"I was once summoned to visit a lady who was represented as being very ill. On my arrival I was shown to the so-called sick-room, where three persons were present--an old lady, her daughter, and the daughter's husband. All of them seemed in good health. When I inquired which was my patient, there was silence for a moment. Then the daughter said:
"'I am the patient, and my complaint is jealousy. I am jealous of my husband, and if you do not give me something to relieve me I shall go out of my mind.'
"This, on the face of it, seemed preposterous. She was a tall, fair, beautiful woman of about thirty. The husband, on the contrary, was several years older, a short, swarthy, plain man. It seemed to me more reasonable to suppose that he might have cause to be jealous of his wife, rather than she of him. But she persisted in her statement, and declared that she had good reason to feel jealous.
"The husband insisted he had done nothing to justify her jealousy. She reasserted he had. In the midst of an outburst, distressing to listen to, she fell into a queer fit. With rhythmic regularity, she went through various spasmodic convulsions. At one moment she would stand at full length, her body arched forward. The next instant she was in a sitting position, with her legs drawn up, her hands clutching her throat, and a guttural noise coming from her mouth. Then she would wildly throw her arms and legs around; after which she would rise to go through the same performance.
"It was necessary to give her a drug to quiet her. I learned that she had been subject to these attacks ever since she began to feel jealous of her husband. Inquiring more closely, I found that, quite without reason, she was specifically jealous of him in connection with a certain woman in the small town where he carried on his business. Thereupon I advised him, for the sake of her health and his own peace of mind, to remove to another town. This having been done, her jealousy abated and the convulsive seizures ceased."
Of course, this mode of treatment--if treatment it should be called--gave no guarantee that the jealousy and the consequent convulsions would not recur under other circumstances. What the jealous wife really needed was psychical re-education to give her a saner philosophy of life, enabling her to get a better grip on her emotions, and, through this, to control better the workings of her nervous system. Here we touch on what is far and away the most important fact in the problem of jealousy--a fact unappreciated by too many parents, and, for that matter, likewise unappreciated by most writers on the pedagogy of childhood.