason, “¿one does not love for a reason any more than one enjoys a joke for a reason, the particularity of the occasion excludes calculation and causal analysis―. Does such a construction have a place for jealousy? It leaves

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plenty of room for envy of those fortunate enough to be the subjects, or objects, of such imaginative curiosity, but it appears to involve no actual claims on the other, to be only “¿for a time―and to be free of social or traditional encrustations or expectations. This leaves jealousy without a rational basis. Although there is curiosity about the other and their inner world, it is the inquisitiveness of the spectator which regards and explores the other in all their manifestations, physical and psychological. There is no obvious need in this model for reciprocity. It can have Hume's aesthetic and lustful appreciations, but what of benevolence with its desire to promote the happiness of the other? Such love is the love of subject for object, if neither demands nor requires love in return, it desires only “¿to take possession for a time―. The loved one is presumably free to reciprocate the curiosity, or not, for such love would not need to intrude or ask, let alone demand, commitment. Jealousy with such a model would surely be a jarring irrelevance. On the other hand, if love is compounded of curiosity and imaginings its kinship to jealousy would be clear, for jealousy is nothing if not curious and nothing if not driven by a fevered imagination. As Proust (1913—22) wrote: “¿a little jealousy is not unpleasant. . . for it enables people who are not inquisitive to take an interest in the lives of others, or in one other at any rate―. If we enter sexual relationships not as free and independent contractors, but as members of a society whose values and traditions are not dominated solely by the ethic of the market place; if we enter not as isolated self-sufficient monads, however imaginative, but as dependents seeking some security and reassurance; in short, if we are the human, all too human, members of a tradition which still seeks to realise some of their potential through intimate relationships, then jealousy cannot yet be relegated entirely to a pathology of the passions. But then again perhaps it can and perhaps it should. This paper could be read as an attempt to rehabilitate jealousy by recalling that it once had both social relevance and interpersonal meaning. Jealousy is about infidelity, and infidelity has a moral dimension. Some commentators claim jealousy is an inescapable part of our nature which can only be controlled by the habit of fidelity (Scruton, 1986). This paper has asserted that fidelity and jealousy are constructed differently at different historical periods and in different cultures, in part because of the changing nature of social and economic realities. The ideology of our age promoted a greater acceptance of polygamous erotic activity and the reputation of jealousy is in eclipse. Moral relativists claim that we can describe the influences of culture on ethical

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standards, but deny the existence of any transcendent values by which differences could be assessed. Conversely, some would judge this history of jealousy in terms either of ethical perspectives resurrected from the past, or of those dreamed of as future possibilities. The changes in sexual practices in Western culture reflect, in part, the influences of late capitalism's need for mobile atomised labour and the marketing of commodities through the medium of an anonymous eroticism. The deformations imposed on sexuality by the world of profit are often explained not in terms of social forces, but in terms of the victim's own licentious nature. This view sees man's nature as immutable with personal renunciation and strictness offering the only counterbalances to lasciviousness. There may well be biological givens relevant to the world of emotion, but because cultural construction plays a major role, it is change which is characteristic of the history of sexual behaviour and passions rather than the repeated expressions of unvarying nature. What then of the distinction between normal and pathological jealousy? The problem is the erosion of any area of human experience corresponding to normal jealousy. In our culture jealousy is now regarded not just as problematic or undesirable, but increasinglyas unhealthy, as a symptom of immaturity, possessiveness, neurosis or insecurity. To be jealous is to be showing signs of personal, or interpersonal, instability. The symptoms of the psychiatrist are carved out of the totality of human experience by the expedient of attributing them to the causal processes of madness and disorder. This creation of symptoms from phenomena can claim both theoretical and pragmatic justifications, but even the most subtle and sophisticated of clinicians strip much of the cultural and personal meaning from an experience in metamorphosing it into a symptom. What remains of the moral resonance and heroic achievement if the despair of Kierkegaard's (1849) The Sickness Unto Death is annexed to a major depression by the criteria

of DSM—III—R or is regarded as a symptom of his personal insecurities and relationship problems? The language of symptom claims to understand what really lies behind the other's behaviour but in the process invalidates that behaviour. Our culture makes increasing use of such language to stigmatise the unacceptable. The morally reprehensible, the socially deviant, the personally disruptive, and what remains of old-fashioned evil is likely to be spoken of in the language of our age as a symptom, be it of character defect, social disintegration or develop mental disorder. This process is nothing new: one only has to think of the influence of Galen's theory of the humours to realise that biological explanations

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Paul Mullen, Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Otago, P0 Box 913, Dunedin, New Zealand

Jealousy: the pathology of passion.

P E Mullen BJP 1991, 158:593-601. Access the most recent version at DOI: 10.1192/bjp.158.5.593

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