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love-object. There are other feelings involved, as anger, envy, pain, vanity, and a sense of inferiority. To compensate for the inferiority which the jealous person feels very deeply, she (or he) makes herself (or himself) extremely important in a grotesque way. When we fly into a rage, we loom big and become significant psychologically—but the significance is based on a false premise, as most primitive psychological forces are that crop out of our rather undiscriminating subconscious mind when they are not subjected to the censorship of our rational faculties.
August Forel,[1] the famous sexologist, had this to say of jealousy, which he called "a heritage of animals and barbarians": "Jealousy transforms marriage into a hell. . . . Even in its more moderate and normal form, jealousy is a torment, for distrust and suspicion poison love. We often hear of justified jealousy. I maintain that jealousy is never justified; it is always a stupid, atavistic inheritance, or else a pathological symptom."
As jealousy is a primitive emotion, based on fear, the way to overcome it, as in overcoming any primitive emotion, is by subjecting it to rational analysis. We all have a heritage of primitive emotions, possibly in widely varying degrees, but to the extent that we succeed in acting like civilized human beings, to that extent we modify and transform our primitive urges. There is no reason why the advanced thinker cannot be as far superior to the savage on the question of jealousy as he is intellectually and culturally.
The primitive emotion of jealousy, too, is subject to modification and by adopting a rational, cultural ideal, and reasoning out our problems, our emotions become correspondingly influenced. Furthermore, the fear which is behind it loses its potency when its processes are exposed to the light of
- ↑ The Sexual Question, New York.