Jealousy, Femininity and Desire: A Lacanian Reading

THE PALGRAVE LACAN SERIES
SERIES EDITORS: CALUM NEILL · DEREK HOOK
Jealousy, Femininity
and Desire
A Lacanian Reading
Dana Tor-ZilbersTein
The Palgrave Lacan Series
Series Editors
Calum Neill
Edinburgh Napier University
Edinburgh, UK
Derek Hook
Duquesne University
Pittsburgh, USA
Jacques Lacan is one of the most important and influential thinkers of
the 20th century. The reach of this influence continues to grow as we
settle into the 21st century, the resonance of Lacan’s thought arguably
only beginning now to be properly felt, both in terms of its application
to clinical matters and in its application to a range of human activities
and interests. The Palgrave Lacan Series is a book series for the best new
writing in the Lacanian field, giving voice to the leading writers of a new
generation of Lacanian thought. The series will comprise original mono-
graphs and thematic, multi-authored collections. The books in the series
will explore aspects of Lacan’s theory from new perspectives and with
original insights. There will be books focused on particular areas of or
issues in clinical work. There will be books focused on applying Lacanian
theory to areas and issues beyond the clinic, to matters of society, politics,
the arts and culture. Each book, whatever its particular concern, will
work to expand our understanding of Lacan’s theory and its value in the
21st century.
Dana Tor-Zilberstein
Jealousy, Femininity
and Desire
A Lacanian Reading
Tel Aviv, Israel
ISSN 2946-4196 ISSN 2946-420X (electronic)

The Palgrave Lacan Series
ISBN 978-3-031-46470-6 ISBN 978-3-031-46471-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations,
recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or
information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar
methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Paper in this product is recyclable.

To Ilan.
Preface
Jealousy always intrigued and attracted me. I saw it everywhere, especially

among women, and in my relations with them. Like blazing fire, some-
times cunning and deceitful, at other times the only one who speaks the
truth, jealousy captured for me a primordial real that cannot be ignored,
a spark that must be recognized because it may turn into a bright light
but can also ignite a fire.
I have always felt that jealousy condenses something else, proba-
bly because it contains the never-ending and unbearable “more,” the
Lacanian encore that dwells in the body (en-corps) and which is involved
in relentless feminine sexuality. But it was only when the message came
back from the other, when the other was jealous, that I decided to start
investigating this emotion: firstly, in my MA thesis, and then in my anal-
ysis. For me, writing and publishing this book, which became possible
only after years of work and training in psychoanalysis, is the release of a
particle of jealousy and femininity into the world.
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan coined the term désir, expressing
a desire (love) that is beyond passion, but one that is not unrelated to it.
This is what directs the Lacanian analyst in his action. The sinthome, also
a term coined by Lacan, is the reformulation of the symptom from which
the subject suffers, whether through analysis or through singular know-
how, which allows him to transform his symptom into something else
and thus also to tie together the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real
vii
viii Preface
body. I found Lacan’s formulations of desire to be, in more ways than

one, the cause of this work, which seeks a kernel of desire within the
destructive character of jealousy, or as a means out of it.
My introduction with Olivia Shakespear was initiated by my love for
English poet William Butler Yeats. I have searched, without knowing
what I was looking for, for something beyond him—his inspiration, per-
haps. That is how I discovered Shakespear, his muse, his eternal lover, and
a rare writer. Shakespear’s work was written at the end of the nineteenth
century and was republished only several years ago in the United States.
Marguerite Duras holds a special place in my heart, for I began to walk
the paths of psychoanalysis along with reading her story of Le ravissement
de Lol V. Stein (The Ravishing of Lol Stein) and was captivated and rav-
ished by her writing. That was even before I knew that Lacan had written
a special article about her and before I encountered the work of Michèle
Montrelay, a French psychoanalyst and Lacan’s student, who dedicated
the first chapter of her book, L’Ombre et le Nom: Sur la féminité (The
Shadow and the Name: On Femininity), to Duras. It turned out that in
this matter I was definitely not alone. It just so happened that, along with
reading The Ravishing of Lol Stein, I came to read Lacan’s twenty-third
seminar, Le sinthome, which was also the first seminar of Lacan I have
read from start to finish. I read this text without knowing (and without
understanding), which allowed me to read Duras differently and to begin
to formulate something for myself of my own symptom and maybe even
sinthome. Reading Duras’ L’Amant (The Lover) opened a new gate for me
to research writing as a work of the body. This book is the product of that
work which began many years ago.
I would like to thank my thesis advisor in Tel Aviv University, Dr. Roi
Tartakovsky, for his ardent willingness to guide me throughout my writ-
ing process. I was lucky to receive his diligent and attentive advice.
I would also like to give a very special thanks to Prof. Shirley Zisser for
her guidance and support, and mostly for her transmission of the myste-
rious knowledge of psychoanalysis, from which I have learned how to
read and listen to the unconscious. The path of desire in which my book
partakes would not have been possible without her.
Preface ix
I would like to thank my friends and family, who have contributed to

this book in many ways, and mostly for their loving support, which, even
if it was divided at times, was always precious. And lastly, to the dear
women I have encountered in my life, all of whom inspired this book,
each in her own unique fashion.
Contents
1 I ntroduction 1
2 What Is Jealousy? Jealousy and Envy from Aristotle to Today 9
3 Drive Jealousies in the Development of the Subject 21
4 Two
Instances of Jealousy in Beauty’s Hour and in the
Mirror Stage 33
5 Two
Types of Jealousy—Phallic Jealousy and Feminine
Jealousy 49
6 Jealousy
and Identification—Dora and the Young
Homosexual Woman 61
7 Jealousy
Among Men: Schreber’s Delusional Jealousy and
Little Hans’ Feminine Jealousy 71
8 Ravissement and Jealousy Without Pain 81
xi
xii Contents
9 The Lover: The Writing of Feminine Jealousy 99
I ndex115
About the Author
Dana Tor-Zilberstein Dana practices psychoanalysis in Tel Aviv, Israel.

She is a MA graduate of the department of English at Tel Aviv University,
where she also graduated in law. She is a member of the editorial team of
the magazine Et Lacan published by the Giep-NLS, the Israeli group of
the New Lacanian School. She had translated into Hebrew several works
in the psychoanalytic field. Her publications in English include “The
Oresteia and the Act of Revenge: of Desire and Jouissance,” (2002).
xiii
1
Introduction
Abstract Jealousy, this affect that is so common both in literature and

life, was described by Sigmund Freud as prevalent from birth through the
period of infantile sexuality, the girl's pre-Oedipal phase, the Oedipus
complex, and its dissolution. It has been criticized by feminists and
thought of by philosophers, literary critics, and psychoanalysts. This
chapter provides some necessary introduction for the deviant topic of this
book, the theoretical footings and logic for the book’s insights, and the
background for the literary works at the core of its analysis.
Keywords Jealousy • Envy • Freud • Lacan • Psychoanalysis •

Femininity • Women
Jealousy and Envy, these hostile affects that are common in literature as
well as in life, were described by Sigmund Freud as prevalent from birth,
through the period of infantile sexuality, the girl’s pre-Oedipal phase, the
Oedipus complex, and its dissolution. The strong presence of this affect
explains why it sometimes remains so dominant in a subject’s adult life as
a living remnant of one’s history.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 1

D. Tor-Zilberstein, Jealousy, Femininity and Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3_1
2 D. Tor-Zilberstein
Sigmund Freud, the man whose wish was to “find out what women
want,”1 invented or discovered psychoanalysis through the not-so-simple
task of listening to his patients, most of them women who were called
“hysterics” at the time and who were dismissed by other doctors. Jacques
Lacan declared in the 1950s a “return to Freud,” and dedicated his life
and work to reestablish Freudian psychoanalysis and to continue devel-
oping it, after it was misinterpreted, in his opinion, by the Ego Psychology
movement and those who referred to themselves as post-Freudians. The
psychoanalysis that was formulated by Freud, Jacques Lacan, and their
followers is mostly based on clinical cases, but in addition to learning
from their analysands, both Freud and Lacan turned to authors and poets
to learn more about the subject and the unconscious. Both impregnated
their oeuvre by reading and analyzing Greek mythology, Shakespearean
plays, books and masses written by Thomas Aquinas, Goethe, Balzac,
Duras, and other prolific writers from different historical periods. By put-
ting writers as subjects-supposed-to-know, psychoanalysis seeks to learn
from literature.
Reading the artworks of Olivia Shakespear and Marguerite Duras, I,
too, wish to lend my ear to the unconscious of the woman writer, learn-
ing from her about the subject. Written by language, literature pro-
nounces the truth of the subject who wrote it, that is, her phantasm,
which conceals something of the real for this subject. Therefore, this so-
called truth may teach us about unconscious mechanisms.
The primary, belligerent passion of jealousy is often described in philo-
sophical thinking, literary criticism, and other historical writings and
treaties as deleterious, immoral, even devilish. This work will revisit some
historical interpretations of the signifiers “jealousy” and “envy” to begin
their exploration. However, it is hard to find intellectual and literary dis-
cussions referring to jealousy or envy displayed by women, or, specifically
the type of jealousy this book will refer to as feminine. This book aims to
bring back jealousy into discussion, especially when it is displayed
by women.
The journey begins with thinkers from the dawn of history who tried
to conceptualize jealousy and envy. In this overview of historic
1
Jones (1955).
1 Introduction 3
philosophical reflection, I will present fragments of theories conceived by

thinkers from Ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and modern times so as
to provide an idea of how these emotions were interpreted and conceptu-
alized throughout history. Specifically, I will ask why two terms were
given to designate this emotion and if there is a difference between them
when considering their psychic mechanisms. This chapter testifies to the
abundance of philosophic stutter that tries to purify two separate defini-
tions for jealousy and envy and their mechanisms, with an aim of recon-
ceptualizing them in psychoanalytical terms that share a logical
consistency.
My parashoot is psychoanalysis, as it has been since my first encounter
with it. The writings of Freud relating to jealousy and envy tie an insepa-
rable bond between them and the subject’s primal oral impulse. Freud has
written plentifully about jealousy and envy, yet interestingly, he did so
mainly in his articles on femininity. It is from these writings that this
book articulates and characterizes jealousy in early infancy and in the
development of the subject. It is worth noting, however, that Freud chose
to write an exclusive article about jealousy in relation to homosexuality
and paranoiac men, which serves as another depiction of the inherent
connection between jealousy and femininity.2
The first step in my psychoanalytical exploration treads through Lacan’s
well-known essay, The Mirror Stage. Lacan recognized the fascination of
the gaze as another impulse, which he lays out, inter alia, in this text. It is
there that Lacan ascribes a central place to jealousy in the development of
the subject, even though the final version published in the Écrits does not
show it so evidently as the primary versions of it, in Les Complexes
Familieux (Family Complexes), do.
To examine the relation between the subject’s development, feminin-
ity, desire, and unrestrained jealousy, I have approached three literary
works: Beauty’s Hour by Olivia Shakespear,3 The Ravishing of Lol Stein by
Marguerite Duras, and The Lover written by Duras as well. All three nov-
els, in rather precarious ways, revolve around love triangles, desire, and
jealousy, and in all three, the other woman in the love triangle is
2
Freud (1923).
3
Shakespear (2016).
presented as psychically or physically unseparated from the story’s female

protagonist. The enigmatic and unique plots of these works presented me
with a question about jealousy and its vicissitudes.
The three works are, in fact, from different literary genres, and were
also written in dissimilar time periods. Beauty’s Hour by Shakespear was
written during the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth cen-
tury. It was a groundbreaking novella for its time describing a physical,
Cinderella-esque transformation and a mental split reminiscent of the
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886),4 yet until its republication
in 2016 it was buried in the archives, as sometimes happens with works
authored by women. The candid tone of the narrator reflects a unique
mirror of femininity and jealousy that is rarely confronted in literary
works, as well as its somewhat bizarre plot: it chronicles the story of a
woman who transforms into a beautiful lady every night, yet quickly
starts becoming jealous of herself, that is, of the body and persona to
which she transforms.
The transformation that the novella’s heroine undergoes in front of the
mirror embodies Lacan’s mirror stage and echoes Freud’s saying about
artists and poets whom he follows in the invention of psychoanalysis.
Throughout this novella, and alongside the writings of Freud, Lacan, and
Montrelay, I have elaborated two distinct types of jealousy that can be
observed in both analytical literature and literary works: phallic jealousy
and feminine jealousy. The distinction between the two types of jealousy
is made according to Lacan’s formulas of sexuation, presented in his
twentieth seminar, Encore.5
Following this, I will offer a reading of Mary, the heroine of Beauty’s
Hour, in comparison with Dora, Freud’s patient in one of his paradig-
matic case presentations regarding hysteria, and with another Freudian
case, that of The Young Homosexual. These cases reveal possible paths of a
woman toward her desire, which go through identification and, evidently,
jealousy. They not only demonstrate how jealousy may be disastrous to
desire when it collapses into an identification, but also how jealousy may
lead a subject toward her desire.
4
Daniel (2016).
5
Lacan (1999).
1 Introduction 5
Unlike Beauty’s Hour, which can be considered as somewhat conserva-

tive nowadays, The Ravishing of Lol Stein is an erotic phantasy that allures
readers, inter alia, because it does not operate according to standard liter-
ary rules. It is a living, beating feminine writing that no logic nor mean-
ing can be extrapolated from—only subjective, analytic knowledge. In
Lacan’s twelfth seminar, Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis,6 Michèle
Montrelay presented to Lacan and his students her unique analysis of The
Ravishing of Lol Stein, which was later published as the opening chapter
of her book, L’Ombre et le Nom: Sur la féminité.7 Following Montrelay,
Lacan dedicated an “homage” to Duras and The Ravishing of Lol Stein.8
Also, recently, a collection of essays written on Duras’ works, and espe-
cially on The Ravishing of Lol Stein, was published by members of the
Lacanian school that was established by Jacques-Alain Miller after Lacan’s
death, École de la cause freudienne.9
The heroine of The Ravishing of Lol Stein conjures up love triangles that
stir her into a mental turmoil, in which she confuses herself with the
other woman, calling herself by the name of the other. The title of the
work in French inserted a new signifier to psychoanalysis—“ravissement.”
This book examines this dumbfounding ravissement as the effect of jeal-
ousy. It is debatable whether the word ravissement in French means the
same as ravishing in English. This book will focus on the signifier ravisse-
ment in French, which was discussed by Lacan in his article about Duras,
bearing in mind that the word in English has different connotations,
which may have also provoked more feministic commentaries on the
book by Anglophone Academics. The Ravishing of Lol Stein also provides
an important insight on pain that relates to jealousy and its signs. The
pain of jealousy is not unlike the pain of grief about which Freud had
written in “Mourning and Melancholia,” thereby allowing to compare
jealousy and melancholia.
6
Lacan (2002).
7
Montrelay (1977).
8
Lacan (1965).
9
Miller et al. (2021). Most of the articles in this book will not be discussed here. I will note that
most of them are based on Lacan’s article, an article that has also guided me in my writing, and on
Montrelay’s writing, which she wrote at the same time as Lacan.
The term “ravage,” which characterizes the mother-daughter relation-

ship according to Lacan and Montrelay,10 will be further developed in the
light of Duras’ novel, L’Amant (The Lover). At the heart of feminine
jealousy sits this inseparable bond of mother and daughter, to which
Duras testifies in her work, a work that won the prestigious Goncourt
prize. There, Duras wrote a fictional autobiographical story in the third
person that creates a split between “her” in the past and “her” in the pres-
ent. This split allows her to place into writing things that she has never
written before, or, in Lacanian terms, to write something of that which
does not stop not being written. Duras chose to frame the novel as a work
of “autofiction,” a literary genre that merges memoir with phantasy, yet
after its publication, she declared it to be “autobiographical.” Even though
some literary critics tried to demonstrate the gaps existing between the
plot of the novel and “reality,” it is nevertheless precisely that act of pro-
nouncing her book as autobiographical that testifies to the singular status
of her writing in The Lover. By comparing the two novels of Duras, I will
attempt to articulate Duras’ subjective solution to the ravage that haunted
her, suggesting that writing enabled her to extricate herself from her
maternal and familial heirloom.
As an inseparable, inherent, and essential portion of feminine sexual-
ity, it is impossible to fully delineate jealousy. One can only examine its
being and its action, in the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. Writing
and artistic creation may serve as an option to work with jealousy, fair
avec, to use it as a catalyst so as to approach one’s femininity and, finally,
to transform the destruction of jealousy into something new—an object
or even a book.
Works Cited
Daniel, A. M. (2016). Introduction. In A. M. Daniel (Ed.), Beauty’s Hour.
Valancourt Books.
Freud, S. (1923). Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and
Homosexuality. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 4, 1–10.
10
Lacan (2009); Montrelay (1977).
1 Introduction 7
Jones, E. (1955). The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Basic Books.
Lacan, J. (1999). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore: On Feminine
Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge (1972–1973) (B. Fink, Trans. &
J.-A. Miller, ed.). W.W. New York.
Lacan, J. (2002). The Seminar, Book XII: Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis
(1964–1965) (C. Gallagher, Trans., pp. 272–282). Karnac.
Lacan, J. (1965). Homage fait à Marguerite Duras. In Cahiers Renauld-Berrault
December (pp. 7–13). Gallimard.
Lacan, J. (2009). L’étourdit [1972]. The Letter, 41, 31–80.
Miller, J.-A., Laurent, É., et al. (2021). Duras avec Lacan: ‘Ne restons pas ravie par
le ravissement.’. Michèle.
Montrelay, M. (1977). L’Ombre et le Nom: Sur la féminité. Minuit.
Shakespear, O. (2016). In A. M. Daniel (Ed.), Beauty’s Hour [1896].
Valancourt Books.
2
What Is Jealousy? Jealousy and Envy
from Aristotle to Today
Abstract This chapter turns to thinkers and sages from the dawn of
times, who conceptualized jealousy together with envy in various, intrigu-
ing fashions. It provides etymological and philological definitions of jeal-
ousy and envy from major dictionaries of English, Hebrew, and French, as
well as theoretical elaborations from Aristotle to Pierre Charron and
Benedetto Varchi, La Rochefoucauld to Melanie Klein and Joan Copjec.
It seeks to underline a consistent difference between the definitions based
on logic and reaches the conclusion that current definitions and differ-
ences fail to provide it.
Keywords Jealousy • Envy • Women • The bible • Aristotle • Desire •

