Jealousy: Experiences and Solutions

Hildegard Baumgart

University of Chicago Press, 16/04/1990 - 356 páginas

Deeply ingrained in human nature, jealousy occurs in everyone's life, with varying intensity and significance. Profoundly puzzling, jealousy provokes humans to irrational, sometimes violent acts against others or against themselves. It is a passion that has fascinated writers, storytellers, and audiences through the ages.

Hildegard Baumgart, a practicing marriage counselor, pursues a multilayered exploration of jealousy that is at once public history, based on literary and cultural records, and private history, drawn from individual clinical cases and psychoanalytic practice. In the process she discovers provocative new answers to two central questions: How can one understand jealousy, whether one's own or another's?

Baumgart focuses on the fear of comparison with the rival that motivates much jealousy, and she shows how this idea is, in fact, built into both mythology and theology. She adroitly combines a rich array of documentation and evidence: detailed, clinical descriptions of the classic dilemmas of love triangles; a history of the concept of jealousy in the Judeo-Christian tradition; examples from the lives and writings of a fascinating gallery of authors (Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Goethe, among others); discussions of Freud's writings on jealousy and of later psychoanalytic methodologies such as systems analysis, paradoxical intervention, and communications theory.

Throughout her narrative, Baumgart writes with compassion and feeling. Drawing on her personal experience of jealousy, her own psychoanalysis, and anecdotes from her counseling work and the clinical literature at large, she presents many fascinating vignettes of the painful—sometimes crippling—effects of jealousy as seen from the standpoints of both sufferer and therapist. What is more, she offers sensitive and sensible solutions to the problem of jealousy.

Baumgart's intriguing tapestry of the varied manifestations and interpretations of jealousy gives extraordinary resonance to the case histories she describes. In providing such a panoramic view, Jealousy invites everyone—analysts, counselors, sociologists, jealous lovers, and avid readers of advice columns—to reconsider both the cultural significance and personal meaning of this universal emotion.

Índice

• My Cases and My Own Case: 1
• Jealousy as It Is Lived: 23
• The Jealous Individual: 25
• The Partner: 32
• The Rival: 38
• Normality and Justification: 44
• Destructive Solutions: 50
• Between Patriarchate and Sexual Revolution: 61
• Difficulties with the Concept of Possession: 68
• A Paradox: 71
• TraditionToward a History of the Emotion of Jealousy: 77
• On the Historicity of Emotions: 79
• The Jealous God: 82
• The Power of Emotions on Olympus: 90
• Love and Freedom: 100
• The Difficulty of Expressing Jealousy: 106
• Traditions of Love and Jealousy: 114
• Psychological Theories: 143
• Freuds Essay of 1922: 145
• Husband Wife Child: 168
• From the Triangle back to the Biangular Relationship: 199
• Guilty Individual or Multilateral Entanglement: 224
• Countermovements: 255
• Thirty Cases from Our Counseling Practice: 257
• Shock Rage Pain: 266
• A New Reality in the Relationship: 271
• Seeing Oneself Anew: 276
• The Reality of the Partner: 283
• Withdrawal from Symbiosis: 289
• Working through the Past in Marriage Counseling: 292
• Fantasy and Reality: 295
• Severed Constituents: 302
• Homosexuality?: 306
• Letting Go and Returning: 316
• New Life New Love: 321
• Laughing and Crying: 324
• The Solution of the Gods: 335
• Works Cited: 341
• Index: 351

Acerca do autor

Hildegard Baumgart has been a marriage and relationships counselor at the Ecumenical Counseling Center in Munich-Neuperlach, West Germany, since 1973. She also has a doctorate in Romance languages and literatures. In addition to Jealousy, published in German in 1985, she is the author of several articles on marriage and relationships and the editor of a collection of letters from East Germany, Briefe aus einem anderen Land (1971).

Informação bibliográfica

• Título: Jealousy: Experiences and Solutions
• Autor: Hildegard Baumgart
• Editora: University of Chicago Press, 1990
• ISBN: 0226039358, 9780226039350
• Número de páginas: 356 páginas