It is not always the sort of love that flares up frequently in jealous outburst, sexual or egotistical, which is the deepest. I know of a case in which a husband repressed entirely his anger and desire for vengeance when his wife left him to live with another man. A clever psychologist, he realized that lack of opposition to her plans would kill the romance of his wife's rash step. He also knew that any violence to which he might submit her lover would crown him with the halo of martyrdom. He wrote to her: "I shall not interfere with your adventure, for uninterrupted intimacy will soon cause you to tire of each other. Nor will I shoot him for I would thereby transform him in your mind into a hero." Eventually, the "erring" wife returned to her home.
One form of jealousy which has absolutely nothing to do with love in the normal sense of the word, and one which not infrequently leads to acts of violence, to the "love tragedies" of newspaper headlines, is simply one of the first symptoms of paranoia.
=In Delusional Jealousy=, the patient suffering repressed homosexual cravings, projects his own desires into the personality of his life mate. An unconsciously homosexual husband, attracted sexually by every man in his environment, assumes that his wife is also subject to the same attraction and suspects her of having sexual relations with every man who arouses him. An unconsciously homosexual wife imagines that her husband has a liaison with every woman who appeals to her perverse fancies.
The paranoiac being at times very clever and convincing, that form of jealousy, insane as it may appear to the man or the woman who is the victim of it, may deceive the outsiders. In certain cases, the delusional character of it is obvious to everybody, including the jealous person.
A paranoiac told me that every night he "saw" a man entering his wife's bedroom thru a window protected by solid iron bars so close to one another that a cat could have squeezed thru them only with difficulty.
This was, of course, a case of hallucination, pure and simple.
=Homosexualism.= Other cases are more complicated. Dr. S. Ferenczi, of Budapest, reports two of them which illustrate well the mechanism of insane jealousy due to unconscious homosexualism.