Two Words, One Answer.
Jealousy
 Jealousy: Love's Favorite Decoy $15.95 Marcianne Blvis is a psychiatrist and Freudian psychoanalyst in Paris, but she states, "This is not a book for psychiatric professionals." (p. 9) Neither is it a self help book. It is simply a collection of stories about ten patients all suffering from various forms of jealousy. Since the patients are all treated by psychoanalysis, there is no couple or family therapy in this book. "Freud was not interested in the living family; he was interested in the family-as-remembered, locked away in the unconscious." (p. 2, Nichols and Schwartz, 1995) As Lynn Hoffman has observed, "The family movement in therapy resembles the Protestant movement in religion. It follows on the heels of a highly organized body of ideas and practice which has a well-recognized founding father, Sigmund Freud." (p. 219) Having been raised Lutheran, I remember my surprise the first time I attended a Roman Catholic mass at how similar it was to the Lutheran service. My Lutheran confirmation classes dealt with Catholicism in only a historical context, explaining what practices of the Catholic church Luther protested against, and why he left Catholicism and started another denomination. We learned about the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism rather than the similarities. Similarly, my graduate school courses in family therapy had little about Freudian theory other than the history of how family therapy has moved away from it. Reading Jealousy was a similar experience to attending that mass. It was interesting to read about someone still using the Freudian model, considered pass by most people in our field, and to see how some of its techniques underlie what family therapists do today. Blvis talks about how a certain amount of sibling jealousy can be useful. "An older sibling can envy the baby in the family who gets his way without being scolded, but he can also be proud of his independence. Jealousy in that sense helps to delineate the space that is his, and differentiates him from others." This evokes Bowenian theory, which teaches that "differentiation, the capacity for autonomous functioning, helps people avoid getting caught up in reactive polarities." (p. 371, Nichols and Schwartz) Blvis discusses how it does children good for their mother to have other interests besides her children. "She discovers that to separate from her children is part and parcel of her love and sense of responsibility toward her offspring." (p. 146) In comparing psychoanalysis in France to the way most of us do therapy, I was struck by the leisurely pace at which Blvis proceeds in doing treatment. She describes a client Carol, who spent her time in treatment obsessing over a man who was quite indifferent to her and was involved with several other women. After a year of this, she revealed to Blvis that her father had sexually abused her with her mother's consent. Being Freudian, Blvis has a lot to say about the child's sexual development. She says, "Paradoxically, the absence of common sexual space between the child and her mother or father has the same wounding effect on childhood language as an abusive intrusion," (p. 115) reminding the reader that a child can be damaged by not enough good physical contact as well as by bad physical contact with the parents. Blvis says that the jealous person doesn't realize that "the culprit is neither his lover nor his rival, but a moment in history that wrecked his hopes and damaged his trust in himself and those he loves." (p. 2) She feels that unreasonable jealousy is springs from early childhood experiences in the family, and the treatment is for the analyst to form a close enough therapeutic relationship with the client that he can express his vulnerability and craving for love in a supportive space. Dreams and symbolism are important in Freudianism, and there seems to arise a level of transference that we rarely encounter using the techniques more common in the United States. "The erotic space began to exist once we found the right distance between the fear (and desire) of being seduced-pursued by the analyst-woman-mother-cat and the fear (and desire) of being abandoned to her mother's cold and untouchable sexuality." (p. 113) There are fascinating case studies of people with weird kinds of jealousy, like Frank, who suddenly became obsessed with the woman he had broken up with when he found out she had a new lover. Jealousy is beautifully written. This quote from Jean Paul Sartre really resonated with me as I thought of how some of my clients' get caught up in jealous obsessions as a way of trying to be loved or to be distracted from depression. He compares it to drinking seawater to quench one's thirst. "It is not that I deny my thirst, rather I drink something that resembles water, but what I drink is water that is unreal and does not quench my thirst." References Blvis, M. 2009. Jealousy. New York: Other Press. Hoffman, L. 1981. Foundations of family therapy. New York: Basic Books. Nichols, M. P. & Schwartz, R. C. 1995. Family Therapy, Concepts and Methods. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.  Two Novels: Jealousy and In the Labyrinth (Robbe-Grillet, Alain) $14.50 This book contains two great books by a great author unafraid to do something completely different--a guy who could write a (good) characterless short story about an escalator, or a murder mystery that never uses the letter E, or...or..."Jealousy." Of the two novels contained in this book, "Jealousy" is by far the best. When I first read "Jealousy," I had never read anything else like it--because there is nothing else like it. For starters, the book is written in first person, yet it never uses the words I, me, my, mine, we, our, or us, or any other first person posessives. When it's time for dinner, instead of saying, "And now we sit down to eat," the author says something like "And now it is time for dinner," and he describes there being three plates, and mentions two other people eating. Also, the book is incredibly precise in its details. It names every tree in a bananna forest, spends pages describing a woman brushing her hair, and meticulously records where every shadow in every corner of every room falls, to the point that if he hasn't yet described a part of a room, you wonder, "Well, what's in THAT corner?" As a result of this unique perspective, and of the author's close attention to detail, the reader forgets the story is in first person at all, and grows to trust the book as an exact, almost scientific account of everything going on. But, what's going on isn't science--it's an affair. It's the narrator's wife having an affair with a neighbor, in a hot, foreign, plantation-style setting. As the narrator gets more suspicious and prejudiced, so does the reader. As the narrator gets more distrustful and angry, so do you. This book is brilliant--it's French experimentalism at its best. It explores themes of love and identity and jealousy and reality (despite its author claiming he wants the reader not to find any intended symbolism in it, but only to observe it as one would real life). It's antilinear and unconventional, and explores several dark motifs, such as a squashed centipede on a wall that seems more and more violent with every mention, and with every moment passed in the narrator's growing rage and paranoia. The second book in this collection is "In the Labyrinth," and it's good as well, though not as instantly gripping or startlingly original. It tells the story of a wounded soldier wandering through the maze of a wartime city's streets, anxious to deliver an important package. It's not as wonderful or as haunting as "Jealousy" is, but it's a good novel nonetheless, and it'll stay with you. At times both of these books are hard to read, but they're always worth it, and they're always genius. Especially "Jealousy." Buy it, but it, buy it, buy it. Your mind will never be the same again.  Jealousy $14.00 I really did not know what to expect when I ordered this book, but it went beyond what I could have expected. This books has so much drama it leaves you breathless at the end. The characters all took on a life form and kept me entertained from beginning to end! Marsha D. Jenkins-Sanders you have a hit on your hands! |
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