Morbid Jealousy: Some Clinical and Social Aspects of a Psychiatric Symptom

Morbid Jealousy and Murder

tresses were unfaithful to them. As murderers go, they were an elderly group, of average age 474 years. Unlike ordinary, jealous lovers, their attacks were nearly always upon wives, rather than upon supposed rivals. The latter, being imaginary, could never be caught in the act and were only hazily identified. As with most deluded patients, these murderers seemed driven by emotional necessity to...

Psychopathic personality; some social and psychiatric aspects.

Organic causation of morbid jealousy.

This article describes the organic contribution to morbid jealousy. Although the true prevalence of morbid jealousy is unknown, organic factors contribute significantly to its development. We present an assortment of five case histories to highlight the importance of organic causation in this phenomenon. The first two cases portray organic delusional disorder arising as an aftermath of cerebral...

Jealous love and morbid jealousy.

Jealous love and morbid jealousy, although inextricably linked, cannot be considered the same: jealous love (trait jealousy) is the behavioral and cognitive-affective precondition of morbid jealousy (state jealousy). Love is jealous when it is devoured by the desire for the exclusive and total possession of the partner, whose unconditional and continued presence is avidly requested. This type o...

Morbid jealousy from an evolutionary psychological perspective

Individuals diagnosed with morbid jealousy have hypersensitive jealousy mechanisms that cause them to have irrational thoughts about their partner's fidelity and to exhibit extreme behaviors. Using a newly constructed database of 398 cases of morbid jealousy reported in the literature from 1940 to 2002, we tested four evolutionarily informed hypotheses about normally functioning jealousy mechan...