Dictionary • Passion
ictionary Definitions for Jealousy and Envy

D
in Hebrew, French, and English
In Hebrew, the word for jealousy and envy is the same—kinaa (‫)קנאה‬. In
the principal Even-Shushan Dictionary, which predominantly takes its
sources from the bible, the Hebrew word for jealousy has four viable

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3_2
definitions, two of which are particularly relevant. The first, based on a

verse from The Book of Isaiah, is as follows: “Narrow mindedness, fear of
the success of another, agony for the other defeating you in a certain
matter.”1 The second interpretation, based on a verse from The Song of
Songs, refers to the suspicion of a lack of love or infidelity, especially
between husband and wife.2 Thus, the Hebrew language recognizes
two possible bifurcations of jealousy yet unites them under the same
umbrella.
The word envie in French corresponds to the English envy. As a noun,
its definition in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française is initially conno-
tated with desire: “Desire, mixed with spite and resentment, inspired by
the advantages, the goods, the successes of others.” 3 The second definition
of envie in the same dictionary is: “An imperious desire to do or to have
something,” situating envie in the same position as desire.4 In fact, in
French, the predominant meaning of the word envie is to want something,
while the word employed for jealousy is usually jalousie.
Jalousie, however, is defined here as “a vivid and shadowy attachment to
a good, an advantage that one has and is believed to be threatened”; “[a]
feeling of a person who knows himself or believes himself betrayed by the
loved one”; and “disappointed not to have what another gets or owns and
that one desires for oneself.” 5 It is noticeable that the third and first defini-
tions of jalousie mirror each other, and correlate with the definition of
envie, the only difference being that in the definition of envie, desire is
emphasized. The second definition of jalousie is related to a person’s loved
one. In relation to the Hebrew definitions of the word, it is noticeable that
the first Hebrew definition for ‫ קנאה‬is to be found in the definitions for
envie, and that the second Hebrew definition is more suitable to the sec-
ond definition the French dictionary provides for jalousie. It is thus already
conspicuous that the difference between the two words is incoherent, as
both encompass manifold, interchangeable definitions and meanings.
1
Even-Shusan (1993, 1679).
2
Ibid.
3
Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (2019), Envie, N.
4
Ibid.
5
Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (2019), Jalousie, I, N.
Interestingly, the word jalousie has another meaning in French, that is,
a specific type of shutters through which one can “see without being seen,”
and can even lower or raise jalousie to control the level of seeing and being
seen.6 This meaning of the word already links jealousy to the scopic drive,
which will be discussed in the next chapter.
Clearing the path to the English definitions of the word, The New
Shorter OED defines jealousy as follows:
1a. The consuming fear, suspicion, or belief that one is being or might be
displaced in someone’s affections; distrust of the fidelity of a spouse or lover.
b. Of god: intolerance of the worship of other gods. C. Resentment or envy
of another person or of his or her possible or actual success, advantage, or
superiority; rivalry. 2a. Anger, wrath. b. Devotion, eagerness. 3. Concern or
anxiety for the preservation or well-being of something or someone; vigi-
lance or care in guarding something or someone. 4. Suspicion; apprehen-
sion of evil; mistrust.7
Hence, according to the most popular dictionary of English, jealousy

ranges from fear of being displaced as a loved one, envy for one’s posses-
sion, anger, devotion, anxiety, etc., thus covering most of the possible
interpretations and connotations of the word. The New Shorter OED thus
includes, in effect, envy as one of the definitions of jealousy.8 In compari-
son, envy is defined by the same dictionary more modestly, that is, as “1.
hostility; malice; enmity; 2a. A feeling of resentful or discontented longing
aroused by another person’s better fortune, situation, etc. 3. Longing,
desire; enthusiasm.”9 Thus, similar to the French dictionary’s definition of
envie which emphasizes desire, The New Shorter OED also includes desire
in one of the definitions for envy, but on the other hand, underlines the
ill-will nature of envy.
6
Ibid., Jalousie, II, N.
7
Ibid., Jealousy, N.
8
Ibid., Jealousy, N.
9
Ibid., Envie, N.
Envy counts as one of the seven deadly sins in the Christian tradition.
Accordingly, in the English The Ladies Dictionary (1694), jealousy is
treated as the “greatest enemy to marriage in the world.”10 It follows the
perhaps traditional concept, according to which jealousy implies being
suspicious of a beloved partner’s love for another person that the jealous
person values more than him or herself. The dictionary’s definition engages
primarily with the husband’s jealousy for his wife, which is said to turn
marriage into hell.11
The comparisons between the above definitions in relation to the sub-
ject of this research subject, are taken from the major dictionaries of three
languages that are relevant to my work, namely Hebrew, being my mother
tongue, the language from which my ideas conspire, together with English
and French, the languages of the literary works that are posited at the cen-
ter of this research. Together, the definitions from all three languages reveal
that jealousy and envy are not exactly distinct from each other. Initially
expecting that The New Shorter OED will provide a clear distinction
between jealousy and envy, one finds similar attributes in both definitions
that transgress the general idea that jealousy is focused on one’s spouse and
his or her devotion and faithfulness, while envy means to desire something
that belongs to another, prompting ill will toward such persons. In my
research, instead of differentiating between jealousy and envy, I will refer to
envy as a type of jealousy, in accordance with the definition of The New
Shorter OED, as well as the Hebrew and French definitions, alongside the
philosophy of Western thinkers, who also consider envy as a branch of
jealousy.
Jealousy and Envy in the History of Thought

The revelation of how little distinction was rendered between jealousy and
envy in the major dictionaries propelled me to explore what other thinkers
and writers thought about these two passions, from classical thinkers to
10
Dunton (1694), 233.
11
Ibid.
early Anglo-French modern writers and essayists. The question what jeal-
ousy is and what envy is had been asked since the days of ancient Greece.
Aristotle, in his book On Rhetoric, devoted a section for both jealousy
and envy. He regarded envy (pathonos) as close to being indignant yet dif-
ferent from it, and added that it is also “agitated pain [that is] directed at
success, but of an equal and a like, not of one who is unworthy.”12 This
success can be related to various good things, but the condition for being
envious, according to Aristotle, is that the person who is envied is similar
to the envious person in their characteristics.13 Envy, therefore, is related
to rivalry, and is prominent in those who have reputation and success at
the outset. Aristotle adds that the feeling of envy causes the wish for the
other to befall from his assets and happiness, which are desired by the
envious person. This is why “one who is malicious is also envious.”14 He
treats envy and pity as antonyms: envy is wanting to have someone else’s
happiness, while pity is wanting to share your happiness with others.15
Zelos, jealousy, is regarded by Aristotle as “the positive counterpart of
envy.”16 Both feelings may result from rivalry, but jealousy leads to imita-
tion, and is referred to by Aristotle as “emulation”: “While envy is bad and
characteristic of the bad; for the former [person], through emulation, is
making an effort to attain good things for himself, while the latter, through
envy, tries to prevent his neighbor from having them.”17 Aristotle does not
attribute jealousy specifically to a relationship between lovers, but to the
desire to attain good things to oneself, which may, evidently, include love.
He differentiates envy and jealousy as positive and negative counterparts
belonging to the same passion, claiming that jealousy can lead to owning
what the person desires.
Jumping forward some thousands of years, from a different perspective
that perhaps is also akin to Christian morality, François de la Rochefoucauld
is in accord with Aristotle in the sense that he treats jealousy as a more
12
Aristotle (2020), 155.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid., 158.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid., 160.
17
Ibid., 155.
justified emotion than envy. Jealousy, according to La Rochefoucauld, aims

to maintain possession of what we already own, while “envy is a fury that
always makes us wish for the ruin of others.”18 La Rochefoucauld treats
envy as worse than hate.19 In that sense, he agrees with Aristotle, situating
envy as a certain underside of jealousy, but for different reasons than those
of Aristotle.
Other thinkers, mainly of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, did not
follow Aristotle’s point of view, and chose to focus on jealousy as one of the
hindrances of matrimony. Benedetto Varchi speaks of jealousy as a “hellish
suspecy,”20 an “uncurable plague,”21 and a “deadly poison,”22 which derives
from the desire to enjoy one’s beauty by yourself (i.e., the beauty of one’s
spouse).23 Like the French dictionary’s definition, which links envy with
desire, Varchi underpins the way jealousy proceeds from passion:
Jealousie proceedeth from Passio, when we covet to enjoy or possesse that

which we most love and like, wonderfully fearing lest we should loose the
possession thereof, as if our Mistresse should become a secret sweet Friend
unto another man; and in this pittifful perplexitie and case was propertius,
as may appeare, when hee made this mournffull elegie.24
This quote is intriguing because it once again propagates that jealousy

stems from passion and treats it like other thinkers treated envy. “Passio”
here is similar to the desire described by the English or French dictionaries
in relation to envy. In addition, Varchi claims that jealousy is the precursor
of envy, and that both are of the same species. Therefore, envy is entrenched
in jealousy.25 If, according to Varchi, envy is based on jealousy, then envy
cannot exist without jealousy. I would add that it also originates from it.
18
De la Rochefoucauld (2005), Maxime 28.
19
Ibid., Maxime 328.
20
Varchi (1615), 5.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid., 18.
25
Ibid.
This makes jealousy the first and foremost type of emotion, from which
envy branches out. This definition of Varchi is the one that I relate to the
most, as it settles the many definitions presented herein, and it treats envy
as a sort of jealousy, allowing the first to be included in the latter.
Sixteenth-century French philosopher, Pierre Charron, treats envy as
desire for a good that another possesses that makes us lose the good that is
within us. Jealousy, according to Charron, is an emotion that makes us fear
the loss of our possession to another.26 Charron also emphasizes envy and
jealousy as related to desire, whether it is desire for the person or a posses-
sion that we own, or that of another. Charron, Varchi, the various diction-
aries, and Aristotle all show us that jealousy and envy were always linked
with desire.
The essays and theories on jealousy and envy depicted above indicate
that from the dawn of humanity, jealousy and envy were subjects of interest
as passions that rule the subject. In addition, the multiple definitions also
present the enigma that is related to jealousy and envy; none of the defini-
tions is identical to the other, nor clearly discerns between them. This pool
of definitions indicates that these two seemingly separated affects are con-
verged together and are both linked with desire. Which type of desire,
whether desire for possession, for someone’s love or for something else,
remains obscure, and this book will try to dissipate some of this fog by
providing explanations for jealousy and types of jealousy based on psycho-
analytic theory and the subjective knowledge that literature provides.
Before concluding, I should mention the approach of psychoanalyst
Melanie Klein, who wrote about the distinction between jealousy and envy.
According to Klein,
envy is the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something
desirable—the envious impulse being to take it away or to spoil it. Moreover,
envy implies the subject’s relation to one person only and goes back to the
earliest exclusive relation with the mother. Jealousy is based on envy but
involves a relation to at least two people; it is mainly concerned with love
that the subject feels is his due and has been taken away, or is in danger of
26
Charron (1697).
being taken away, from him by his rival. In the everyday conception of jeal-
ousy, a man or a woman feels deprived of the loved person by some-
body else.27
In her explanation, Klein attributed the emotion of envy to the subject’s

relationship with his mother, and jealousy to the relationship between
three people: presumably the child, the mother, and the father. As opposed
to Klein, I would claim that both jealousy and envy always include a third
component, that is, an object of desire, which can also be the other woman
in a love triangle. Envy is included in jealousy because it is always based on
the relation between two people, the one who is envious, the one who is
envied, and a third, the object of desire that instigates it. For example, in
envy, X is envious of Y because Y has a lovely husband, Z, while in jealousy,
X is jealous of Y, because Z, the husband of X likes Y. Jealousy is therefore
a more intricate situation of envy: both describe the same situation, with
the only difference being that in jealousy, the object a, signified by the let-
ter Z in this example, is also a subject who has agency. The agency of this
subject, that is, Y’s desire for Z, is what makes X jealous. Therefore, in
both cases there are three, as will be thoroughly explained in psychoana-
lytic terms in the following chapters.
Another interesting analysis of the difference between jealousy and envy
can be found in Joan Copjec’s Imagine There’s No Woman. In analyzing the
1944 film Laura, Copjec makes a clear distinction between what she pre-
sumes to be jealousy and envy. She adopts a distinction made by English
Synonyms and builds upon it. Her claim is that “jealousy is grounded in
the possession of a certain pleasure, whereas envy stems precisely from a
lack of it.”28 But what is it exactly that one lacks or that one thinks she
lacks? Copjec acknowledges that one’s desire would not be satisfied by
receiving the other’s jouissance. Therefore, according to this definition, if
one were to receive the other’s object of jouissance one is craving for,
wouldn’t she still desire something else—and perhaps would be jealous of
the other for having it? It means that something else is at stake here.
27
Klein (1957), 180 (emphases mine).
28
Copjec (2002), 159.
Copjec names it the “evil eye,” following Lacan’s use of the Latin word
invidia. She puts forth envy as the evil eye, the wish to destroy the other’s
jouissance, as opposed to wanting an object for oneself or to not lose the
object. Copjec provides the example of the judgment of Solomon, writing
that for the woman, the child’s splitting is “not a compromise she is willing
to accept, but the sort of ruination for which she longs.”29 Envy, the evil
eye, according to Copjec, follows another logic. I shall try to show in the
following chapters that this logic is that of feminine jouissance, and that it
is also the logic that prevails in jealousy. Copjec’s analysis presents the need
for a new kind of thinking of jealousy and envy, one that implicates desire
and jouissance, i.e. the object a.
Finally, J. Hillis Miller analyzes the vast etymological sources and
knowledge that pertains to the word “jealousy,” as he proclaims that his
own knowledge of the word is limited. Reading Marcel Proust’s In Search
of Lost Time alongside French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Miller pin-
points two issues regarding jealousy: (i) The jealous person “wants to see
without being seen,”30 and so surveillance plays an important role in jeal-
ousy; (ii) Being is what is at stake in jealousy: the lover whose love is lost
to another does not wish to exist anymore.31 Miller’s definition is based
upon the French definition of the word jalousie,32 but is also in accord
with the description of psychoanalyst Michèle Montrelay. Some twenty
years before Miller, reading The Ravishing, Montrelay describes Lol V. Stein
as the one who watches but cannot feel.33 Montrelay underlines that jeal-
ousy is at the core of the subject’s existence. When the man’s gaze turns
away from you to another, one becomes, according to Montrelay, emptied
of oneself, hollowed out from desire, “hors de toi.”34 Thus, Montrelay spec-
ifies that being is in fact exactly what is at stake when the gaze is turned
away from the subject. Even though Miller refers mostly to Derrida, and
not to psychoanalysis, his interpretation is psychoanalytical all the
29
Ibid., 160.
30
Miller (1995), 122.
31
Ibid.
32
Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (2019).
33
Montrelay (1977).
34
Ibid., 152.
same. This should not be a surprise, considering that Derrida based him-
self on Freud in his writing on jealousy. Miller acknowledges that he refers
to the masculine angle of jealousy in his book, and partly explains it by the
fact that jealousy was traditionally a part of patriarchy. He invites others to
explore the difference between the jealous wife and the jealous husband by
naming it an “important enterprise.”35
The various definitions and elaboration of jealousy and envy that I dis-
played throughout do not, evidently, cover every theory and writing on
the topic. It is, instead, a variety that aims to show that thinkers were
always in conflict and even at a loss when facing these concepts, or more
precisely, these emotions. From Aristotle to today, whether these are phi-
losophers, critics, scholars, or psychoanalysts, each outline and theorize
jealousy and envy differently. This lays the ground for new categorization
of types of jealousy. My purpose is to deconstruct the so-called distinction
between envy and jealousy in order to lead to new kind of thinking of
jealousy, from the perspective of the drive and the phallic and feminine
logic of sexuation, following Freud and Lacan. Also, this review empha-
sizes the link between jealousy/envy and the obscure concept of desire, the
theorization of which also plays a central part in this book.
Works Cited
Aristotle. (2020). The Art of Rhetoric Book II (J. H. Freese, Trans.). HUP.
Charron, P. (1697). Of Wisdom: Three Books Written Originally in French by the
Sieur De Charron (G. Stanhope, Trans.). M. Gillyflower et al. online edition.
Retrieved December 19, 2020, from www.search.proquest.com/books/
wisdom-t hree-b ooks-w ritten-o riginally-f rench/docview/2240943775/
se-2?accountid=14765
Copjec, J. (2002). Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. MIT Press.
De la Rochefoucauld, F. (2005). Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes Morales
[1664]. Gutenberg, online edition. Retrieved December 19, 2020, from www.
gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14913/pg14913-images.html
Dictionnaire de l’Académie française 9th edition. (2019). Online edition. Retrieved
December 19, 2020, from www.dictionnaire-academie.fr/article/A9E2044
35
Miller (1995), 122 (emphasis mine).
Dunton, J. (1694). The Ladies Dictionary: Being a General Entertainment for the
Fair Sex: A Work Never Attempted Before in English. John Dunton.
Even-Shusan, A., & Ben Haim, D. (1993). Jealousy. In The Hebrew Dictionary,
1679. Kiryat Sefer.
Klein, M. (1957). Envy and Gratitude: A Study of Unconscious Sources.
Basic Books.
Miller, J. H. (1995). The Other’s Other: Jealousy and Art in Proust. Qui Parle:
Literature, Philosophy, Visual Arts, History, 9(1), 119–140.
Montrelay, M. (1977). La Jalousie. In M. Chapsal (Ed.), La Jalousie: Entretiens
avec Jeanne Moreau et al (pp. 149–173). Gallimard.
Varchi, B. (1615). The Blazon of Jealousy: A Subject Not Written of by any
Heretofore (R. Tofte, Trans.). Thomas Snodham.
3
Drive Jealousies in the Development
of the Subject
Abstract This chapter examines various manifestations of jealousy in the

development of the subject, mostly in early infancy, which are catego-
rized under the term “drive jealousies”: oral jealousy, scopic jealousy, and
sadomasochistic (aggressive) jealousy. This chapter is based mostly on
Freud’s writings on jealousy in his articles on femininity and Lacan’s early
text, Family Complexes, as well as his well-known The Mirror Stage,
together with insights from other psychoanalysts such as Jacques-Alain
Miller, Michèle Montrelay, and Alenka Zupančič.
Keywords The Mirror Stage • Narcissism • Aggressiveness • Jealousy •

