ABSTRACT
To experience jealousy is to experience mental torture. Jealousy feels visceral and urgent, pressing for action or relief. One literally feels torn up inside, imprisoned in a cage of longing and exclusion. Searing hot-blooded psychic pain combined with unrelenting desire feels unbearable and excruciating. Jealousy does not have the advantage of being an experience that feels noble or moral. In fact, it is quite the reverse—it feels shameful and filled with hatred. Roland Barthes (1977) describes it well:
As a jealous person, I suffer fourfold: because I am jealous, because I reproach myself for my jealousy, because I fear that my jealousy is hurting the other, because I allow myself to be enslaved by banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common. (p. 146)
