Freedom Captured by the Green-Eyed Monster Some Existential Perspectives on Romantic Jealousy

Abstract

This paper undertakes an exploration of romantic jealousy from an existential perspective, taking the material of two of the author’s clients, Nico and Chloe, as illustrative examples. The author makes her primary focus the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and his ideas concerning the capture of the Other’s freedom; she also considers jealousy briefly in relation to the existential concepts of fidelity, shame, temporality and engulfment of the self, drawing on the work of Gabriel Marcel, R.D. Laing and Maurice Merleau-Ponty; finally reflecting on the implications for us as existential therapists working with romantic jealousy as a presenting issue. The paper seeks to demonstrate that romantic jealousy, which has perhaps been dismissed alongside other emotions as being an ontic experience, in fact contains deep undercurrents of ontological significance. Key words jealousy, possessiveness, freedom, existential, love, the other