The oral drive • The scopic drive • Invidia
Oral Jealousy
First and foremost we may mention jealousy of other people—of brothers
and sisters, rivals, among whom the father too has a place. Childhood love
is boundless; it demands exclusive possession, it is not content with less

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3_3
than all. But it has a second characteristic: it has, in point of fact, no aim
and is incapable of obtaining complete satisfaction; and principally for that
reason it is doomed to end in disappointment.1
In this constitutive paragraph about jealousy, Freud teaches us that

jealousy in infancy is aimed at whoever is present in the child’s life, who
in the child’s eyes, causes him to lose something of the satisfaction he
derives from his mother. According to Freud, the baby’s love in the infan-
tile stage is “aimless,” meaning that it is not directed at anyone in particu-
lar. Michèle Montrelay explains that the baby at this stage does not
differentiate between his mother and father; the body of the father is
embedded in the mother’s.2 It means that the infant’s jealousy for his
mother is not related to the Oedipus complex, as there is no distinction
between the sexes at this stage. At this stage of early infancy, jealousy is
aroused whenever satisfaction is taken away from the child. Freud marks
this jealousy as an inability to bring upon the full satisfaction of the drive,
and designates jealousy as the infant’s insatiability.3 In other words, jeal-
ousy is inseparable of any satisfaction, as one can never reach full satisfac-
tion. Therefore, there is always a remnant of jealousy, of dissatisfaction.
It appears that the first time Freud notices jealousy in children in rela-
tion to a particular person is in relation to their siblings. Regarding infan-
tile jealousy, Freud pinpoints that “It is known that, when their passions
awake, children never develop such violent reactions against the brothers
and sisters they find already in existence but direct their hostility against
the newcomers,”4 that is, jealousy is mostly prevalent in relation to
younger siblings. The jealousy of a younger brother or sister is derived
from the pain of the child who loses his mother’s breast, and his
accusation toward his mother for not sufficiently nourishing him.5 This
blame is heard no matter what the circumstances are, mentions Freud,
and it will not be surprising to find this complaint also in children who
1
Freud (1950), 231.
2
Montrelay (1977a).
3
Freud (1950).
4
Freud (1955a), 149.
5
Freud (1953).
were breastfed until the age of three or four.6 According to Lacan, jeal-
ousy is inherent in lack but is also related to frustration, the latter of
which being imaginary, while the first is symbolic.7 Jealousy in infancy is
linked with the oral drive and is attributed to resentment for losing satis-
faction, which again “flares up when the next baby appears in the
nursery.”8 Then, the lack of satiable breastfeeding becomes linked with
the appearance of a new baby. The older sibling develops jealous, hatred,
and rage toward the younger baby for being dethroned from his seat.9
The jealousy toward the new baby begins with the child’s inquiries
about how babies come into the world. In one place, Freud quotes a tod-
dler’s response to hearing the news about a new member of the family,
saying “the stork can take him up again.”10 Thus, the hostility and jeal-
ousy toward the new brother dates back to the time of first hearing the
news, when one can already estimate the losses he is about to experi-
ence.11 Freud discovered in his clinic that sometimes children’s jealousy
toward their younger siblings is characterized with acute intensity, which
at times can turn in their adult life into a real obstacle in their ability to
love.12 Resentment can also be directed toward their parents, that is, for
choosing to bring another child into the world. Freud mostly described
the outburst of jealousy as a response of older siblings to new ones, but
he also recognized that a younger brother or sister may develop jealousy
and rage toward older siblings.
In “A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung Und Warheit,” Freud
analyzes Goethe’s memory of throwing kitchenware out of the window as
a young boy, smashing it on the pavement. Freud compares Goethe’s
memory with similar stories of his patients, and deciphers that all such
incidents are associated with news about a new family member that is
about to come into the world. Like the smashed kitchenware and the fly-
ing stork, from the sibling’s perspective, the new baby may also fly out
6
Ibid.
7
Lacan (2020).
8
Freud (1953), 123.
9
Ibid.
10
Freud (1958), 251.
11
Ibid.
12
Freud (1955a).
from the window.13 It should be also mentioned that elsewhere, Freud

interprets his patients’ dreams as death wishes directed toward their
siblings.14
Based on Freud’s theory of narcissism, Montrelay emphasizes that
there are three levels of narcissism: autoerotic, primary, and secondary.15
In autoerotic narcissism, the body parts enjoy themselves in a dismantled
way, without the jouissance of the body as a whole. In primary narcissism,
the body already enjoys itself as one unit. In secondary narcissism, the
subject’s object is not an organ (as opposed to autoerotic narcissism) or an
ensemble of organs (as in primary narcissism) but the ego.16 It implies
that in secondary narcissism there is already a system of representations
between the subject and the object, even though the object is the ego.
Freud discovered that the oral drive, which involves the sucking of the
breast, dominates jealousy. Lacan adds to it the scopic drive of St.
Augustine. These two jealousies dwell in autoeroticism and primary nar-
cissism before the subject recognizes his body as his own in the mirror
stage. Hence, in both jealousies, we are in the realm of partial drives of
narcissism.17
Scopic Jealousy
In Family Complexes, a very early text by Lacan written in 1938,18 he
expands the subject of jealousy between siblings, which directs him to the
formulation of his famous mirror stage. In 1949, Lacan presented an
updated version of it during a lecture he gave in Zurich. In those texts,
Lacan recognized jealousy as the experience of the subject when he real-
izes that he has siblings, and marks jealousy as representing a mental
13
Ibid.
14
Freud (1958), 250.
15
Montrelay (1977b).
16
Ibid.
17 .
Montrelay states in L’Ombre et le Nom (1977b) that in primary narcissism, the partial drives,
such as the scopic and oral drives, reign. I understand this as true also for the stage of
autoeroticism.
18
Lacan (2002).
identification that is related to the scopic drive.19 In the heart of the

institution of the subject in the visual field, there is the gaze.20 The mirror
stage is a moment in the birth of the subject of the unconscious, which
determines the structure of the ego;21 the child-subject sees an image in
the mirror, recognizes it as his own, and identifies with it.22 The “I” with
which the subject identifies is “an ideal ‘I’ in a primordial form,23” which
Lacan refers to as an imago of the subject. In Family Complexes, Lacan
elaborates on the fellow creature of the child, a semblable that may be an
image of the subject or the subject’s playmate in the playground, both of
which he takes upon himself via the mechanism of identification.24
In this encounter between the semblable and the toddler, primordial
jealousy arises, in a drama that is reminiscent of St. Augustine’s confes-
sion about being struck by jealousy on the sight of his younger brother
suckling at his mother’s breast.25 In his eleventh seminar, The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan describes this jealousy of
Augustine as “Invidia,”26 the Latin term for envy, whose meaning is
slightly different than that of the definitions of jealousy and envy that
were reviewed in the previous chapter. “Invidia” implies being envious of
someone’s possession or goods without actually wanting it; it has to do
with the casting of an “evil eye.”27 Lacan underpins that it is not the desire
for the mother’s breast that makes Augustine pale when he sees his brother
suckling, but a fascinating power of the completeness of the picture that
determines the relation between the object a and desire, which does not
necessarily give the subject the satisfaction he seeks. This completeness
that fascinates the child can be also the completeness of the subject’s own
picture in the mirror, which is deadening to him. It is deadening precisely
because it includes the object a, which must be lacking so that one would
19
Ibid.
20
Lacan (1998).
21
Lacan (2006a).
22
Lacan (1998).
23
Lacan (2006a), 76.
24
Lacan (2002).
25
Ibid.
26
Lacan (1998), 116.
27
Ibid., 116.
be able to seek it. Scopic jealousy or Invidia does not arise when lack
exists, but quite the opposite, that is, when the image is complete. It
freezes the subject and his movement toward his object of desire, fixating
him in an ideal I. The evil eye has thus the effect of killing, as lack is nec-
essary for movement—and for life.28
Freud discovered that the oral drive, which involves the sucking of the
breast, dominates jealousy. Lacan adds to it the scopic drive, providing
the example of St. Augustine. In his twentieth seminar, Encore, Lacan
mentions St. Augustine’s invidia once more. This time, he calls it
“jealouissance,”29 jealous hatred that “sprimages forth – s’imagaillisse,”30
from the gaze to object a. Scopic jealousy follows this logic of jealouis-
sance that is related, in my view, to what Jacques Alain-Miller develops in
“L’objet jouissance.”31 According to Miller, “in this type of jouissance
[object jouissance] the notion of satisfaction is produced on the way of
the drive, or, as Lacan would say, by the circuit of the drive.”32 Following
this logic, I would say that in this jealouissance the subject produces satis-
faction from jealousy itself, which is the circuit of the drive, a part of
its course.
This jealousy has great repercussions for the subject’s adult life. In
What Is Sex,33 Alenka Zupančič writes about “the norm (normative pre-
scriptions of sexuality)” as “taking the place of the image that one has
never seen,”34 that of a body completely wrapping itself around the
Other’s body. This articulation, based on Lacan’s twentieth seminar, takes
us back to the incident described by St. Augustine. It ties together the
phantasy of the body of the One that reunites in the sexual relation and
the jealousies that dwell in the jouissance of the complete image. According
to Zupančič, “the fantasy (and imperative) of the relation comes from
(within) the very structuring of the drives,”35 that is, the phantasy about
28
Ibid.
29
Lacan (1999), 100.
30
Ibid.
31
Miller (2016).
32
Ibid., 102.
33
Zupančič (2017).
34
Ibid., 18.
35
Ibid., 19.
full satisfaction, which can never be fulfilled, related to this primary, nar-
cissistic scopic jealousy, invidia, is what structures, according to Zupančič,
the social and ideal impressions about the sexual relation between the
sexes. We know from Lacan that this relation does not exist.
adomasochistic Jealousy in “A Child is

S
Being Beaten”
Another jealouissance I would like to enumerate is the sadomasochistic
one provided in Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten.” Freud analyzes in it
the sadistic and masochistic tendencies of his patients. The title quotes
the first of three sentences that Freud reiterates from his patients in this
text: (1) “A child is being beaten”; (2) “I am being beaten by my father”;
(3) “My father is beating the child, he loves only me.”36 The second sen-
tence is in fact the unconscious phantasy that Freud constructs after hear-
ing from his patients several versions of the first and third sentences. The
first and third sentences are phantasies articulated by the patients, yet the
sentence “I am being beaten by my father” is an unconscious phantasy
constructed by Freud after hearing several versions of the first and third
sentences. In addition, the third sentence adds information about the
love of the child to the person who performs the beating.37 The second
sentence is an essential example to what Lacan will later term the “phan-
tasm,” the unconscious phantasy through which the subject interprets
his world.
Even though Freud noted that these phantasies only present them-
selves toward the age of four, he mentions that they may very well also be
the “end product” of something that began much earlier. Freud finds that
these phantasies are more prevalent in women, and that they date back to
early infancy. Usually, the beater in the phantasy is the girl’s father, and
the child who is being beaten is a younger brother or sister.38 The beating
received a phantasmatic dimension by the onlooker’s scopic drive, that is,
36
Freud (1955b), 182–183.
37
Ibid.
38
Ibid.
an unconscious jouissance the children derived from watching their sib-

lings being beaten.
Regarding the first sentence, “A child is being beaten,” Freud points
out that he cannot indicate clearly if it has a masochistic or sadistic char-
acter, as the sex of the beaten child is not constantly identical nor oppo-
site to that of the child who is fantasizing about the beating. This basic
sentence that constructs the phantasm is elaborated by Freud’s patients in
another part that is added to the sentence, namely “my father is beating
the child whom I hate.”39 Hatred enters the picture and brings with it new
information about the relation of the subject to the beaten child. The
subject hates the child who is being beaten, yet he is also jealous of him.
Freud calls this affect “jealous hatred (eifersüchtig gehaßt).”40 Freud also
links the love of the object to the hatred toward the person who is com-
peting on this love and the subject’s sadistic tendencies toward his com-
petitor, with whom he also identifies (and therefore, also with the subject’s
masochistic tendencies toward himself ).41
Lacan used the term jealous hatred to describe what he referred to as
the Invidia of St. Augustine. It means that, at least for Lacan, the same
affect of Invidia is that of the sadomasochistic phantasm in “A child is
being beaten.” Moreover, the jealousy described in Freud’s text is linked
with the death drive as that which manifests itself in children’s hostile
feelings toward their siblings. Lacan interprets the previously described
death wishes of the subject toward their siblings as related to the death
drive of the subject himself. According to Lacan, aggressiveness is, in fact,
the refusal to recognize the mere existence of the other, and not the ten-
sion between the subject and the other.42 The brother’s or sister’s jealousy
is attributed thus to the sadomasochistic drives of the subject, where the
subject and the other are not separated from one another. These drives
dictate early infancy and are manifested by the death drive.43
39
Ibid., 199.
40
Freud (1987), 219.
41
Freud (1955b).
42
Lacan (2006a).
43
Lacan (2002).
Transitivism is the phenomena that takes place during the years of the
mirror stage (between six months to two and a half years of age), in
which, by identifying with the semblable,44 the child reacts, feels, and
responds as if what happened to the other happened to herself.45 The
condition for this identification is that the semblable is approximately the
same age as the subject.46 Charlotte Buhler recognized the dialectic of
transitivism as that which turns jealousy into empathy, as summarized
by Lacan:
A child can thus, in a complete trance-like state, share in his friend’s tum-
ble or attribute to him, without lying, the punch he himself has given his
friend. I will skip the series of the phenomena... All of them are understood
by Buhler in the dialectic that goes from jealousy (the jealousy whose
instructive value Saint Augustine already glimpsed in a flash) to the first
forms of sympathy. They are inscribed in a primordial ambivalence that
seems to me, as I am already indicating, to be mirrored, in the sense that the
subject identifies, in his feeling of Self, with the other’s image and that the
other’s image captivates this feeling in him.47
Freud posits jealousy as the first reason for the girl to abandon her
mother as a love object. Other than hating the person one is jealous of,
the subject also deeply cares for her and can develop these feelings of
identification with the object of jealousy, feelings which Buhler calls
“empathy.” These feelings will be further analyzed and explained later in
analyzing the case of Mary in Beauty’s Hour and in Freud’s case of Dora.
To recapitulate, aggressiveness, the death drive, the scopic drive, and the
oral drive all participate in the celebration of jealousy.
44
A footnote in Seminar XX by Bruce Fink summarizes Lacan’s usage of the term “semblable” in his
teaching, namely as “the mirroring of two imaginary others (a and a’) who resemble each other (or
at least see themselves in each other).” Fink also reminds us that the word is first found in William
Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, in a usage that seems apt to the Lacanian one (Lacan (1999), 83 n.14).
45
Lacan (2006b).
46
Ibid.
47
Ibid., 81.
Works Cited
Freud, S. (1950). Female Sexuality. In The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI (1927–1931): The Future of
an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and Other Works (J. Strachey,
Trans., pp. 221–244). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1953). Femininity. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXII: New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-
Analysis and Other Works (1931–1936) (J. Stratchey et al., Trans.).
Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1955a). A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung Und Wahrheit. In
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (J. Stratchey
et al., Trans., pp. 145–56). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1955b). A Child is Being Beaten. In The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919):
An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (J. Stratchey et al., Trans., pp. 179–204).
Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1958). The Interpretation of Dreams. In The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IV: The Interpretation
of Dreams (First Part). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1987). Gesammelte Werke 12. S. Fischer Verlag.
Lacan, J. (1998). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964–1965) (A. Sheridan, Trans. & J.-A. Miller,
ed.). W.W. Norton.
J.-A. Miller, ed.). W.W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2002). Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual [1938].
(C. Gallagher, Trans.). Antony Rowe.
Lacan, J. (2006a). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed
in Psychoanalytic Experience. In Écrits (B. Fink, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed.,
pp. 75–82). W.W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006b). Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis. In Écrits (B. Fink, Trans. &
J.-A. Miller, ed., pp. 82–102). W.W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2020). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IV: The Object-Relation
(1956–1957) (A.R. Price, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed.). Polity Press.
Miller, J.-A. (2016). L’objet jouissance. La Cause du Désir, 3(94), 101–113.

