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Jealousy: The Pathology of Passion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Paul E. Mullen
Paul E. Mullen*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Otago, PO Box 913, Dunedin, New Zealand
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Abstract

Emotions may be rooted in biology but the process of cultural construction gives those emotions form and a language for their expression. The changing construction of jealousy in Western societies has transformed a socially sanctioned response to infidelity into a form of personal pathology which is the mere outward expression of immaturity, possessiveness and insecurity. This is a history of the stripping away of social, ethical and finally interpersonal meanings from an experience, to leave it as a piece of individual psychopathology. Fidelity and jealousy are constructed as they are because of the nature of the social and economic realities which drive our culture. The erosion of the area of human experience which could be identified with normal jealousy leaves the boundary between the pathological jealousy of psychiatry and normal experience increasingly problematic.

Type
Lecture
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 158 , Issue 5 , May 1991 , pp. 593 - 601
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1991 

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