by Frank Tallis
Anita might well have been a good judge of character, but this didn’t mean that she had special powers. Nor did it mean that her fantasies had any significance. False inferences inevitably lead to false conclusions.
I was still unclear about what Anita thought was really happening when she couldn’t locate Greg.
‘Do you believe that Greg is having an affair?’ I asked.
‘He could be,’ she responded.
’That’s the answer to another question.’
She crossed her legs and seemed distracted by the long, pointed heel of her boot. She reached out and touched it—almost a caress. ‘Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t.’
Jealous protagonists appear in all literary traditions. Euripides’ Medea poisons her rival and slaughters her own children; Shakespeare’s Othello smothers Desdemona; and Tolstoy’s Pozdnyshev despatches his wife with a dagger thrust beneath her ribs. These depictions reflect a grim reality. Estimates vary according to time and place, but broadly speaking the murder of partners and former partners accounts for approximately one in ten of all murders worldwide. The motivation for such murders is predominantly proven or suspected infidelity. Men are more likely to kill women, but women also kill men—albeit in very much smaller numbers. About a third of women who are murdered around the globe are killed by their husbands or boyfriends—often stabbed or beaten to death. A woman is statistically much safer getting into bed with a total stranger than with someone she knows. Although jealousy arises along a spectrum of severity, even mild forms can be explosive.
Throughout the course of the twentieth century, Anita might have attracted any of the following diagnostic labels: Othello syndrome, erotic jealousy syndrome, morbid jealousy, psychotic jealousy, paranoid jealousy, obsessional jealousy and delusional jealousy. Today, these terms have been superseded by Delusional Disorder: Jealous Type—which makes pathological jealousy a close relation of de Clérambault’s syndrome (now designated Delusional Disorder: Erotomanic Type).
Whereas the defining feature of de Clérambault’s syndrome is a delusion of love, the defining feature of Delusional Disorder: Jealous Type is a delusion of infidelity. The same drugs are prescribed for both conditions, suggesting common neurochemical pathways. There may also be further overlap insofar as pathological jealousy, like de Clérambault’s syndrome, has been linked with damage located on the right side of the brain. The two conditions have behavioural similarities. Both types of patient will stalk, although for quite different reasons. A de Clérambault patient does so because he or she cannot tolerate separation, whereas the pathologically jealous do so in order to spy; both have strong intuitions and treatment outcomes are generally poor.
I mentioned to Anita that some of my patients found it easier to control their jealous thoughts when given medication. She was extremely resistant to the idea because she had suffered bad side-effects after taking Prozac; however, there was also another reason. ‘Taking pills made me feel different, a bit dead inside. It was really weird, I don’t know if I’m imagining this, but they seemed to interfere with my ability to work. I’d walk into a room and nothing would come into my head—you know, colour schemes, textures, materials… Usually, I get lots of ideas.’ This was a complaint I’d heard many times before from patients whose professions required the exercise of an artistic gift. There is a school of thought that mood disturbance, particularly oscillating mood disturbance, promotes creativity. The lifetime prevalence of mood disorders in writers, for example, is significantly greater than in non-writers matched for age, sex and education. Mood swings might plausibly underpin optimally productive cycles of reflective melancholy followed by enabling surges of energy. The artificial stabilisation of mood by chemical means would negate this effect.
Anita had had relatively few sexual partners. She was—in her words—‘quite fussy’. On every occasion when she had permitted lovers to get close, she had been overwhelmed by a sense of her own vulnerability. When she talked of feeling exposed, I noticed that her voice lost strength, particularly at the end of sentences—trailing off into breathlessness. It happens when people are frightened or anxious. The effect was to make her sound like a child.
The idea that we all carry within us a sub-personality, a remnant of who we once were, has its origins in the analytical psychology of Carl Gustav Jung. In 1934 he wrote: ‘For in every adult there lurks a child—an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education.’ Jung’s precept was subsequently borrowed and reworked by numerous practitioners, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, and it has since been enthusiastically endorsed by pop-psychologists who frequently exhort us to love our ‘inner child’. Overuse and sentimentality have undoubtedly devalued the concept; nevertheless, it is a serviceable way of thinking about how the mind works. Emotions or situations that remind us of significant moments in infancy activate dormant memories and we feel like a child again.
I fancied that I’d heard the voice of Anita’s inner child: a little girl, hiding behind drawn curtains, peeking through the gap. I could have encouraged her to step out, but I was apprehensive. She might get scared, run away and never come back again.
You can tell a great deal about a couple by observing where and how they sit. All too often, I saw couples who, on entering my consulting room, would choose to sit at opposite ends of the sofa. It was as though they were surrounded by mutually repelling force fields. When seated, they would lean away from each other or sit at oblique angles so that they were almost back to back. Sometimes, I would ask them to sit closer and they would oblige. But by the end of the session they had usually edged apart again. All of them had expressed a wish to save their relationships, but their words were never quite as informative as their body language.
