"There is no doubt," Ferenczi writes, "that this was a case of
alcoholic delusion of jealousy. The conspicuous feature of his
homosexual attachment to me, however, allows the interpretation that
the jealousy he felt of every man, was only the projection of his own
desires for the male sex. Also, his lack of desire for his wife was not
simply impotence but was determined by his unconscious homosexuality.
"To him alcohol played the part of an inhibition-poison and brought to
the surface his crude homosexual erotism, which, as it was intolerable
to his consciousness, he imputed to his wife.
"It was only subsequently that I found a complete confirmation of this.
He had been married before, years ago. He lived only a short time in
peace with his first wife, began to drink soon after the wedding and
abused his wife, tormenting her with scenes of jealousy until she left
him and secured a divorce.
"In the interval between his two marriages, he was said to have been
a temperate, reliable and steady man and to have taken to drink only
after his second marriage. Alcoholism was not the deeper cause of his
paranoia; it was rather that, in the insoluble conflict between his
conscious heterosexual and his unconscious homosexual desires, he took
to alcohol, which brought the homosexual erotism to the surface, his
consciousness getting rid of it by way of projection, of delusions of
jealousy. He saddled his wife with his desires and by jealous scenes
assured himself that he was in love with her."
=A Jealous Wife.= The other case is that of a woman, still young, who
after living in harmony with her husband for a number of years and
bearing him daughters, began to suffer from violent fits of jealousy
soon after the birth of another child, a boy. Alcoholism played no part
in this case.
She suspected every move her husband made. She dismissed maid after
maid and finally had only male servants in the house. Curiously enough,
her jealousy was directed against very young and very old, even very
ugly women, while she was not jealous of her society friends or of the
pretty women whom she and her husband occasionally met. Her conduct
at home became so unbearable and her threats so dangerous that she
was taken to a sanatorium upon Freud's advice. After which Ferenczi
proceeded to analyse her.
She harbored many delusions of greatness and ideas of reference. She
thought she found in the local paper veiled allusions to her depravity
and to her ridiculous position as a betrayed wife. The highest
personalities in the land were banded against her, etc.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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