ABSTRACT
Recall the worst experience of jealousy you have ever had, and ask yourself exactly what it is you were feeling on that occasion and what, if anything, your susceptibility to this emotion revealed about you. Was your emotion basically just an intense experience of indescribable anguish, revealing nothing more than the fact that, like most of us, you feel psychic pain when certain things do not go the way you want them to go? Or is it possible to describe a bit more perspicuously exactly what this experience involved and exactly what it did or did not reveal about you as a person? Was the anguish essentially a matter of fear, for example, mixed with anger, as some writers would say, or was it more a matter of grief, as Freud claimed, with an admixture of pain and anger because of the “narcissistic wound” that was involved? 1 And was there a “wound” of some sort, or is this really a bit too dramatic, even for an emotion most of us are none too anxious to experience if it is at all possible to avoid it? And, again, whatever the answer to these questions, what does your having been capable of being “pained” (if not in fact wounded) in this way reveal about you, at least as you were then? Did it, as we just imagined, simply show that it hurts to lose (or think you have lost) something or someone you dearly wanted not to lose? Or is it possible that it revealed something rather more unattractive about you—that, for example, you are, or were, in some important sense still at an essentially infantile stage of psychological development? Or that you are, or were, clearly a person who thought of at least some one other person as a “thing” that “belonged” to you, like property, not to be tampered with by others, at least without your permission?