Retrieved June 15, 2023, from www.cairn.info/revue-la-cause-du-
desir-2016-3-page-101.html
Montrelay, M. (1977a). La Jalousie. In M. Chapsal (Ed.), La Jalousie: Entretiens
Montrelay, M. (1977b). L’Ombre et le Nom: Sur la féminité. Minuit.
Zupančič, A. (2017). What Is Sex? MIT Press.
4
Two Instances of Jealousy in Beauty’s
Hour and in the Mirror Stage
Abstract The chapter focuses on Lacan’s mirror stage and locates jeal-
ousy as that which plays an important role in the constitution of the
subject and her desire. This chapter provides a close reading of Olivia
Shakespear’s novella, Beauty’s Hour, alongside Lacan’s texts, so as to artic-
ulate two instances of jealousy, one that promotes the development of
desire via the Other, and another which enhances the destruction of
desire. This chapter aims to show how jealousy is simultaneously an insti-
gator of desire and its impediment.
Keywords Jouissance • Mirror Stage • Desire • Jealousy • Beauty’s Hour

• Femininity • Jacques Lacan
The Mirror and the Birth of Desire

The mirror stage is the making of the subject’s body, his outlines, dents,
cuts, and humps. A new body is born, separated from the breast and from
the Other. However, the mirror stage, Montrelay emphasizes, does not
eliminate primary narcissism, for it repeats throughout the subject’s life

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3_4
as “the perfect jouissance of oneself,”1 which is reminiscent of the jouis-

sance of the One-all-alone, developed later by Jacques-Alain Miller. 2 The
image the child sees in the mirror, which is mediated to him by the gaze
of the mother or another Other, is simultaneously the veiling and reflec-
tion of the subject’s body. Through the gaze of the mother that enters the
scene of the mirror stage, holes are created in the narcissistic bubble of
the subject. The image is incomplete. The mother recognizes the subject
in the mirror, giving his body its name, marking it as desired, but, prefer-
ably, not as her only desire. This body is lacking. Montrelay, following
Lacan, referred to those holes that represent lack as repères. These repères
are the landmarks that carve the body of the subject, giving him his con-
tours and marking and shaping his jouissance.3
For the image of the subject to receive the dignity of a signifier, for the
subject to become an “I” both in language and in speech, it must be re-
pèred.4 The repèration gives the subject a Name-of-the-Father, a master
signifier. This is the first signification through which the subject recog-
nizes his body, through the mother’s gaze indicating to him that it is his
figure that he spots in the mirror: “The image is noticed (remarked),
perforated, if the child sees it when the mother gazes at it. This image is
therefore an element in the chain in the place where the desire of the
mother is being articulated.”5
According to Lacan, the Mirror Stage is a “particular case of the func-
tion of imagoes”6 creating a relation between the organism and its reality,
that is, “between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt,” 7 or between the subject
and the object. However, once the “I” is created in the mirror, the subject
experiences alienation. The subject feels that the image does not represent
him; he is alienated from his own image that will never be able to
1
Montrelay (1977a), 44 (translation mine).
2
Miller (2018).
3
Montrelay (1977a).
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid., 49 (translation mine).
6
Lacan (2006a), 78.
7
Ibid.
4 Two Instances of Jealousy in Beauty’s Hour… 35
represent the subject’s object of desire, the objet petit a, the movement of
the body that is unfixed.8
In the imaginary register, the subject is whole. It implies the insertion
of the subject into the social sphere via the dissolution of the Oedipus
complex and the subsequent constitution of the symbolic register, which
will enable him to miss the object of desire, and experience alienation.
The mother’s words, together with the gaze, will enable the subject to
exist in the social sphere and will prompt desire, mediated through the
Other’s desire. In addition, “desire of man is the desire of the Other.”9 As
Joan Copjec articulates it in Read My Desire, “the subject is the effect of
the impossibility of seeing what is lacking in the representation, what the
subject, therefore, wants to see.”10 There is a theoretical correlation
between what the subject does not see in the mirror and his desire; only
that this correlation comes into being together with the subject’s inven-
tions and constructions of desire. Copjec also reminds her readers that
desire must always be taken literally: “Desire may register itself negatively
in speech … the relation between speech and desire, or social surface and
desire, may be a negative one.”11 Desire surfaces in analysis, through the
words of the subject that point to his lack. However, alienation is always
present, which may also be the reason for the subject’s negative attitude
toward his desire, what Freud defined as negation.
Beauty’s Hour: Introduction

Pale brows, still hands and dim hair,
I had a beautiful friend
And dreamed that the old despair
Would end in love in the end:
She looked in my heart one day
And saw your image was there;
8
Ibid.
9
Lacan (2016a), 22.
10
Copjec (2015), 35.
11
Copjec (2015), 35.
She has gone weeping away.12
This poem, written by William Butler Yeats, tells the story of the end
of his love affair with Olivia Shakespear. The addressee is Maud Gonne,
the object of Yeats’ unrequited love. According to Yeats, Olivia Shakespear
is the woman who is “gone weeping away” when she envisions the image
of Maude Gonne in Yeats’ heart.13 This provocative piece of information
about Shakespear engages with psychic mechanisms that are placed at
this book’s center of discussion: jealousy, love, desire, and feminine sexu-
ality, all of which are at the heart of Shakespear’s novella.
Who is Olivia Shakespear? Shakespear (1863–1938) wrote six books,
two plays, and one novella in her lifetime, before she retired from writing
to manage her literary salon and patron writers and poets such as Ezra
Pound (who was also her son-in-law), James Joyce, and others. Shakespear
is mostly recognized as being one of Yeats’ muses, not an unworthy title
by itself, yet one that does not do her justice, considering her own literary
contributions.14
In 1896, Shakespear wrote Beauty’s Hour, her only work to be distrib-
uted also in the last century. Beauty’s Hour revolves around a passion of
jealousy that is usually rejected from discussion, even in these so-called
liberal times we are living in.15 The candid tone of the narrator reflects a
unique mirror of femininity and jealousy that is rarely expressed so
bluntly. Why was this novella forsaken in the archives until 2016? Was it
because its writer was a woman, or rather the subject of the work is what
condemned it to oblivion for so many years?
Unlike Shakespear, who was described by Yeats as “a woman of great
beauty,”16 the heroine of Beauty’s Hour, Mary Gower, has a “plain” face.17
Gower is an orphan who lives with her former governess and works as a
secretary for a wealthy lady. She is in love with her employer’s son, Gerald.
Even though she is Gerlad’s close companion and confidant, she claims
12
Yeats (2022).
13
Yeats (1972).
14
Daniel (2016).
15
Regarding jealousy between women as an undiscussed, even tabooed topic, see Wyatt (1998).
16
Yeats (1972), 72.
17
Shakespear (2016), 47.
he only cares for beautiful women. Gerald denies these accusations made
by Mary on several occasions.18 Mary, who is also the narrator, tells her
readers about her own fascination with those beautiful women who cap-
ture every gaze when they enter a room, and wishes to become a beautiful
woman herself.19 Mary is jealous of Bella Sturgis who is meant to marry
Gerald. She refers to Bella as the one with the “perfect face,” 20 and wishes
to have a face like hers. Her interest in Bella is expressed in her wish for
Bella to notice her and talk to her. Mary is intimidated by Bella’s beautiful
face. She nearly does not speak when Bella is around, making herself
invisible; she also refuses to go to balls because she feels ugly, certain that
nobody will want to dance with her.21 Mary idolizes Bella and is jealous
of her at the same time. Her interest in Bella instigates her desire to
become beautiful.
One night, Mary stares intensely at her reflection in the mirror, when
suddenly, it becomes blurred, and “from the mist there grew a new face,
of wonderful beauty; the face of my desire.”22 From the mist, or the mys-
tic, Mary’s wish comes true: her body changes, her fingers lengthen, and
her face becomes beautiful. This physical change recurs every night, fol-
lowing Mary’s desire, but only for the night. Mary is then split into two
personas: during the day she is still Mary G., a frustrated woman who
lives a gray, unhappy life but who is Gerald’s close friend, and during the
nights she introduces herself as Marry Hatherley, Mary Gower’s cousin,
who enjoys a life of leisure, is surrounded by suiters, and attends dinners
and balls. Quickly, Gerald falls in love with Mary H., and Mary G. devel-
ops a bitterness toward him and jealousy toward her other self: “I felt a
sudden pang: this was the first tribute offered to my beauty, and it hurt.
Was Mary Gower beginning already to be jealous of Mary Hatherley?”23
Mary’s jealousy serves as a fil rouge in the story. Following it unfolds the
insights of this novella on feminine sexuality and jealousy. At the novella’s
conclusion, Mary chooses to renounce what she calls “the face of [her]
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid., 48.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid., 49.
23
Ibid., 59.
desire,”24 and leaves Gerald. Not only that, she also directs Gerald toward
the other woman, Bella, her initial rival in the competition for his heart.
This ending left me with a question: out of every option in this fantastic
world, in which a plain looking woman can transform into a stunning
one for a few hours each night, why does the heroine choose to forsake
the man she was in love with? Why is this the fate Shakespear chose for
her character, and can something be learned from this fate about jealousy
by and large?
ary’s Jealousy I: Following Desire Through

M
the Mirror
The identification with the imago and the primary drama of jealousy are,
according to Lacan, what inaugurates the dialectic that “binds the ‘I’ to
the social sphere.”25 Jealousy is at the stem of desire and subjectivity,
pushing the subject toward an existence in the social sphere. However, at
the same time, jealousy withdraws the subject away from desire, as it
attracts him to the specular ideal. In Beauty’s Hour, the ideal “I” of iden-
tification that is reflected in the face of the semblable, a fellow image of
the subject, is represented at the beginning of the tale by the “perfect”26
face of Bella Sturgis. Thereafter, it shifts to the face of Mary H.
As opposed to Freud, who wrote about jealous hatred as related to
aggressiveness and to children’s sadomasochistic drives, in “Aggressiveness
in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan mentions that the aggressiveness he refers to is
not a specifically sadomasochistic one, but one that is in line with the
formation of the ego.27 This is evident in Mary’s displays of aggressive-
ness, which are aimed both at herself and at Bella at the same time, and
then at Mary H. For example, she refers to herself as “unattractive”28 and
24
Ibid., 49.
25
Lacan (2006a), 79.
26
27
Lacan (2006b).
28
to her love as “grotesque.”29 Similarly, she describes Bella as one who is

“incapable of loving.”30 This aggressiveness that Mary displays in the
above monologue will return at the plot’s conclusion, specifically in her
choice to leave the man she loves without giving him a real opportunity
of loving her back. Mary’s gaze on herself shows the masochistic aggres-
siveness of primary narcissism that is involved in the mirror stage.
In L’Ombre et le Nom, however, Montrelay posits the following rhetori-
cal question: “These drives of destruction that play like opposite forces of
narcissism, which are incompatible with the sentiment of the cohesion of
the subject, do they not contribute to its organization?”31 In other words,
these partial, sadomasochistic drives, do they not contribute to the con-
stitution of the subject, as well as his ego? Based on this question, I will
ask, does jealousy not operate in the constitution of both the subject and
his ego, as well as in their destruction?
Jealousy is a two-way street, as Montrelay enlightens us. The idea of
two movements or instances of jealousy before and during/after the mir-
ror stage solves this alleged conflict in Lacan’s statement above, and shows
how jealousy is compiled of partial drives, yet at the same time contrib-
utes to the constitution of the subject’s body, desire, and ego. I detected
these two movements of jealousy in Beauty’s Hour and affirmed them
through reading Lacan and Montrelay. They have important ramifica-
tions for the subject, as the plot of the novella teaches us. At first, Mary’s
jealousy instigates her desire to become beautiful and contributes to the
creation of her new mirror image:
I... fell to looking into my own eyes again, with the yearning, stronger than
it had ever been before, rising like a passion into my face... ...My reflected
face grew blurred, and then faded out; and from the mist there grew a new
face, of wonderful beauty; the face of my desire. It looked at me from the
glass, and when I tried to speak, its lips moved too.32
29
Ibid.
30
Ibid.
31
32
The subject is constituted as lack when he identifies with the image in

the mirror, that is, when the other identifies the image in the reflection as
his own. Like the image, upon the reiteration of the subject’s speech, the
subject comes into being. This entire scene resonates with the scene
described by Lacan in the mirror stage. When Mary senses her acute jeal-
ousy of Bella, she strongly wishes to become beautiful, and suddenly,
something magical takes place in front of the mirror. Mary describes her
transformation as a passion that entered her face. She also describes the
power that caused her transformation as “the power of desire.”33 My read-
ing of it is that Mary’s jealousy enables her to conjure something of her
desire, acting as a sort of catalyst. The passion or desire Mary is describing
is not necessarily desire in Lacanian terms, but it seems to have made
something of that desire emerge. Mary uses the transformation to make
something of her desire possible: wearing the face of Mary H., she starts
attending dinners and balls, and lives a life of leisure that she had never
experienced before. Mary’s new face indeed changes her personality and
gives her a new identity; in the body of M. H., she is seductive, flirta-
tious, and self-confident, and Gerald woos her. The image in the mirror
is what gives the subject the alienating armor of his identity.34 This iden-
tity is the subject’s persona that allows oneself to exist in the social sphere.
“The face of my desire” is an equivocal term. A possible reading of it is
that the face that looks at Mary from the mirror, the face of M. H., is the
face Mary desires to have. Before her transformation, Mary refers to her
face as “my face” and “my eyes,” whereas after the transformation the face
turns into an “it.”35 Being referred to as an object of possession, Mary’s
face of desire receives a phallic value, the value of something one “has” or
“does not have.” The new and beautiful face therefore functions for Mary
as a phallic object with which she masquerades herself: after several weeks
of transforming into Mary H. every night, Mary declares the following:
“I’m tired of masquerading.”36 Interestingly, this term was coined by
33
Ibid.
34
Lacan (2006a).
35
36
Ibid., 70.
sychoanalyst Joan Riviere in 1929 to designate a woman who is a man

p
dressed as a woman.37 Lacan borrowed this term from her to refer to the
hysteric as a woman who plays the part of a man.38 In psychoanalytic
terms, Mary’s sentence can be translated thus as follows: “I am tired of
pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man.” The masquerade is
the way for a woman to cover her lack by pretending to have a phallus.
Olivia Shakespear apparently knew this before psychoanalysis.
According to Riviere, a woman who is masquerading is afraid to be
found a thief of the phallus that is not her own. This provokes anxiety.
Zupančič takes up the subject of masquerade and underlines the femi-
nine anxiety that is attached to it. This anxiety, according to Zupančič, is
the anxiety of being revealed as nothing: “In other words, the really trou-
bling question here is: What if I’m not really anything, what if there is no
‘me’ in any of this? This ontological anxiety doesn’t stop at ‘Am I that
name?’, rather, it revolves around ‘Do I exist at all?’ All that I have left at
this point is a pretense, a mask.”39 Thus, Mary’s tiredness of being, of
being a woman with a phallus, of being Mary Hatherley, pronounces the
anxiety of a woman caused by her existence in the social sphere. It is a
type of an existential anxiety displayed here by Mary that is attached to
being a woman pretending to have a phallus. There is no Woman, Lacan
tells us: The Woman does not exist, which means that each woman has to
invent her own version of being a woman. Masquerading is a manner of
hiding this being, namely by pretending to have. Femininity is closely
related to the nothing all of us are trying to hide. Marguerite Duras writes
around this nothing in her novels, as I will show in the following chapters.
Another interesting point to make in this regard is that Mary delin-
eates the feeling of transforming back to the body of Mary G. after being
in the body of Mary H. as “a sensation of being in darkness ... from which
I emerged with my beauty fallen from me like a garment.”40 Mary’s
37
Riviere (1929).
38
Lacan (1999).
39
Zupančič (2017), 56.
40
attitude toward her new body after her transformation is a unique por-
trayal of what Lacan calls in his twenty-third seminar, Le Sinthome, a
possible relationship to one’s body that is constructed during the mirror
stage.41 Her description of beauty as a garment, of wearing the imaginary
body as an attire, is similar to James Joyce’s description of his body as
something that can be peeled off of him like fruit skin, meaning some-
thing that is not his own.42 Mary speaks of the face that stares at her from
the mirror after her transformation as an object, and the question remains:
will she except this image as her own armor of identity, like the child in
the mirror, or throw it away?
Returning to St. Augustine’s Invidia, in his twentieth seminar, Lacan
refers to Augustine’s jealousy as the first substitution of the subject to the
jouissance that he derives from his first object, the Other.43 It means that
jealousy directs the subject to the little a, the object of desire. This sheds
an important light on the function of jealousy in the subject’s life. The
question arises whether the subject will be able to move from this object,
and be guided toward his desire, or if she will choose to remain with the
satisfaction she derives from her jealousy (oral and scopic), from her objet
jouissance, which causes her also a considerable amount of suffering, and
keeps the child attached to her mother’s lap. The more the subject is
closer to the other, the more he is attracted to the specular identification,
in which he is the object, and wishes to protect the complete mirror
image that he guards.44
Paradoxically, one way to gain satisfaction is to leave this initial other
and become an object a in the place of desire for another person. Perhaps
this is what Lacan means when he asks the following in his twentieth
seminar: “Is having the a the same as being it?”45 Lacan, in other words,
designates two possible positions of subjectivity, one of having, and one
of being.
41
Lacan (2016b).
42
Ibid.
43
Ibid.
44
Lacan (2016a).
45
Lacan (1999), 100.
Mary’s Jealousy II: A Shunning of Desire

