Talk of the Town - On jealousy June 20 2001

I remember going to couples counseling 20 years ago with a possessive mate who used to accuse me constantly of cheating. I sat smugly through the sessions while the therapist lectured my mate about the destructive nature of jealousy, how it was a defense and must be purged in the way a virus must be eliminated from the blood.

"But this is about my love!" my partner protested. "I know he's cheating!"

"No," the therapist replied, "this is about your insecurity. Even if you're right, it's beyond your control. Do you want revenge?"

I felt validated. After all, I prattled to myself, the fact that I actually am cheating is beside the point. Indeed, while I have had bouts of jealousy I certainly am not among those who feel its bilious influence routinely and turn green and scheming.

Never utter such a thought. The moment you do, the gods seize their thunderbolts. A year later when I was abandoned for another, I took to rummaging through the ex's garbage can, green with rage. One day, I lifted the garbage lid and startled an enormous rat in the act of gnawing a long-stem rose. I gasped, life having presented me such a horrific image of myself. There was I, the non-jealous one, gnawing on abandoned love, reduced to the sneaky behavior of a vile rodent.

Ever since, I've had a deep respect for jealousy (to say nothing of the power of life to hand me a mirror when I least want it).

This most inevitable feeling is the subject of this year's Myth and Theatre Festival, to be held July 25-29 in New Orleans. Under the direction of Enrique Pardo, it is a stimulating encounter between theater types and people interested in archetypal psychology and mythology.

I regard Pardo's work as the best alternative to psychotherapy I've ever encountered. Pardo is a former painter who became interested in theater in the '60s, specifically in the work of Roy Hart, a teacher of an avant-garde form of voice training. Later, Pardo, encountering the myth-drenched work of James Hillman, developed his Pantheatre, in which he often works with mythological themes and figures, like Aphrodite, goddess of love.

His work involves movement, recitation of text and music. By establishing counterpoints — between gestural activity of participants, between the manner of reciting the text and its content, between music and the general mood — images condense in the mind and performance space. Following these images until they come to rest is deeply satisfying. There is nothing to explain, just the experience of watching the psyche's movement toward a place of resolution — the goal of therapy. One difference is that the resolution in Pardo's work is contentedly temporary. It offers no cures. Instead, it offers meaning derived from beauty.

The choice of jealousy as this year's theme is timely. Humanistic psychology still tries to wish jealousy out of existence. But Freud reminds us that anything repressed returns — and Carl Jung added that the return can be outside ourselves, in a trash can or in the culture.

Thus we live in a time when jealousy has become a meta-narrative of community life. We see it in the re-enactment of Othello in the O.J. Simpson affair, in the new disorder of "stalking," and in television programs like "Survivor" and "Jerry Springer," that turn jealousy into gladiatorial sport. Interestingly, the effort by psychological culture to "de-naturalize" jealousy coincides with the popular abandonment of Freud's Oedipus Complex, psychology's foundational theory, in which the emotion is central. According to Freud, the way the child's love of one parent and its jealous hatred of the other as a rival gets resolved predicts later mental health. But Freud did not fantasize the elimination of jealousy. Instead, he said it must be accommodated, surely to arise again.

In Sophocles' drama, from which Freud drew his inspiration, it is Oedipus' inquiry into his origins, and the revelation that he has killed his father and married his mother, that brings on both peace and destruction. Freud argues that Oedipus' inquiry, which modeled the psychoanalytical inquiry as well as the content of the original complex, is inevitable since the conflict was not resolved earlier. But it is important that Oedipus never loses his rage. In fact, the manner of his death, though he asks for his daughter's loving touch, actually condemns his own sons to death. His peace and his love depend in part on revenge.

This of course, is at odds with the current notion that jealousy and love are incompatible. But it is very compatible with Enrique Pardo's way of working. He often counsels participants to ingest a "pinch of hate," in order to evoke something else. Nobody's ever run an effective intervention on Aphrodite's well known jealousy. It will be interesting to me to see how the love goddess responds if Pardo insists she confront the rat that eats the rose.

For more information on the festival, go to www.pantheatre.com.??