Romantic Jealousy: Causes, Symptoms, Cures by Ayala Malach Pines Page A

his mother's infidelity is enormous, and so is his need to undo the trauma. I low does he accomplish this? One way is to marry someone who will never be unfaithful, and then continuously harass her with groundless accusations of infidelity. For these men, the faithful wife represents Mother, the way she should have been in their childhood fantasies. He accuses the wife of being unfaithful, the way his mother was in reality. The accusations enable him to replay his childhood trauma, but with a different ending. His wife's repeated assurances of her fidelity are supposed to help undo the terrible reality of' his mother's betrayal. Yet no reassurance is quite enough because the trauma was enormous, the wife is not the mother, and the situation is not really the same.
    This helps explain why people with delusional jealousy avoid situations that might provide positive proof of' their suspicions. They don't really want to believe that their mates have been unfaithful. On the contrary, they want to be convinced that unlike their fathers, and unlike the childhood situation, this time they are "number one" with their faithful mates.
    Choosing a faithful wife and harassing her with groundless accusations is one way a man tries to overcome a trauma of his mother's betrayal. Another way is to choose an unfaithful mate who will provide ample opportunities to master the childhood trauma. In this case the jealousy is not delusional; it derives from an actual situation. Yet it is still not under complete control of the conscious ego. It represents a "repetition compulsion," an irrational need to replicate a traumatic experience. In such a case the adult seeks situations in which he or she seems to master repressed conflicts and traumas of childhood, even while the true conflicts remain repressed.
    Not all people suffering from delusional jealousy have a parent who was sexually unfaithful during their adolescence. Another cause, in my experience, is a perceived threat to the relationship that is projected on the partner, but has other causes. An example is a woman who was convinced that her loving husband had an affair with his secretary. I ler jealousy was groundless. It started after a series of terrible losses that included the death of one of her twin boys from (-ancer, followed by the death of her mother and of an older sister who raised her. (The mother, who had twelve kids, did not have much time for her.) What seemed to have triggered the jealousy was another sister's painful discovery that her husband had been unfaithful. The woman's childhood experiences as the tenth child in a poor family with an overworked and overburdened mother did not give her enough security in her own loveability. The losses she experienced made her feel even more dependent on her husband's love. The thought that she could loose him was terrifying. No assurance of his love was enough to calm her anxiety. She felt that if she were to loose him (like she lost her child, her mother, her sister) she would die. With the influence of her sister's painful experience of betrayal, her fear of abandonment took the shape of delusional jealousy.
    Another antecedent of delusional jealousy reported in the litera- lure is either undergratificaIion or overgratification by parents during the earliest stages of' life-both of which leave the person in chronic need of self-aggrandizing love from others and suspicious of rivals. In clinical terms: narcissism. Such people enter relationships to bolster their self-esteem. When doing so they unconsciously relive their childhoods.2
    In men, another cause of delusional jealousy is real or imagined smallness of the penis. Clinical work with men who suffer from this problem suggests that they feel at a disadvantage to other men in the struggle to obtain and hold a mate. Their feelings of inadequacy-which are also common among impotent husbands, elderly husbands married to young wives, and plain spouses wedded to handsome ones-pave the