The experiences Mary goes through during the nights leave a mark on her
also during the days, still working in Gerald’s residence, in the body of
Mary G. After receiving the attention and privileges of a beautiful woman,
Mary’s behavior changes: she “forgets herself,” becomes impatient with
her employer and does not act as sympathetic to her environment as she
used to before the transformation.46 Mary starts to rebel, advancing a
subjective agency that was not enacted by her in the past. However, soon
enough, the readers learn that even though her new personality does not
fit in with the body and persona of Mary G, Mary also fails to identify
with the body of Mary H. The transformation initiates a split in herself,
and she becomes jealous of herself.47
In his eleventh seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,
Lacan designates the relation of the subject to the Other according to the
logical disjunction of the level of alienation.48 Alienation implies that the
subject is torn between a movement, in which he allegedly has two
choices, but in fact in one of which he disappears, for example: “your
money or your life.”49 Losing your life means also giving up money, los-
ing money means living life deprived of something. Similarly, according
to Montrelay, the choice of assuming one’s body upon oneself, to accept
one’s body as one’s “own,” has deadly ramifications: “The gaze which fixes
the form in the mirror, which helps to repress the drive, the aggressiveness
of primary narcissism, is also deadening.”50 What is it that is deadened in
this act?
As mentioned earlier, the first time that Mary announces her jealousy
of M. H. in the novella’s beginning, she asks the following: “Was Mary
Gower beginning already to be jealous of Mary Hatherley?”51 It is inter-
esting to note the word “already”; it is as if Mary’s jealousy of herself is to
46
Shakespear (2016).
47
Ibid.
48
Lacan (1998).
49
Ibid., 212.
50
51
be expected according to Lacan’s saying that a woman is always “other to

herself.”52 Mary’s oscillation between the first and third persons in her
speech depicts the movement of alienation that Lacan speaks of in his
eleventh seminar.53 At the novella’s ending, Mary chooses to stop her
transformations to Mary H., leaving both her job and Gerald. In this act,
she gives her subjective answer to Lacan’s question, “your money or your
life.”54 The jealousy Mary feels after her transformation, her jealousy of
herself as M. H. does not lead her in the direction of desire. It is the
destructive side of jealousy that causes Mary to retreat in the face of
Gerald’s love. In fact, at the novella’s ending, Mary refuses to be in com-
petition with her semblable, Bella. She destroys her desire and directs
Gerald to Bella, telling herself that it is her (Bella) who is really meant
for him.
To assume one’s body upon oneself requires Mary to relinquish her
jealousy, which is turned into empathy toward Bella at the story’s ending.
The choice between accepting one’s image in the mirror in exchange for
alienation and a deadening of jouissance is also the choice Mary had to
make in Shakespear’s novella. This choice is similar to Dora’s choice in the
well-known Freudian case, to be discussed later.
Montrelay writes that when the woman is jealous of the other woman,
she becomes interested in her body, her behavior, her passions. Following
the other woman, she says, can be a solution for the woman who is no
longer the object of her lover’s gaze, which is turned to another.55 An
important point to make is that there exists a difference between “follow-
ing the other woman” and identifying with her. In the story’s beginning,
following Bella’s footsteps is a solution that gives Mary a new body. This
body allows her to take part in the social game and opens a gate to her
femininity. However, when push comes to shove, Mary is unable to iden-
tify with her body, not the one of Mary G., nor that of Mary H., switch-
ing her identity from one to another, not admitting to herself or the
world of being both women.
52
Lacan (1999), 81.
53
Lacan (1998).
54
Ibid., 212.
55
Montrelay (1977b).
Instead of embracing her new status as beautiful and enjoying the priv-
ileges that she receives as Mary H., as well as Gerald’s love, Mary chooses
to empathize with Bella, who was pushed aside by Gerald as a result of his
infatuation with Mary H: “A very short while ago you were quite taken
up with Bella Sturgis. You don’t care the least for her feelings; you simply
follow your impulses, and desert her for a more attractive woman …
‘Poor Bella!’ I cried ‘You may drift into marrying her yet’.”56 Like Dora
from Freud’s case, which will be discussed in a later chapter, Mary meta-
phorically slaps Gerald for turning his back on Bella once he falls in love
with (her as) Mary H. Refusing to see herself as the object of Gerald’s
desire, Mary identifies with Bella. She is afraid that Gerald’s fickleness
may lead him “into marrying her yet.” This sentence supposedly refers to
Bella but also exposes her fear that Gerald wants to marry (her as) Mary
H., or that if she were to accept his courting of Mary H., he will eventu-
ally leave her for Bella. Mary uses Bella’s body as a defense against the
man’s love, and shows compassion toward her, in a manner of jealous
identification that leads her to betray her own interests—and desire.
Mary’s mirror image is deficient; she does not identify with her body
as Mary H., and it peels off from her, like a garment. Mary’s denial of her
body is so great that she develops a hatred toward it, while over-
appreciating Bella. It is noticeable in sentences such as “I grew to hate the
other Mary’s beautiful face … I seemed to have realized Mary Hatherley
as … distinct from myself. She was the woman Gerald Harman loved; she
was the woman … she was the woman who had done both Gerald and
another a wrong that might never be undone.”57 In this dramatic mono-
logue, we see that Mary’s jealousy of M. H. had turned into hatred toward
herself, and compassion toward the other woman, with whom she identi-
fies. Mary’s jealousy is that of narcissistic, primary, feminine jealousy that
refuses to separate from the body of the other woman and pushes her to
deny her own body. In this display of feminine jealousy and feminine jou-
issance, both of which will be explained in the following chapter, Mary
denies her desire and femininity, and situates Mary H. as The Woman,
The One, which Mary is not. In his twentieth seminar, Lacan teaches that
56
57
Ibid., 75 (emphases mine).
“The Woman does not exist; ”58 there is no one woman who is She, who
is Perfection, who is Everything, who is not lacking, who is not subject to
castration. At the heart of feminine jouissance and feminine jealousy,
there is a belief that The Woman exists, that is, that another woman pos-
sesses something which I do not.59 This belief is related to the pre-Oedipal
period, where the mother is still not lacking, and where castration is still
not registered.
At the end of the story, Mary refuses to take Mary H.’s body upon
herself when she refuses to tell Gerald that the person with whom he is in
love is actually her: “Then there came a wild moment in which I was near
telling him all … ‘I have one last word to leave you,’ I said to him. ‘You
will forget me. When I am only a memory, go back to Bella; for you loved
her’.”60 A possible reading of this tragic ending is that Mary’s jealousy
prevails her, which is why she renounces her image as Mary Hatherley,
leaves Gerald both as Mary Hatherley and Mary Gower, and directs him
to Bella’s arms. Mary chooses to isolate herself, when she goes off to live
with her father’s old friend and takes care of him.
Madeleine Chapsal, in an interview with Montrelay, was curious what
does it mean then to follow the other woman. What is this passion toward
the other woman and is it, indeed, homosexual?61 Beauty’s Hour, and the
road not taken there by Mary, provides further clarification in my opin-
ion for the solution of “following the other woman” as a solution to jeal-
ousy. We see that at first, Mary manages to follow the other woman, that
is, when she transforms into a beautiful woman and creates a new life for
herself. However, at the plot’s conclusion, Mary identifies and sympa-
thizes with Bella, and, as a result, she forsakes the new life she created for
herself, thinking it is not her but Bella who deserves this life. Mary’s
choices provide crucial knowledge about the possible consequences of
jealousy, namely leaving the path that leads to desire. Perhaps Olivia
Shakespear did the same thing as well, when leaving Yeats as Maud Gonne
58
Lacan (1999), 72–73.
59
Bruce Fink’s translation for Lacan’s phrase “La femme n’existe pas” is “there is no such thing as
Woman.” However, Fink explicitly mentions in the footnote that the French version indicates that
it is “La femme” who does not exist, and not just “femme” (Lacan 1999, 72 n. 29).
60
61
Montrelay (1977b).
did, identifying with Gonne’s absence that is present even in her name.
Shakespear was supposed to leave her husband for Yeats, and there was a
change of heart at the last minute, supposedly due to Yeats’ infidelity. She
left her husband eventually, but never remarried, and Shakespear and
Yeats remained good friends until their deaths. Yeats had married
Shakespear’s niece. This speculation is based on some autobiographical
details of Shakespear and Yeats found in Yeats’ Memoires and letters, but
of course one cannot speak for Shakespear about her desire for her or the
decisions she made in her life.
Works Cited
Copjec, J. (2015). Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Verso Books.
Daniel, A. M. (2016). Foreword to Beauty’s Hour. In A. M. Daniel (Ed.), Beauty’s
Hour. Valancourt Books.
Lacan, J. (1998). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964–1965) (A. Sheridan, Trans. & Jacque-Alain
Miller, ed.). W.W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006a). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed
in Psychoanalytic Experience. In Écrits (B. Fink, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed.,
pp. 75–82). W.W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006b. Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis. In Écrits (B. Fink, Trans. &
Lacan, J. (2016a). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety (1962–1963)
(A.R. Price, Trans. & J.-Alain Miller, ed.). Polity Press.
Lacan, J. (2016b). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII: The Sinthome
(1975–1976) (A. Price, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed.). Polity Press.
Miller, J.-A. (2018). L’Un-tout-seul – L’orientation lacanienne, 2010–2011. La
Martinière.
Montrelay, M. (1977a). L’Ombre et le Nom: Sur la féminité. Minuit.
Montrelay, M. (1977b). La Jalousie. In M. Chapsal (Ed.), La Jalousie: Entretiens
Riviere, J. (1929). Womanliness as Masquerade. The International Journal of

Psychoanalysis, 9, 303–313.
Shakespear, O. (2016). In A. M. Daniel (Ed.), Beauty’s Hour [1896].
Valancourt Books.
Wyatt, J. (1998). I Want to Be You: Envy, the Lacanian Double, and Feminist
Community in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride. Tulsa Studies in Women’s
Literature, 17, 37–64.
Yeats, W. B. (1972). Memoires. Macmillan.
Yeats, W. B. (2022). The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love. American Literature.
Retrieved June 15, 2023, from https://americanliterature.com/author/
william-butler-yeats/poem/the-lover-mourns-for-the-loss-of-love
Zupančič, A. (2017). What Is Sex? MIT Press.
5
Two Types of Jealousy—Phallic Jealousy
and Feminine Jealousy
Abstract This chapter offers a differentiation between two types of jeal-

ousy, phallic and feminine. Building on Freud’s theory of the develop-
ment of feminine sexuality and on Lacan’s logical formulas of feminine
and masculine sexuality in his twentieth seminar, this chapter elaborates
these jealousies. It also follows Montrelay’s original thinking about jeal-
ousy in women and explores feminine jealousy as the origin of phallic
jealousy, what was termed by Freud as penis envy. It also unfolds the term
“ravage,” which Lacan coined to designate the mother-daughter relation-
ship, as the main characteristic of feminine jealousy and as its locus.
Keywords Ravage • Feminine jealousy • Phallic jealousy • The Oedipus

complex • Sigmund Freud • Penis envy • Jacques Lacan
Phallic Jealousy
One of the first articulations of the Oedipus complex is found in Freud’s
letter to friend and colleague Wilhelm Fleiss. Freud and Fleiss engaged in
a thorough correspondence in the early years of psychoanalysis, a

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3_5
correspondence that Freud referred to as his “self-analysis,” which helped

him in making some of his grand discoveries. In this letter, Freud describes
the Oedipus complex, based on his personal experience, as “the experi-
ence of helplessness told by a jealous man.”1 Such description of the
Oedipus complex ties jealousy with the experience of helplessness of the
child who seeks satisfaction from his mother, and who wishes to murder
his father so as to achieve that purpose. Jealousy is thus originated in the
most primal need of the child to be nurtured, and his fear that he will
cease to be loved and cared for.2
The Oedipus complex is described by Freud as being in love with one
parent and wishing to murder the other who is positioned as the subject’s
rival and object of jealousy.3 Freud finds proof for the relevance of the
Oedipus complex in neurotics in the fact that Oedipus Rex, the play writ-
ten by Sophocles in ancient Greece, gains timeless popularity, which is
true to this day. According to Freud, the play continues to shock audi-
ences in modern times because it touches upon one of the most repressed
wishes of every subject.4
In the case of the little boy, the Oedipal situation is supposedly simple.
His attachment to the mother is an attachment to the nourishing Other
that gave him life, who was also his first love object, before his discovery
about the sexual difference. The child’s jealousy at the Oedipal stage is
thus directed at his father-rival, and it dissolves only upon the dissolution
of the Oedipus complex. However, the situation is not the same for the
little girl. The Oedipus complex for the girl is related to her discovery of
not having a penis, through her recognition that her mother does not
have one.5 During the pre-Oedipus phase, the girl is completely attached
1
Freud and Masson (1985), 270.
2
Freud (1953a).
3
Freud and Masson (1985).
4
Freud (1958).
5
A common mistake is to refer to the girl’s Oedipus complex as the “Electra complex.” This term
was coined by psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung who developed his own psychoanalytic theory, one
that differs from that of Freud. Freud expressly rejected this term and Jung’s theory of sexual devel-
opment, which creates a parallelism between the sexual development of the two sexes (Cf.
Laplanche, 1988, 126).
5 Two Types of Jealousy—Phallic Jealousy and Feminine Jealousy 51
to her mother, and she loves her as a “phallic mother,”6 that is, a mother
who allegedly has a phallus. When the girl discovers that her mother
“does not have one,” she encounters castration, which leads her to penis
envy and to the Oedipus complex that is expressed by turning to her
father with the wish to receive the organ that was deprived from her by
her mother. According to Freud, this is only mended when the young
woman replaces the wish for a phallus with the wish for a baby.7
Penis envy, the term that Freud gives to the girl’s jealousy of the boy for
having a penis, makes Freud suspect that jealousy is more prevalent in
women.8 It is not that the boy does not feel jealous, but the very particu-
lar feeling of penis envy that Freud gathers from listening to his patients,
which the girl encounters during her phallic period, greatly influences the
girl’s sexuality and love life. In the Oedipus complex, the girl’s jealousy
and animosity toward her mother increase.9 The girl identifies with the
mother and is jealous of her for having the father’s phallus to play with,
or even for having the girl herself, as her phallic replacement.10 Penis envy
is what drives the girl’s libido to her father instead of her mother. The
disappointment of discovering that her mother does not have one leads
the girl to change objects, a change that requires accepting a loss.
Penis envy attracts the girl to her father, according to Freud, yet at the
same time, it also involves the registration of castration, via the creation
of new phallic representations, inter alia, by prescribing the lack of the
mother’s organ. Therefore, the term “penis envy” relates a woman’s desire
to the lost object, namely the mother’s penis, to the satisfaction she is
always missing. This is the lost object, which shall never be found, but
which will constitute the subject’s object of desire, according to Lacan.11
One of the implications of this is that the Oedipal stage for a woman
already involves separation from her first object. Penis envy acknowledges
castration in that sense that it already follows the logic of having or not
6
Freud (1953b), 126.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
10
Arambourou (1996).
11
Lacan (1992).
having a phallus, belonging or not to the group that is subject to castra-

tion by the father. In fact, Lacan goes as far as to denote the castration
complex—penis envy, also noting that it is “in men and women alike,”12
unlike what Freud figured. In other words, castration is not only present
in men and jealousy is not only present in women. Both are present in
biological men and women, alike, and differently.
The reason Lacan chose to emphasize that penis envy exists in men and
women alike, is that the penis and the phallus are not the same. Montrelay
reminds us, quoting the writers of “New Psychoanalytic Views,” that
“penis envy is always envy of an idealized penis,”13 and one must not
confuse the phallus with the penis. The discovery about a woman’s lack
also has implications for the boy that are expressed, inter alia, in the dis-
solution of the boy’s Oedipal complex and in the fear of being castrated
like his mother.14
Returning to the little girl, Montrelay indicates that it is the lack of the
father’s phallic power, which makes the woman fantasize about having it,
to reassert its power, thus making it ideal.15 Therefore, penis envy is one
type of jealousy, one that requires castration as it already presumes a lack
in the subject. Following Montrelay and peers, I will refer to penis envy
as “phallic jealousy.” This type of jealousy, this particular envy, is a jealousy
of the phallus, the symbolic value that is ascribed to the penis and not of
the penis itself.
In his twentieth seminar, Encore, Lacan first introduced the concept of
feminine jouissance, and differentiated between it and phallic jouissance.
Phallic jouissance follows the law of castration, where the jealous person
desires an object as a replacement to the lost object. I should note that the
primary feature of this jealousy is that it occurs when the subject already
recognizes a sexual difference, an existence of a body that is Other to
myself. This body is always the feminine body. Therefore, phallic jealousy
is present when the subject already “owns” a body, following the mir-
ror stage.
12
Lacan (2017), 27.
13
Chasseguet-Smirgel (1970), 2; Montrelay (1996), 34.
14
Freud (1961).
15
Montrelay (1978).
An example for phallic jealousy is found at the beginning of Beauty’s

