Can we not be jealous?
Freud was the first to say it: “Jealousy is, like mourning, a normal affect. If it is lacking, it is because it has been the object of a powerful repression. It then plays an even greater role in the unconscious. "Antoine, 33, claims to no longer be jealous because he would have been" once and for all in his childhood ": eldest of a family of five brothers, he felt abandoned from the birth of the second. . " Jealousy ? Today I know how to spot it and oppose it with an unstoppable counter-offensive: indifference. As soon as a woman I care about tries to make me feel like this, I feel numb and frozen. She no longer interests me. I immediately stop loving her: I despise her. "

If Antoine has the impression of not being jealous, isn't it precisely because he is terribly so? If he represses his jealousy, wouldn't it be because he unconsciously knows that he would have less strength than others to endure it? Still, he didn't defeat her, but turned her into cold hatred.

When do we fall into the pathological?
“If it is legitimate, during one's life, to go through one or more conflicts engendered by jealousy, estimates Catherine Anthony, psychosociologist and author of Love today, Le Recherches Midi, 1998., we must alarm not to manage to leave this state of jealousy. For example, not succeeding in extricating yourself from a conspicuously unfaithful partner, or imagining, mistakenly and obsessively, being cheated by your spouse. To the point of thinking only of that, losing his job, his friends ... In extreme cases, hysterical or paranoid psychosis is not far away, threatening the psychological integrity of the person and possibly, at worst , lead her to murder or suicide. "

Can she hide a homosexual desire?
There is a form of jealousy, close to paranoia, which Freud qualified as "delusional". In this case, the one we want is not the partner, it is the (or) rival. If I am a woman, for example, I have an unconscious attraction to my husband's mistress. And what bothers me is that this one loves my husband rather than me. In a nutshell, delusional jealousy is the expression of a repressed homosexual desire. Céline's experience gives us a perfect illustration of this: “I lived for three years with Bernard, whom I left because of his profession: he was a midwife gynecologist. I couldn't stand him seeing female sexes all day long. At first I found it hard to believe that he remained as unfazed as he claimed to be, but I managed to control myself. And then I replaced his secretary for five days. For the first time, I saw the waiting room. “Not bad this tall blonde!” “Rather pretty, the redhead!” In the evening, I bombarded Bernard with questions. From that moment, when we made love, I was obsessed with the idea that his desire was not for me but for them. I imagined their breasts, their buttocks ... It was excruciating ...

How is jealousy different from envy?
Some are jealous only in love, others only at work… But in the professional context, we will speak more of “envy”. Jealousy is “the fear of losing what you have”. Whereas envy is “the pain of seeing someone else have what you want for yourself”. On the other hand, jealousy involves a rival third party, while envy involves a one-person relationship. But these two feelings are intimately linked. Doesn't the word “jealousy” come from the ancient Greek zelos, which means “envy”.

What kind of rival are we afraid of?
It happens that only a certain type of rival inspires us with jealousy:

Twin rival
Marc lived with a woman who had multiple relationships while he was faithful. It didn't bother him at all… as long as his rivals didn't look like him: “It was a very different relationship from the one I had with me, they didn't threaten me. But one day another man, closer to me, came into her life. And there, I suffered a lot. "" Marc enjoys a great narcissistic basis, notes Jean-Pierre Winter. He is convinced that no one is better than him. Now the rival appears here as a double which he supposes to be more perfect than himself and which threatens to take his place. Hence the explosion of his jealousy. "