Anita and Greg appeared to be comfortable with closeness. They sat side by side, sometimes touching.
The role of a psychotherapist conducting couples therapy has much in common with that of a referee or adjudicator. It’s surprising how difficult it is for couples to agree on even the basic things—such as who said what and when. The same event is remembered quite differently. They make inferences on the basis of little evidence and are frequently wrong; they act as if they can read each other’s minds and reach erroneous conclusions that are then treated as indisputable facts. This can be very frustrating. In therapy sessions, couples become irritable and talk over each other. Highly dysfunctional couples will start trading insults. On many occasions I’ve been forced to raise my voice and bark commands to get them to stop.
Anita and Greg were bickering, rather than arguing.
‘I don’t know what more I can do,’ said Greg. ‘I let you know where I am and I tell you who I’m with.’
‘Do you?’ Anita asked.
‘Yes.’
‘That’s just not right, is it? You came home late on Tuesday. And you didn’t text.’
‘Oh come on, Anita. Please. That was because of exceptional circumstances.’ Greg looked at me and made an impatient gesture. ‘There was a crisis at work. I had to attend an emergency meeting. I didn’t have the time.’
‘How long does it take to text?’ Anita cut in.
‘I just couldn’t,’ Greg replied.
‘You promised.’
‘Anita,’ I said, raising my arm to get her attention. ‘What did Greg promise, exactly?’
‘That he’d text—always.’
‘That’s true,’ Greg admitted. ‘I did say that, but what you don’t seem to appreciate, Anita, is that sometimes—with the best will in the world…’ His plea became an exhalation articulated by lips that opened and closed without producing any more words. He had lost the will to continue mid-sentence.
I addressed Anita again: ‘Do you doubt that there was a crisis?’
‘She knows what happened,’ Greg said. ‘I’ve shown her my e-mails—and I’ll show you too if you like. It was a serious situation and I had to deal with it there an
d then.’
‘Anita?’ I prompted.
‘It would have taken him a few seconds.’
‘People sometimes forget things when they’re stressed…’
‘Not important things.’
‘Is that what Greg’s oversight means? That you’re not important to him?’
‘That’s what it feels like.’
‘Which must be very upsetting. But I’m asking you now for a considered answer. Do you really believe that because Greg didn’t text you, on this particular occasion, that you’re not important to him?’
I was trying to get her to stop and reflect, to acknowledge the possibility that some of her thoughts might have become automatic, examples of what cognitive therapists sometimes call thoughtless thought; however, I’d asked the question too emphatically, the stresses were wrong and I’d made her feel as if she were being cross-examined like a witness in a court of law. I had also previously referred to Greg’s failure to text her as an ‘oversight’, which suggested, perhaps, that I had already decided that his behaviour was excusable. A psychotherapist, like a writer, must use words with great care.
Anita tensed. ‘Look,’ a flush of anger reddened her cheeks. ‘Greg’s always telling me that I can rely on him. That he’s trustworthy. But I can’t even trust him to send a text.’
Couples frequently argue over things that appear entirely unimportant to others, going round and round in circles without resolving anything or getting anywhere. They are like medieval theologians, interminably debating the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. But when couples clash over seemingly minor issues it’s worth straining to hear the subtext. It’s not the argument that’s important, it’s what the argument reveals.
Greg was also getting annoyed. ‘This is ridiculous,’ he grumbled. ‘Anita, you’re getting everything completely out of proportion. I got home—what?—an hour late?’
‘An hour and ten minutes.’
‘Fine.’ Greg rolled his eyes. ‘An hour and ten minutes.’
I added a single word under my existing scrawl of notes: ‘perfectionism’. And then I underlined it.
Why do people get jealous? If you love someone you should want them to be free and happy. True love knows no bounds; it releases the soul—takes us beyond conventional limitations. The Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran, whose works are among those most frequently read at wedding ceremonies, wrote: ‘Love is the only freedom in the world because it so elevates the spirit that the laws of humanity and the phenomena of nature do not alter its course.’ These are uplifting words, but Lucretius gets much closer to the truth when he warns us that the goddess of love has sturdy fetters. We are only free to be ourselves and that isn’t very free at all.
Utopian communities have adopted ‘free love’ as a guiding principle, but virtually all of them have dwindled or collapsed on account of group members reverting to monogamy. Where polygamy is permitted, only 5 to 10 per cent of men choose to have several wives. The internet has opened up a channel of communication between young couples eager to explore a ‘polyamorous’ lifestyle, yet many of them confess that overcoming jealousy is a major obstacle. Couples who manage to maintain stable ‘open’ relationships and raise children constitute only a tiny fraction of the general population. Whenever social engineers or political visionaries have attempted to alter the structure of society, the family unit returns. Our need to privilege a single, exclusive relationship and guard it jealously is clearly hardwired.