Hour, when Mary is complaining about her “lack,”16 claiming that if she
were to have beauty, or even only “personal fascination”17 she would have
everything she would need in the world. Mary is sure that the one thing
she is missing in order to be happy is beauty, what serves her as a phallic
instrument. Montrelay clarified that when it comes to penis envy, one
must be reminded that what the girl is envious of is not the penis per se,
but the social benefits and status that accompanies the phallus’ owner.18
This means that phallic jealousy is a feeling of deprivation. One can hear
it in the clinic quite often by women who complain about “not having,”
whether it is a job, money, or even clothes. This feeling of deprivation can
cause a substantial amount of suffering.
After elaborating phallic jealousy and upon following the thread of
Mary’s jealousy in Beauty’s Hour, I have figured that if there was only
phallic jealousy, Mary would have accepted her wish to become beautiful
and be with the man she loves. According to my reading, it was not phal-
lic jealousy which caused Mary to denounce her new persona and her
beloved. In the next section, I will present and develop the type of jeal-
ousy that I refer to, following Montrelay,19 as feminine jealousy, which has
its origins in the pre-Oedipal phase.
Feminine Jealousy
In his introductory lecture on femininity, Freud tries to confront “the
riddle of femininity.”20 There, and in his other articles on feminine sexu-
ality, Freud discovered and presented the pre-Oedipal phase in the devel-
opment of feminine sexuality.21 The importance Freud ascribed to the
pre-Oedipal phase in women is so significant that he renounced the uni-
versality of his prior statement about the Oedipal phase being the “nucleus
16
17
Ibid.
18
Montrelay (1996).
19
Ibid.
20
Freud (1953b), 113.
21
Freud (1950).
of the neurosis.”22 It is worth mentioning that according to Freud, the

pre-Oedipal phase occurs only in the life of women, as only a woman
needs to change her object from the mother to the father in order to enter
the Oedipal stage. However, Freud himself admitted that femininity and
masculinity are traits that can be found in both sexes, and that femininity
is a subjective position. This matter creates a perplexity in relation to the
origins of femininity in the sexual development of men, considering that
even if there is a pre-Oedipal phase in men, the anatomical difference
impacts the consequences of the same stage, which are still enigmatic.
In the pre-Oedipal phase of feminine sexuality, a woman experiences
attachment to her mother, the satisfier of vital needs. She divests her
entire libido in her, while the father at this point is a mere “troublesome
rival.”23 This phase contains many early sexual wishes in relation to the
mother, and is characterized by “an especially inexorable repression.”24
The end of the pre-Oedipus is typified by strong hatred toward the
mother, represented by different reproaches directed at her, one of which
is for not providing enough milk. Freud notes that this claim may also be
heard in cases where the mother kept nursing her child until the age of
three or four, meaning that there is something there that denies
satisfaction.25
After Freud establishes that the girl’s hostility toward her mother origi-
nates in the pre-Oedipal phase, he counts the factors for turning away
from the mother and entering the Oedipal phase, emphasizing that jeal-
ousy of other persons, among them siblings as well as the father, is there
“first and foremost.”26 According to Freud’s passage, which was also
quoted in the beginning of the third chapter, jealousy is the reason for the
daughter’s turning of her love from her mother to her father, when her
lack is not appeased by the mother’s love. Thus, the hatred of the girl
toward her mother, at the end of the pre-Oedipal phase, is related to one
of the major etiologies of jealousy of a younger child, which is based on
22
Ibid., 226.
23
Freud (1950), 226.
24
Ibid.
25
Ibid.
26
Freud (1950), 231.
the child’s insatiable need for nourishment. With regard to the pre-
Oedipal phase, Freud found that “in this dependence on the mother we
have the germ of later paranoia in women,”27 a notion which he bases on
the article “Analysis of Delusional Jealousy” authored by American psy-
choanalyst Ruth Mack Brunswick, his close student, where she describes
a patient’s pre-Oedipal fixation to her sister.28 In this little footnote Freud
attributes, in fact, the type of jealousy which he calls delusional to the
pre-Oedipal complex, indicating that there is a type of jealousy that finds
its source there that is not penis envy. Jacqueline Rose insightfully notes
that it is here that penis envy fails. According to Rose, “it is clear that
nothing has been answered at all…”29 that is, in reference to penis envy.
I do not agree that nothing has been answered and would say that some-
thing has been answered but that this something is, following Lacan’s
twentieth seminar, not-all. In other words, the nothing of feminine jeal-
ousy has not fully been explored, nor can it ever be fully explored.
And indeed, the same love that is “boundless” and that “is incapable of
obtaining complete satisfaction” 30 articulated by Freud is the love that
Lacan would develop in his twentieth seminar, Encore, as feminine jouis-
sance, the limitless, insufferable enjoyment that exists in both men and
women, but that is logically attributed to the one who is not fully under
castration, the one who in the symbolic-imaginary realm is lacking, that
is, woman. Feminine jouissance is a woman’s sexual enjoyment that goes
beyond that which takes place in coitus, beyond the phallic instrument,
as the myth of Tiresias teaches us, observes Lacan.31 Tiresias, who experi-
enced sex as both man and woman, was asked by the gods whether men
or women enjoy more. His answer was that a woman enjoys approxi-
mately ten times more than a man. Thus, feminine jouissance can keep on
going again and again, encore, as the seminar’s title indicates. According
to Lacan, this jouissance serves the nothing and comes to the subject as an
imposition from the super ego: “Enjoy! [Jouir!].”32
27
Ibid., 227.
28
Ibid., 227, n. 1.
29
Rose (2002), 42.
30
Freud (1950), 231.
31
Lacan (1999).
32
Ibid., 3.
Jouissance is the enjoyment of the Other body, the body of the Other,
or the body of yourself as other. Phallic jouissance is the jouissance of the
organ, the jouissance of the signifier, while the feminine position is situ-
ated as not wholly under phallic jouissance, not-all under the phallic func-
tion, and not entirely subject to the Law of the ather.33 As such, it goes
beyond the desire to have a phallus. It means that the sexuated feminine
position dwells in another jouissance, one which is not expressible in
words, unrepresented by phallic signification and infinite. It is akin to the
dark continent of femininity that Freud articulated, that which goes
beyond sense and does not abide by the rule of castration.
In L’Ombre et le Nom: Sur la féminité, Montrelay developed the femi-
nine organization of the libido, termed the concentric economy, similar to
what Lacan would later develop as the discussed feminine jouissance. The
concentric economy of the libido is characterized by silence and “stupor;
”34 in it, no representation is registered in the psyche even as unconscious.
According to Freud, the condition for representation is repression. If
something is not represented in the psyche, it means that it did not go
through the process of repression, that is, that it is not symbolized for the
subject as a memory trace, as representation.35 Jealousy of the feminine
period is that which refuses to separate itself from the mother’s body,
refusing to lose the last physical connection of the child to it, namely via
the nipple and the mouth. Montrelay writes that in the deepest, wildest
formulation of jealousy, the subject, his parents, and his siblings are still
one body. It requires a minimum of speech to create at least an initial
separation between the members of the family, so that the subject will not
feel himself as nothing more than a dismembered body,36 that is, symbol-
ization or representation is necessary for separation. Femininity is charac-
terized by its un-representability in speech and, instead, it comes back in
the subject’s life as real, in Lacanian terms, as a repetition that is unex-
plained and un-signified, causing suffering in the subject’s life.
33
Ibid.
34
Montrelay (1977), 71 (translation mine).
35
Freud and Masson (1985).
36
Montrelay (1996).
Based on Freud’s articulations of jealousy in the pre-Oedipal phase,

and Montrelay’s and Lacan’s developments of a concentric economy and
feminine jouissance, respectively, I discover a type of jealousy that is pri-
mal to phallic jealousy, which I refer to as primary jealousy or feminine
jealousy, a term Montrelay used in “La jalousie.” Feminine jealousy finds
its source in the inability to separate from the object that provides satis-
faction, which is also the object of identification in the Oedipal phase for
the daughter, that is, the mother. Being under the feminine organization
of the unconscious, feminine jealousy is silent, chaotic, and close to the
Lacanian Real. Primary, feminine jealousy has a sadomasochistic, aggres-
sive nature, before the constitution of the subject via the mirror stage. It
presides in primary narcissism and in the autoerotic jouissance of the body
before the subject knows how to differentiate between her own body and
that of her semblable.
Feminine Jealousy and Ravage

Following the discovery of the pre-Oedipal phase, Freud underlines that
the rivalry of the mother-daughter is rooted there, and not in the Oedipus
complex. Lacan termed this rivalry as “ravage” in “L’Étourdit.”37 There,
Lacan states that woman bases herself on a moiety, being not entirely in
the phallic function; her libido is directed toward an Other jouissance,
that which is alive in ravage. Ravage, tells us Montrelay, is a battle of non-
separation that tears and suffocates the mother and daughter.38 The trou-
ble that a woman has with her father, says Lacan, is secondary to the
ravaging devastation of her relationship with her mother.39 Originated in
the pre-Oedipal phase, ravage is pre-castration, meaning that the meta-
phors of loss and desire are not operative there. It is located thus outside
of sense, outside of the signifier, and before the mirror stage.
37
Lacan (2009).
38
Montrelay (1977).
39
Ibid.
Ravage is related to a woman’s relationship to her own body, which

Montrelay describes as “simultaneously narcissistic and erotic.”40 It
encompasses an intense jealousy of the body that is concurrently your
body and other to it. The kernel constituent of ravage is feminine jealousy.
In feminine jealousy, the little daughter identifies with the mother, who is
all-consuming for the daughter at this stage. She is das Ding, a mythical
creature that is both frightening and all-providing at the same time. The
feminine body is that unrepresented object, which becomes the battle-
field in the mother-daughter relationship; Montrelay describes the
mother and daughter as confronted in an interminable battle.41 “Ravage”
is the relationship between mother and daughter that stands like a threat-
ening sword over the throat of both, waiting to eliminate one or the
other, creating an inseparable bond between them. Loving and “tearing,”
“suffocating,” and “caressing,”42 ravage, circled around feminine jealousy,
knows no separation. The subject is her mother’s object Each woman
must invent her unique solution to feminine jealousy and ravage that
repeat in her love life in various ways, taking her back to the primary
relationship with her mother and the primary moments of her sexuality.
The encounter with the other woman, usually in relation to a man,
who is an object of the subject’s desire, stirs feminine jealousy. The jeal-
ousy of the other woman brings with it homosexual feelings that were
alive in ravage together with feelings of strong hatred and jealousy of the
woman who is both you and not you at the same time.
To conclude, the two types of jealousy that I developed in this chapter
are based on Lacan’s two types of jouissance and the two libidinal organi-
zations that Montrelay theorizes. Phallic jealousy is situated in the jouis-
sance that is subject to castration and is in the heart of the Oedipus
complex. It is the second instance of jealousy that manifests itself first in
the development of the subject only after the mirror stage, already recog-
nizing an other. The other jealousy, Feminine jealousy, originates in the
pre-Oedipal complex, and follows the logic of feminine jouissance, the
infinite jouissance that goes beyond the phallus and the logic of castration.
40
41
Ibid.
42
Ibid., 153–154 (translation mine).
Feminine jealousy is also the main constituent of ravage that is found in

the first and primal instance of jealousy in the subject’s life before she dif-
ferentiates between herself and the Other. The two types of jealousy exist
at the same time in the subject’s unconscious, and do not eliminate one
another. Phallic jealousy can accommodate something of feminine jeal-
ousy and can perhaps serve as a disguise for feminine jealousy, its mas-
querade, as the woman is not all under the phallus.
Works Cited
Arambourou, M. (1996). Arrêt sur image. In C. Maillet et al. (Eds.), Che Vuoi?
Series no. 6: Revue du Cercle Freudien. L’Harmattan.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1970). Female Sexuality: New Psychoanalytic Views.
University Michigan Press.
an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Other Works (J. Strachey,
Freud, S. (1953a). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII: A
Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works 1901–1905
(J. Stratchey et al., Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1953b). Femininity. In The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXII: New Introductory Lectures
on Psycho-analysis and other works (1931–1936) (J. Stratchey et al., Trans.).
Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1958). The Interpretation of Dreams. In The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IV: The Interpretation
of Dreams (First Part). Hogarth Press..
Freud, S. (1961). The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex. In The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX: The
Ego and the Id and Other Works 1923–1925 (J. Stratchey et al., Trans.).
Hogarth Press.
Freud, S., & Masson, J. M. (1985). The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to
Wilhelm Fleiss: 1887–1904. Belknap Press of HUP.
Lacan, J. (1992). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis (1959–1960) (D. Porter, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed.).
W.W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2009). L’étourdit [1972]. The Letter, 41, 31–80.
Lacan, J. (2017). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference (B. Fink,
Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed.). Polity Press.
Laplanche, J. (1988). The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Karnac Books and the
Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Montrelay, M. (1978). Inquiry into Femininity. In M/F: A Feminist Journal 1,
ed. Parveen Adams, Rosalind Coward, Elizabeth Cowie.
Montrelay, M. (1996). La Jalousie: Un branchement direct sur l’inconscient. In
C. Maillet et al. (Eds.), Che Vuoi? Series ni. 6 Revue du Cercle Freudien.
L’Harmattan.
Rose, J. (2002). Sexuality in the Field of Vision. Verso Books.
Shakespear, O. (2016). Beauty’s Hour [1896]. Ed. Anne Margaret Daniel.
Valancourt Books.
6
Jealousy and Identification—Dora
and the Young Homosexual Woman
Abstract This chapter examines feminine jealousy and identification

through a reading of Freud’s case of Dora and Freud’s case of the young
homosexual. These cases, together with the reading that was provided in
previous chapter of the case of Mary, Shakespear’s character in Beauty’s
Hour, illustrate that on the one hand, identification with the other
woman as a vicissitude of jealousy can unlock the gate for a woman to
explore her femininity, but on the other hand, it can also lead a woman
to reject her femininity. In addition, it studies the difference between
empathy and identification among women and how it relates to jealousy.
Keywords Identification • Homosexuality • Femininity • Freud • Dora
The Dora Case: A Case of Hysteria

In “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” Freud provides a
description of his analysis with Dora, a teenage girl with persistent cough
symptoms, who accuses her father’s friend, Mr. K, for pursuing her. Freud
notices Dora’s jealousy of Mrs. K, who is the wife of Mr. K, and the lover

