ABSTRACT
Jealousy has produced violence and aggression throughout history. "Crime of passion" has become so familiar a term that we rarely consider how paradoxical it is-passion and crime, love and death. It is the cruel paradox in which one murders the person one loves most. "Love is strong as death," says King Solomon in the Song of Songs; and Edward Young, the eighteenth-century English playwright, calls jealousy "the sevenfold of death." Shakespeare's Othello, the archetype of the jealous husband, strangles his beloved wife, Desdemona, because he suspects her of infidelity. Discovering that his suspicions were groundless, he then kills himself. Shakespeare's tragic hero inspired some psychologists to call delusional jealousy that leads to violence the "Othello syndrome." (See, as an example, Leong et al. 1994.)
of the precipitating causes.I FBI statistics indicate that approximately one third of all solved murders involve spouses, lovers, or rivals of the murderer and either a real or a suspected infidelity as a major cause.2 A wide range of hostile and bitter events has been attributed to jealousy, including murder, suicide, destruction of property, aggression, and spouse-battering.3 Stories of murder and other violent acts triggered by jealousy often appear in newspapers and magazines. The popular interest in such stories suggests that although stories about passion and stories about violence each have a certain attraction, those about passion combined with violence are particularly fascinating.