In the ancestral environment, a thriving infant returned a healthy premium on parental investment: the survival of their genes. For mothers, the most significant threat to achieving this end was the dispersal of family resources—something likely to happen if her partner mated with another female. For fathers, the cost of a partner’s infidelity was far greater. He might squander all his resources furthering the prospects of another man’s genetic material. Jealousy is an alarm that triggers preventative manoeuvres—radar for rivals. Given that the cost of infidelity is so much greater for men, male sexual jealousy is generally more intense, which explains the marked gender asymmetry observed with respect to spousal homicide statistics.
Anita’s alarm was going off all the time.
‘When Greg was still living in his old house, I used to let myself in early so I’d have time to check.’
‘You went through his things?’
‘No…’ I waited and she returned my gaze. Horizontal lines appeared on her brow and she touched her chest as if troubled by a palpitation. ‘I used to check his bed.’
‘What were you looking for?’
‘You know… stains, hairs.’
‘Traces…’
‘Yes.’
‘And did you find any?’
‘There are always hairs in beds. I used to pick them off the sheet and hold them under a lamp…’
‘Were they the kind you were looking for?’
‘There’s always some doubt.’
‘What else did you do?’
‘I’d sniff the pillow, for perfume.’
She had been looking for a woman who wasn’t there. And no matter how many times Greg assured Anita of his innocence, she continued to look for evidence of her elusive rival with the thoroughness of a forensic scientist.
In some instances of extreme jealousy, the affected individual will continue asking questions, monitoring and checking, even after a spouse has actually confessed to being unfaithful. This suggests the existence of a neurological ‘switch’ that has become stuck. Under such circumstances, jealousy resembles obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a condition in which intrusive thoughts produce a state of anxiety and discomfort that the individual attempts to reduce by performing rituals. These rituals are compulsive and associated with strong urges that are hard to resist.
An effective treatment for OCD is exposure and response prevention. The individual is asked to tolerate discomfort in situations which create anxiety, while resisting the urge to perform ritualistic actions. Scanning studies have shown that this form of ‘behaviour therapy’ reduces activity in certain areas of the brain such as the caudate nucleus and the thalamus. These altered patterns of brain activity are almost identical to those observed when OCD patients take medication. Remarkably, biological abnormalities associated with psychopathology can be corrected through the exercise of willpower.
The majority of OCD patients treated with exposure and response prevention subsequently experience fewer intrusive thoughts, become less distressed and feel less compelled to perform rituals.
I asked Anita to resist performing her checking behaviours. Although she could resist for short periods of time she was simply unable to sustain her efforts. A disturbing image of Greg and another woman would come into her mind and her malignant suspicions would metastasize until she was consumed with jealousy and overcome by compulsive urges to resume her questions and detective work.
Almost all schools of psychotherapy agree that stresses experienced during childhood have long-term consequences for mental health. Some carry this principle to its logical extreme and assert that even pre-natal experiences are of critical importance. Foetuses evidently experience and react in the womb, sometimes prefiguring adult behaviour. Ultrasound scans show that after only twenty-seven weeks of gestation, baby boys’ penises become erect when they suck their thumbs.
I asked Anita about her childhood.
‘Mum’s an artist,’ she said, without pride. ‘Big, colourful abstracts… she’s always been very dedicated, even though she’s never sold enough work to make a proper living. She didn’t have much time for us when me and my brother were kids—fancied herself as a Bohemian—still does. Men would come and go. I was only small but I knew something was going on; I knew something wasn’t right. My mum used to make me and my brother accomplices.’ Anita’s eyes expanded and she spoke like a medium channelling an inebriated ghost: ‘Don’t tell your father.’
‘Did you keep her secret?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Anita replied. ‘Of course—but Dad found out somehow. She might even have told him herself. It was the sort of thing she would have done in the middle of an argument—for effect—she loved drama. They were always having rows, breaking up and getting back together again. My brother and I got used to being packed off to our grandparents when they were patching things up.’ Anita’s eyes misted with recollections. I sensed a curious duality, a vague impression that the adult Anita and the child Anita were suspended in a state of indeterminacy—like a quantum superposition flirting with prospective realities. ‘Eventually, Mum settled down and the men stopped coming. I can’t say why—maybe she just got too old for it all. They seem to get on well enough now, Mum and Dad. But it was difficult—back then.’
Somewhere in the building a phone started purring.
‘How do you feel about your mother?’
The purring stopped.
‘It’s difficult. She’s my mum—but she was a pretty useless parent. She just wasn’t interested. I think she found looking after children dull.’
Donald Winnicott, a luminary of British postwar psychoanalysis, asserted that the mother-child relationship is the principal safeguard against future mental illness. Indeed, he went on to argue that ultimately the selflessness of ordinary mothers makes the whole of civilisation possible. A central feature of Winnicott’s theory of emotional development is ‘holding’—a term that he employed to mean not only physical holding, but every aspect of maternal care: feeding, bathing, attending, comforting. A ‘holding environment’ makes the infant feel safe and facilitates the transition from dependence to independence. Holding is also the first experience of relating and it informs all subsequent social activity.