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3_6
of Dora’s father, and deems it as derived from Dora’s love for her father.1
Freud notices Dora’s admirable words in praise of Mrs. K: “When Dora
talked about Frau K., she used to praise her ‘adorable white body’ in
accents more appropriate to a lover than to a defeated rival...”.2
Nonetheless, Freud did not put all the weight on Dora’s little infatua-
tion with Mrs. K, but on Dora’s jealousy of her, commenting that such
homosexual feelings are common in the unconscious life of hysterical
girls.3 After analyzing Dora’s dream, Freud concluded that Dora’s jealousy
of Mrs. K is in fact an unconscious mechanism meant to conceal Dora’s
love to Mr. K. and her fear of surrendering to his temptation.4 Even
though Freud notices Dora’s favorable attitude toward Mrs. K, his empha-
sis in her treatment returns time and again to Dora’s supposed feelings
toward Mr. K. This is Freud’s error in the case of Dora, according to Lacan.
Lacan read Freud’s analytic work in Dora’s case and constructed it in
three dialectic reversals.5 The second reversal, Lacan notes, is “far from
the alleged object of jealousy providing her true motive … [it] conceals
an interest in the rival-subject herself.”6 According to Lacan, this reversal
leads to the development of the truth. Lacan recognizes Dora’s fascina-
tion with Mrs. K not necessarily as homosexual, but as a relation to an
object that carries with it “the mystery of Dora’s own femininity, by which
I mean her bodily femininity.”7 Dora is fascinated with the feminine
body and finds an answer to her fascination, namely in the body of Mrs.
K, which provides her a portal to explore her own femininity.
Dora’s interest in Mrs. K leads her to identify with her. Jealousy and
identification work in a similar way, as both mask the interest in feminin-
ity and present a kind of reversal of it. Freud designated identification as
the “earliest expression of an emotional tie” with an object.8 However, he
stated that not every identification is based on strong empathy and that
1
Freud (1953).
2
Ibid., 61–62.
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
5
Lacan (2006).
6
Ibid., 179.
7
Ibid., 180.
8
Freud (1955), 120.
6 Jealousy and Identification—Dora and the Young Homosexual… 63
as a hysterical symptom, it can also be within a competition for a love

object.9 Freud exposed Dora’s manifold identifications in several inci-
dents. I would like to focus on the presentations of feminine identifica-
tions in Dora’s case, rather than the phallic ones. For example, Dora’s
identification with Mrs. K is present also in her coughs, the symptom
with which she arrived for treatment with Freud: Dora announced that
she learned from Mrs. K that a health condition may sometimes allow
you to evade unwanted duties. Mrs. K often felt unwell exactly when Mr.
K would come home from his excursions. In conjunction, Dora men-
tioned her cough that comes and goes, which, as Freud discovered, coin-
cided with Mr. K’s absence or presence, like Mrs. K’s cough—but with an
opposite reaction to the trigger (Dora coughed when Mr. K was gone).
However, in his interpretation of her cough, Freud also attributes greater
emphasis to Dora’s love for Mr. K than to her identification with Mrs. K.10
Elsewhere, Freud concludes that Dora’s behavior in relation to her
father’s love affair is more like that of a “jealous wife”11 than that of a
daughter, as it is characterized by an identification with the father’s love
object, whether the present one (Mrs. K.) or the past one (Dora’s mother).
By identifying with the object of her father’s desire, Dora could have
theoretically paved her own path to becoming a woman and an object of
another man’s desire. However, the question is how the subject uses her
identification, and what does she do with it, following the Lacanian for-
mula of savoir y faire, knowing how to do with it.
Another crucial identification of Dora is found in the made-famous
incident by the lake, where Mr. K., in trying to seduce Dora, told her a
sentence that enraged her: “I get nothing out of my wife,”12 and in
exchange was rewarded with a slap. Freud analyzes Dora’s slap as deriving
from her identification with the governess of the K’s children, with whom
Mr. K. had an affair, and to whom he said the exact same sentence. The
governess confessed to Dora about her affair with Mr. K., an affair that
resulted in pregnancy. Mr. K. promised the governess that he will leave
9
Ibid.
10
Freud (1953).
11
Ibid., 56.
12
Freud (1953), 98.
his wife for her, a promise he failed to fulfill, following which the govern-
ess left her position at the Ks by a fortnight notice, as was customary at
the time. Dora’s termination of her analysis with Freud is also made by a
fortnight’s notice. In the aftermath, Freud interprets Dora’s act as putting
him in the place of Mr. K and identifying again with the governess.13
Lacan’s analysis of Dora’s slap introduces a different angle to the case.
For Lacan, the slap indicates that Dora is mad at Mr. K for disparaging
his wife, who is Dora’s object of idealization and interest. Dora’s love for
Mrs. K and anger at Mr. K allow her to flee from the place of being Mr.
K’s object of desire.14 This way, her identification acts as a hindrance to
her femininity.
In my reading of the slap incident, I agree with both Freud and Lacan.
Dora has many reasons to be jealous of Mrs. K: she takes her father’s
attention, she is married to Mr. K, she is attractive, she has jewelries, etc.
However, Dora chose to convert her jealousy into empathy, love, identi-
fication, and idealization. Dora’s identification is an identification with a
woman whose husband betrayed her and chose another man who is
impotent (Dora’s father). This identification with a betrayed woman or a
woman who chose to be with an impotent man returns in Dora’s identi-
fication with the governess, with whom Mr. K. consummated his attrac-
tion, and betrayed her afterwards.15 Therefore, it is important to notice
that it is not only phallic identification Dora is enacting, as emphasized
by Jacqueline Rose,16 but more significantly, an identification with the
body of the rejected woman.
When Mr. K. told Dora that he gets nothing out of his wife, Dora
becomes infuriated because she idolized Mrs. K, who also provided her
with a gate to her femininity. However, Lacan underestimated Dora’s jeal-
ousy, which Freud exalted. It is not that Dora is not jealous, but rather it
is jealousy that attracted her to Mrs. K in the first place, as part of her
research into her femininity. When Dora slapped Mr. K, she supposedly
“chose sides,” being empathetic toward the governess and Mrs. K. and
13
Ibid.
14
Lacan (2006).
15
Freud (1953).
16
Rose (2002).
identifying with both, while situating herself in the place of a woman

who is no longer a man’s object of desire. However, empathy is not the
only transfiguration of jealousy.
A hypothetical question that I evoke is the following: What could have
Dora done differently with her jealousy were she to go through a Lacanian
rather than a Freudian analysis? What could be a possible vicissitude of
jealousy that is not empathy and identification that goes in tandem with
the Lacanian ethics of desire?
In relation to Dora, Lacan articulated what is true for every woman:
“In order for her to gain access to this recognition of her femininity, she
would have to assume [assumer] her own body, failing which she remains
open to the functional fragmentation (to refer to the theoretical contri-
bution of the mirror stage) that constitutes conversion symptoms.”17 For
Lacan, the subject’s body is always an imaginary body, and it is through
identification with one’s own body that the subject chooses to assume her
body upon herself. Instead of assuming her own body upon herself, Dora
seems to be identifying with the body of her semblable, the governess.
This imaginary body of the governess that Dora assumes, situating herself
in the governess’s shoes, continues until the end of her analysis, the result
of which is that she flees both Mr. K. and Freud. Whether Dora was
interested in Mr. K. or not is not pertinent; what is pertinent is that her
actions prevented her from facing the mere possibility of being an object
of his desire, from accessing something of her femininity. Dora’s jealousy
of Mrs. K and of the governess is appeased by her identification with
them. Dora’s identification protects her from her other femininity, allow-
ing her to escape both men and analysis. Freud’s conduct in the analysis
and his own identification and countertransference contributed to it.
Dora’s protective mechanism fails once Dora hears of Mrs. K’s own
betrayal of her by spilling Dora’s secrets to Mr. K.18 In that moment,
Dora chooses the body of the governess to veil her femininity, both from
herself and others, so that she will not have to compete for Mr. K’s love,
becoming a rival of the governess and Mrs. K. Such interpretation is not
17
Lacan (2006), 181.
18
Freud (1953).
stated directly by Lacan. Lacan showed that Dora’s feminine idealization

of Mrs. K. made her worship the feminine body. Being enchanted by
Mrs. K, Dora began researching her own femininity. However, this infat-
uation led to her identification and a refusal to assume her own feminine
body upon herself, being the object of a man’s infatuation.
There is something in common between Mary’s Case and Dora’s Case,
because in both cases feminine identification operates as a displacement
of jealousy. Instead of jealousy, there is empathy and identification which
derail the subject from her object of desire, making her relinquish it
instead of competing for it. The cases of Dora and Mary present a solu-
tion for feminine jealousy, which may be referred to as the “homosexual”
solution, even though it is not homosexual per se. This solution is homo-
sexual because it includes empathy toward the other woman that is in fact
an embodiment of jealous identification, this time in a manner that serves
to veil one’s interest in her femininity. This type of jealous identification
is not the one Montrelay refers to, namely a solution for jealousy by “fol-
lowing the other woman.”19 Rather, this solution sustains the body of the
other woman as an idealized body, as the body of The Woman, and simul-
taneously maintains the body of the subject as an inferior one, and not as
an object of desire. This empathy, which is meant to protect the subject
from her feminine jealousy or from her femininity, distances her from her
desire and from becoming a woman in her subjective and unique manner.
The Case of the Young Homosexual

In this case analysis, Freud described the preliminary meetings he had
with a girl whose parents had referred her for his treatment. Her parents
asked Freud to “cure” the girl of her homosexuality, a request Freud
rejected since it goes against the ethics of psychoanalytic treatment. Freud
was interested in the case and met with the patient for some time until he
decided to terminate the sessions.
The case revolves around a nineteen-year-old girl, who began courting
a young woman. That woman was notorious for living with a married
19
woman while engaging in intimate relations with other men. The case
came to Freud’s doorstep about six months after the girl tried to kill her-
self by jumping to the train tracks. This suicide attempt happened while
she was walking down the street with the woman she adored, and whom
she courted, when suddenly her father passed them by and ignored her.
According to Freud, the girl’s position toward that woman is a masculine
position, meaning that the girl acts as a man.20 This is also known in psy-
choanalytic terms as “phallic identification.” Freud emphasized that the
erotic precondition for the girl’s infatuation was that the object is a
“Lady.”21 Following Lacan, it can be said that the way in which the girl
wooed the woman is similar to the sublimation of courtly poets who
adored noble ladies and who raised these women to the level of an ideal
in their sonnet sequences.22 This was the poets’ ways to adore women
from afar, not putting themselves in a real risk of being in a love-
relationship with them, due to the supposed unattainability of the women
they adored.
Freud noted that the analytical material presented to him led him to
the conclusion that that girl’s interest in women in general and in older
women in particular began at the age of sixteen, and more specifically
with the birth of her third brother. By that time, Freud said, the girl had
developed a relationship with a three-year-old boy she met at the play-
ground, and her strong desire for motherhood was evident. Freud ana-
lyzed this strange result of having a brother and turning to female objects
as a “revival of the infantile Oedipus-complex so common at puberty.”23
According to his analysis, the girl had a strong desire for a baby boy and,
unconsciously, for a baby boy from her father: “And then: it was not she
who bore the child, but the unconsciously hated rival, her mother.
Exasperated and embittered, she turned away from the father and from
men altogether.”24 Thus, according to Freud, following the failure to
receive a baby from her father, the girl made a strategic decision to
20
Freud (1920).
21
Ibid., 137.
22
Lacan (1992).
23
Freud (1920), 135.
24
Ibid.
abandon her competition with her mother, up to the point of eliminating

her own femininity. This jealousy may be labeled as phallic jealousy if we
follow Freud’s assumption that the girl’s jealousy of the mother was
directed at having a son of her own, a phallus. Nonetheless, as I have
demonstrated above, phallic jealousy also veils primal, feminine jealousy.
In this case, the homosexual girl’s jealousy of her mother took over her
in such a way that she could no longer bear the competition with the
mother, who was herself a young woman, as Freud pointed out, admired
and coveted by men—“an inconvenient competitor.”25 When the girl
chose a homosexual object, she also enjoyed the fact that she removed her
mother’s displeasure at being a competition, and this can even be seen in
the patience that the mother displayed toward the daughter’s choice of an
object.26 What is this display of consideration if not the empathy that
Mary shows Bella and that Dora shows Mrs. K. and the governess? These
clear observations of Freud in the case of the young homosexual supports
the analysis of jealousy in these cases.
However, Freud overemphasizes the father once more. For him, the
girl’s choice for the homosexual object displeased the father greatly, which
reinforced her in return as her goal, which according to Freud, was “out
of defiance against her father.”27 However, in my reading of the case, in
comparison with the case of Dora, Mary, and my study of jealousy, I
would claim that the mother’s new liking of her daughter serves as much
as an incentive as her father’s disliking. Not being able to compete with
her mother’s femininity, the girl decided to drop out of the race. The
father’s disliking was a poor after-affect, which caused her great displea-
sure that reached its height when she received his indifferent gaze. Her
jealousy of the phallic type retreated to feminine jealousy, a more archaic
one, and was then converted into empathy for the mother and a phallic
identification with the father.
25
Ibid., 135.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid., 137.
However, this phallic identification did not work well for that girl, for
when the father ignored the girl as he passed her on the street, the latent
love for him, as well as jealousy of her mother, arose from the repressed,
and the girl could not bear to have his gaze diverted from her. This diver-
sion of the gaze reminisces Montrelay’s words about the woman who feels
empty of jealousy after the gaze has been lifted from her, as will be further
explored in the literary case of Lol V. Stein. The girl’s jealousy pushed her
into the abyss, and she jumped into the train rails. Furthermore, her
father’s avoidance of her seemed to strip her of her phallic identification
and left her to fall as a discarded object. This case illustrates what can
occur to someone who loses her identification at an instant.
Works Cited
Freud, S. (1920). The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman.
In The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 1, 2. Retrieved June 15, 2023,
from https://The.Psychogenesis.of.a.case.of.female.Homosexuality.pdf
Freud, S. (1953). Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. In The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume VII: A
Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works 1901–1905
(J. Stratchey et al., Trans., pp. 1–122). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1955). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII
(1920–1922):: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other
Works (J. Stratchey et al., Trans., pp. 65–144). Hogarth Press.
Psychoanalysis (B. Fink, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed.). W.W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006). Presentation on Transference. In Écrits (B. Fink, Trans. &
Rose, J. (2002). Sexuality in the Field of Vision. Verso Books.
7
Jealousy Among Men: Schreber’s
Delusional Jealousy and Little Hans’
Feminine Jealousy
Abstract This chapter explores the subject of jealousy in biological men

and in their early childhood. It turns to Freud’s cases of Schreber and
Little Hans, as well as his articles on the link between jealousy and homo-
sexuality so to extract a certain logic relating to jealousy among biological
men. It also elaborates on Lacan’s reading of Freud’s analysis of the case of
Little Hans in his fourth seminar, and on Michèle Montrelay’s criticism
of the case and its analysis. Finally, it illustrates how every case explored
by Freud provides a connecting thread between jealousy and one’s
repressed femininity.
Keywords Feminine jealousy • Delusional jealousy • Homosexuality •

Femininity • Freud • Paranoia
elusional Jealousy and Repressed

D
Femininity—Freud’s Case of Schreber
The question this chapter engages with is as follows: how is feminine
jealousy displayed among men, and from where does it originate? Freud
asserted in various places that “there is yet another difference between the

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3_7
sexes, which relates to the Oedipus complex,”1 and that, as opposed to

men, women’s sexual development is divided into two main phases, the
Oedipal and the pre-Oedipal, the latter of which is the origin of feminine
jealousy. How does feminine jealousy, which is also the main feature of
ravage among women, exist in biological men, and is there any difference
at the way it manifests itself them?
In “Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and
Homosexuality,” Freud distinguishes three types of jealousy: competitive
or normal, projected, and delusional.2 About the “competitive or nor-
mal” type Freud states that
it is rooted deep in the unconscious; it is a continuation of the earliest stir-

rings of the child’s affective life, and it originates in the Oedipus or family
complex of the first sexual period … It is noteworthy that in many persons
it is experienced bisexually; that is to say, in a man, beside the suffering in
regard to the loved woman and the hatred against the man rival, grief in
regard to the unconsciously loved man and the hatred of the woman as a
rival will add to its intensity.3
Freud refers to jealousy here in the context of jealous spouses. This

introductory paragraph condenses a lot of information regarding jealousy
in men. Freud underlines that competitive jealousy is something that is
considered normal, that is, it is healthy and common among neurotics.
Freud adds that on many occasions, this jealousy among men has to do
with grief relating to an unrequited love for a certain man, evidently an
unconscious one. In view of his observations on jealous male patients
who revealed unconscious homosexual love feelings, Freud thus under-
lines that competitive or normal jealousy can be experienced bisexually.4
Freud equates the normal type of jealousy with the process of grief and
relates it to the narcissistic wound of the subject. At the same time, he
underlines feminine identification at the core of his patients’ jealousy,
mentioning that he “went through unendurable torments by consciously
1
Freud (1950), 228.
2
Freud (1923).
3
Ibid., 1–2.
4
Ibid.
7 Jealousy Among Men: Schreber’s Delusional Jealousy and Little… 73
imagining himself in the position of the faithless woman.”5 The patient

