ABSTRACT
Within schools of psychoanalytic thought, jealousy is described as either a delusion or normal and inherent in all people. Either way, it is a dysfunction that everyone is confronted with in their lives and can resist or succumb to it. Because we all identify with this problem, films about jealousy, even if they are badly acted or made, will usually resonate in some way with viewers. Most good films about jealousy portray it as an irresistible force. Owing to this narrative purpose, viewers can see characters act in ways they might not in real life and even take a guilty pleasure in watching the characters being affected by situations and consequences that they themselves would not get into. Four films are covered here for the complex and interesting methods and results of the way they tackle the subject. Several schools of thought have impressions of what jealousy is, but most take the view of Klein (1957) in that jealousy is based on 132envy (a relation between two people) yet involves a relation between three or more people, where the jealous person feels deprived of the second person by the third person. They can show up together frequently as situations become more complex. These phenomena are believed to be rooted in unresolved childhood trauma. Kaplan and Saddock (1985) define jealousy as something every child suffers from when a third person (father or sibling) intrudes between the self and the mother. The occurrence of pathological jealousy in adult life is related to the lack of resolution of this early childhood attachment.
