Lacanian Perspectives on Jealousy

A great effort has been made in contemporary Western culture to move beyond jealousy in our private lives - we have renegotiated old prohibitions, reorganising our sex lives, relationships, and family structures in new and inventive ways. But have we really been so successful at bearing the knowledge that, at a certain point, others’ desires belong only to them? This collection takes the temperature of jealousy today – how does it show up in the clinic? Does this differ from how it used to? What can be said of how jealousy functions both psychically and socially?

Clinicians and writers working from within a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework explore the concept and unpack not only its numerous guises and forms, but its founding effects on the levels of both the individual and the social. The question as to where jealousy is located today leads to a deeper look at the feeling’s origins: its close relation to identification and with envy, its interaction with early infantile complexes, its constant interplay with the social realm and its systems of governance, and its complex expression of ambivalence towards the maternal.

This book is for anyone interested in psychoanalysis, be they readers or historians of psychoanalysis, or clinicians looking for ways to approach jealousy in their practice. It is also for anyone who knows what it is to suffer jealousy, which if Freud was right, is most of us.