Freud is referring to here had associated his jealousy with sexual assaults
he experienced by a man in his childhood. This case, as well as others,
made Freud reach the conclusion about the link between jealousy and
feminine identification.
The relation between feminine identification and jealousy among men
can also be spotted in the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, who was a candi-
date for the presidency of the Reichstag, the highest court in Germany. He
described his memories of his mental illness and hospitalization in a book
that was analyzed by Freud.6 In a first psychotic outbreak about which
Schreber did not provide many details, Schreber was hospitalized for six
months in a mental institution, where he was treated by Professor
Flechsig.7
After that, the disease was dormant for eight years. An interesting
detail in Schreber’s story that Freud points out is the admiration his wife
held for the Professor who treated him: “The gratitude of my wife … was
perhaps even more heartfelt; for she revered Professor Flechsig as the man
who had restored her husband to her, and hence it was that for years she
kept his portrait standing upon her writing-table (36).”8 At the night of
the disease’s outbreak, Schreber described that after he had dreamt, for
the second time, that his disease returned, an image arose in him “that
after all it really must be very nice to be a woman submitting to the act of
copulation.”9 In his analysis of the case, Freud concluded that the reason
for the outbreak of his psychosis the second time was Schreber’s rejection
of this very thought, of this phantasy of being a woman who submits
herself to intercourse. Freud attributed this phantasy to Schreber’s erotic
thought about Professor Flechsig: “The exciting cause of his illness, then,
was an outburst of homosexual libido; the object of his libido was prob-
ably from the very first his doctor, Flechsig; and his struggles against the
libidinal impulse produced the conflict which gave rise to the symptoms.”10
5
Ibid.
6
Freud (1958).
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid., 12.
9
Ibid., 13.
10
Ibid., 43.
Thus, like his male patients who expressed jealousy, Freud identified in
Schreber a homosexual thought that was rejected by the subject and led
to the outburst of paranoia. It is not the thought itself that instigated the
outbreak, but rather its rejection. I would say that this thought was, in
fact, already a solution to Schreber’s jealousy. It is interesting to note that
shortly before Schreber’s phantasy, he writes about his wife’s reverence of
the Professor, as quoted above.11 Schreber’s phantasy may be a manner to
relate to his femininity as a solution to feelings of jealousy he felt due to
his wife’s reverence. Freud emphasized Schreber’s love for Professor
Flechsig but overlooked his repressed jealousy of him. Schreber’s femi-
nine phantasy may already be the solution for this jealousy. In fact, it is
this identification with femininity, becoming the wife of God, which
ascribes him the cure to his illness. The Aufheben of femininity provided
president Schreber a way out of his jealous paranoia.
Through his jealous, male patients, Freud discovered delusional jeal-
ousy. This jealousy operates as a mechanism that is aimed at repressing
homosexual tendencies and unfaithfulness among men. According to
Freud, it usually appears in addition to the first and second layers of jeal-
ousy he noted, that is, competitive or normal and projectional. Delusional
jealousy could be described by the following formula: “It is not I who
loves the man, she loves him,”12 referring to another man the male subject
desires. In other words, the subject’s denial of his own homosexual love
toward another man culminates in a delusion that his wife is in love with
another man or cheating on him with another.13 Freud states that it
occurs just the same among women: “It is no I who love the women- he
loves them. The jealous woman suspects her husband in relation to all the
women by whom she is herself attracted owing to homosexuality and the
dispositional effect of her excessive narcissism.”14 This homosexuality is
an effect of the woman’s own interest in her sexuality (that Freud related
to here as narcissism), which was described in the previous chapter.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid., 64.
13
Freud (1923).
14
Freud (1958), 64.
Therefore, in both men and women, delusional jealousy has to do with a

repressed interest in femininity, whether homosexual or not.
But, what arrives first, jealousy or homosexual tendencies? It is inter-
esting that in his article about jealousy among men, Freud attributed
these homosexual tendencies of identification with a woman and the pas-
sive position to the period I discussed at the book’s beginning, the period
before sexual difference is registered, which is characterized by aggressive-
ness and death wishes directed toward siblings.15 According to Freud, in
this period “rivals of the earlier period became the first homosexual love-
objects.”16 It can be assumed that on this basis, inter alia, developmental
psychologist Charlotte Buhler formulated the insight according to which
jealousy converts to empathy. In this context, Freud described a case of a
homosexual whose mother often praised another boy in his youth and
after a short period of intense jealousy, the rival became an object of love.
According to Freud, when homosexuality grows out of repressed jealousy,
persecutorial paranoia develops. Therefore, Freud situates jealousy or
repressed jealousy here as the instigator of homosexuality. In this case,
Freud’s patient suffered from paranoia that presented itself through inces-
sant obsessive thoughts about his wife’s infidelity (Freud did not believe
the wife had cheated on his patient). Therefore, the reversal begins here
by shifting from jealousy of the rival to repressed homosexuality, that is,
his love for him, to paranoid-delusional jealousy in an imaginary love
triangle.
At the article’s ending, Freud declared the discovery of this new type of
homosexuality. This type involves an identification with the feminine
position as explained. The men analyzed by Freud are not necessarily
homosexuals per se, yet they manifest homosexual tendencies that are
suppressed due to unresolved jealousy of the first period. The “earlier
period” mentioned by Freud in the above quote is the pre-Oedipal period
in the life of women. In men, as well as in women, this is also the period
of rivalry between siblings, between myself and my undistinguished
imago, where the partial drives of primary narcissism reign.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid., 9.
Little Hans’ Solution for Feminine Jealousy

The case of Little Hans and its analysis by Freud, Lacan, and Montrelay
sheds more light on the dialectical reversals of jealousy in the life of a
male subject. In the case of Little Hans, a four-year-old boy whose
father was a student of Freud and has decided to bring him to analysis,
there is an indication for how the boy found a solution to his feminine
jealousy, which was based on repressed homosexual feelings. The solu-
tion was to access his femininity, as will now be elaborated. Freud did
not formulate Hans’ solution this way, yet from his meticulous writing
on the case and the analysis provided by Lacan and Montrelay, some
valuable knowledge about dealings with archaic jealousy can be
extracted. The analysis that Freud performed on Hans was mediated
through Hans’ father and in correspondence with him, whereas Freud
only met Hans few times.
Little Hans from Vienna developed a phobia of horses and did not
agree to stay or walk near horses (which, at the time, served as a common
means of transportation). This phobia had developed after several events
that occurred in Hans’ life: an experience of unwanted erections; a threat
made by his mother not to play with his “widdler” so that the doctor will
not come and take it away from him; the birth of his sister, and around
the same time an awakening of greater curiosity about female genitalia,
accompanied by questions about the arrival of children into the world.17
When Hans saw a horse, he was interested in its genitalia and asked his
mother about her own genitals. His mother did not tell Hans that women
do not have a penis (Freud suggested to the father to clarify it for Hans),
and Hans declared that his mother has a penis as big as the horse’s. Hans’
parents did not provide him with answers to his questions about sexual-
ity. They evaded his questions about how children come into the world
and fed him with stories about storks. In response, Hans wanted the stork
to take back his baby sister. In several events, Hans played a game with
other children in a stroller, in which they were his children.
17
Freud (1955).
For Freud, Hans’ case confirms his invention of the Oedipus complex
and his theories on sexuality in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
According to Freud, Hans presented a panic from his father and a fear of
castration, but unlike Lacan and Montrelay, he did not consider that
Hans’ father had a rather pleasant and not particularly threatening per-
sonality. Lacan illustrated that Hans’ father was unable to situate a barrier
between Hans and his mother so as to create the necessary separation,
when the mother enjoys her child in her bed without limits.18 According
to Lacan, Hans’ phantasy about the plumber who will come to replace
the organ makes it possible to convert the continuous movement of the
real into a symbolic replacement.19
Other than the validation of the castration complex, Hans’ case con-
tains many insights into jealousy and feminine sexuality in biological
men. Michèle Montrelay’s analysis of the case of Little Hans provides
another input about the relationship between jealousy, homosexual love,
and feminine identification among men. Reading the case alongside
Lacan’s analysis of it, Montrelay recognized that the solution that helped
Hans soothe his anxiety was the separation from his mother that was
made possible by his phantasies. Hans’ phantasies, declares Montrelay,
serve him as an instrument that aids him in dealing with his phobia.
Hans’ first phantasy is a reaction to his fear of being drowned in the bath;
Hans fantasized about a bath being unplugged and based in his belly.20
The phantasy is described by Hans as follows: “I was in the bath, and
then the plumber came and unscrewed it. Then he took a big borer and
stuck it in my stomach.”21 The bath here is the mother’s uterus, as Freud
discerns.22 It is a symbol of femininity that frightens Hans because it
involves the lack, attributed to castration, which is not yet or just in the
process of becoming symbolized at this time of Hans’ life. According to
Montrelay,
18
Lacan (2020).
19
Ibid.
20
Montrelay (1994).
21
Freud (1955), 65.
22
Ibid.
in this phantasy the maternal body, long before the ‘widdler,’ becomes a
mobile object that can be unscrewed, dismantled, and carried away, to be
repaired, as Freud specified. Here we see the dangerous, huge container,
worked on by a handyman who dismantles it without incurring harm or
danger; the proof, says Lacan, that the mother is then the object of the
work of symbolization.23
The plumber phantasies enable Hans to symbolize both feminine and

masculine genitalia so as to convert them into signifiers, the “bath” and
the “bore.” This way, separation from the mother, who becomes a detach-
able object, is made possible. After Lacan’s later conceptualizations of
feminine jouissance, it can be said that the symbolic enables Hans to posi-
tion a certain limit to the infinity of feminine jouissance, evidently related
to the mother’s enjoyment.
This is strengthened by the second part of the phantasy, where a
plumber unscrews Hans’s organ and provides him with another.24
Montrelay directs the readers’ attention to the fact that in this phantasy,
Hans’ belly is being penetrated by the organ that is given to him from the
plumber, in the bellybutton which is non-other than a hole.25 By becom-
ing female, or “accepting” the feminine, passive position of the one being
penetrated, Hans is able to conquer his phobia. In this way, Hans’ iden-
tification with femininity enables him to also cope with his jealousy of his
little sister, and introduces a new separation from the mother. Montrelay
discerns that by dismantling the bath, the femininity of Hans’ mother
becomes masculine, “phallic,” “fitted up,”26 and thus less threatening, but
at the same time, by the second part of the phantasy, that of being “bored”
by the plumber, Hans is fixated entirely in the position of a woman. The
plumber in this scenario is the ideal lover, a prolongation of the father.
For Montrelay, Hans’ love for his father renders the father an even more
intensive object of rivalry and death wishes.
This stage of homosexuality of the boy that Montrelay designated
through the case of Little Hans works in tandem with Freud’s analysis of
23
Montrelay (1994), 218.
24
Freud (1955).
25
Montrelay (1994).
26
Ibid., 221.
what he calls “delusional jealousy,” in which the jealousy for a woman

veils latent homosexual feelings toward a man, which are themselves a
reversal of jealousy. The more femininity is repressed by a man or the
more a man suppresses his jealousy or his homosexual feelings that his
jealousy attempts to veil, so will his jealousy present itself in the register
of the real, as an uncontrollable impulse. The same line of thought is
noticeable in Montrelay’s statement that a man who does not have a posi-
tive relationship with his mother’s body in his infancy, will grow to be
pathologically jealous.27
In conclusion, Freud’s analysis of jealousy among men as concealing
repressed homosexuality indicates the existence of feminine jealousy in
male subjects and contributes to its understanding. Montrelay’s analysis
of the case of Little Hans provides a new perspective about feminine
identification in the case of feminine jealousy among men by illustrating
that it is not the strong and threatening character of the father that facili-
tates the child’s separation from his mother as a solution to his jealousy,
but rather his identification with the mother.28 The identification with
the mother enables the subject to become separated from her, that is, by
becoming more feminine than her, so as to step outside of his narcissistic,
jealous, Oedipal wound.
These notes about the link between homosexual phantasies and femi-
nine jealousy display a difference in the manner male subjects react to
jealousy, but also a similarity in the fact that what is at stake in feminine
jealousy for male and female subjects alike is essentially the same thing,
that is, separation from the mother.
Works Cited
27
Montrelay (1977).
28
Montrelay (1994).
an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Other Works (J. Strachey,
Freud, S. (1955). Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy. In The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume X
(1909): Two Case Histories: ‘Little Hans’ and the ‘Rat Man’ (J. Strachey, Trans.,
pp. 5–152). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1958). Psychoanalytical Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a
Case of Paranoia (Schreber). In The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911[1910]): The Case of
Schreber, Paper on Technique and Other Works (J. Strachey, Trans., pp. 4–82).
Hogarth Press.
Lacan, J. (2020). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IV: The Object-Relation
(1956–1957) (A. R. Price, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed.). Polity Press.
Montrelay, M. (1994). Why Did You Tell Me I Love Mommy and That’s Why
I’m Frightened When I Love You. American Imago, 51, 213–227.
8
Ravissement and Jealousy Without Pain
Abstract This chapter studies jealousy by reading Marguerite Duras’

novel, The Ravishing of Lol Stein. It elaborates on the aphorisms “follow-
ing the other woman” and “assuming one’s body upon oneself,” articu-
lated by Montrelay and Lacan, as possible solutions to feminine jealousy.
It tracks down Freud’s elaborations of pain in The Project for Scientific
Psychology as an important psychic mechanism that has to do with the
registration of memories, and asks, following Montrelay and Duras—
what is jealousy without its pain? It then ties together the concept of
ravissement, which was developed by Lacan and his followers after Duras’
novel, with jealousy and pain.
Keywords The other woman • Marguerite Duras • Lol Stein •

Ravissement • Jealousy • Pain • Jacques Lacan
The Ravishing of Lol Stein: Plot Summary

The narrator of Duras’ novel wishes to know all there is to know about
Lola Valery Stein. He begins the story from the middle of the investiga-
tion he holds about her, telling us, the readers, what information he

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3_8
managed to draw until now.1 Later in the story, the readers find out that
he is also a character in the story named Jacques Hold. One of the first
things Hold discovers about Lol is that there is something missing in Lol,
Lol has a hole, and her story is full of holes as well: Lol was never really
there, as her friend Tatiana testifies.2 This missing something, we are told
right at the plot’s beginning, has to do with Lol’s inability to feel pain.
Tatiana said she had never even seen a tear on Lol’s eye: she thinks that
what is missing from Lol has to do with emotions, a flaw in Lol’s heart.3
Soon, it is clarified that Hold’s inquiry is the result of his surging infatu-
ation with Lol and her mysterious character. Hold continues to unravel
Lol and the tale by providing the readers details about Lol’s history: at the
age of nineteen, Lol was engaged to Michael Richardson and the couple
attended a ball at the Town Beach Casino in S. Tahla when suddenly, an
older woman entered the room, along with her daughter. From the
moment they entered, everything changed. Michael Richardson was cap-
tivated by the older woman, who is named Anne-Marie Stretter and spent
the entire night dancing with her. Initially, he dances with her with Lol’s
approval, but as the night proceeds, he seems to have forgotten all about
Lol. Throughout the night, Lol stays motionless by the plants (the place
where she stood when Michael Richardson first asked the other woman to
dance) next to her good friend Tatiana Karl, who does not leave her
side the entire night. The couple dances all night long, even after the band
stops playing. It is only when dawn breaks, and Lol’s mother enters the
room, that their dance ceases. Then, Lol starts screaming; she yells to
Michael Richardson that the hour is wrong, that there is still time, but the
lovers escape, and Lol is forcefully dragged outside the ballroom.4
During the months that follow the night of the ball, Lol falls into mad-
ness; she keeps repeating the same words: that the hour was wrong, that
there was still time... She occasionally cries, repeating her name, Lola
Valery Stein. During these months, Lol does not leave her mother’s house,
and she is annoyed about her inability to find a single word to describe
1
Duras (1964).
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
what she feels.5 After a while, she starts taking walks, during one of which,
she meets the man who would become her husband. The new couple
leaves the town of S. Tahla, according to the wish of Lol’s mother.
Ten years later, Lol returns to her hometown of S. Tahla alongside her
husband. Her mother has died in the meantime, and Lol moves to her
old house. She starts taking walks, and in one of them, she follows the
footsteps of a stranger who reminds her of her ex-fiancé. She tails him
until they reach the hôtel du bois, a hotel in the woods, where he meets
none other than her old friend Tatiana Karl. This man turns out to be
Jacques Hold, Tatiana’s lover and the novel’s narrator, who suddenly
enters the plot that he recounts as one of its characters, switching the
novel’s narration style from that of a detached, omniscient, extradiegetic
observer to diegetic, first-person narrator. After he sees the lovers make
love in the hotel room, Lol reconnects with Tatiana and at the same time,
starts a non-physical affair with Hold. She forces him to continue his
meetings with Tatiana at the hotel, while she is lying outside in a field of
rye, watching them through the window of their room having inter-
course. Hold craves Lol, who urges him to stay with Tatiana. He is eager
to consummate his relations with Lol, and they plan a trip to Town
Beach, the town of the infamous ball. However, when Lol remains alone
with Hold at a hotel room in Town Beach, after visiting the old ballroom,
her mind/body disentangles; she asks Hold to call her by her name,
Tatiana Karl.6
An Analysis of Lol’s Case

The Ravishing of Lol Stein had received many interpretations from psy-
choanalysts, including Jacques Lacan and Michèle Montrelay. My analy-
sis is based on their interpretation, emphasizing jealousy and what can be
learned from it regarding Lol.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid.
Lol is vague, flimsy, too slim to grasp, as if she does not really exist. In
Lacan’s twelfth seminar, Critical Problems for Psychoanalysis,7 Montrelay
offered a unique analysis of The Ravishing of Lol Stein, later edited and
published in her book.8 There, she underscores that Lol’s body and mind
do not connect, do not make a tie, and yet the ball in Town Beach is the
only place where Lol exists, body and mind together, as Duras writes.9
According to Montrelay’s reading, there, at the ball, Lol functions as an
object that provides “space, pause”10 and break to the new couple that is
formed under her eyes. During the ball, Lol allows her fiancé to dance
with an-other woman, and she watches them all night, holding them
together with her gaze in a threefold relationship.11 According to
Montrelay, it is Lol who enables the lovers to form a couple during this
ball, and the threesome she creates functions for her as a body.12
Following Montrelay, Lacan also explored this captivating story, which
ravished him, as he testified in a special article he dedicated to it. Lacan
finds that Lol creates at the scene of the ball a knot composed of three
components, in which Lol is the object of the ternary.13
Lacan’s knots were further elaborated in his twenty-third seminar, Le
Sinthome. There, Lacan reticulated the structure of the psyche in topo-
logical terms, namely as a Borromean knot of three registers: the imagi-
nary, the symbolic, and the real.14 The Borromean knot is each subject’s
symptom, a unique tying of the three registers, which is also the subject’s
relation to the Name-of-the-Father, his equivocal per-version (pèrver-
sion). Without the Name-of-the-Father, which is another name for cas-
tration, the three rings in the Borromean knot untie, creating chaos, a
dismantling of the body and a void in the psyche. The subject will then
have to find a solution to write this void by using knots,15 that is, when
7
Lacan (2002).
8
Montrelay (1977).
9
Duras (1964); Montrelay (1977).
10
11
Duras (1964).
12
Montrelay (1977).
13
Lacan (1965).
14
Lacan (2016).
15
Ibid.
the Name-of-the-Father does not operate, the subject has to create his
symptom or rather his sinthome, as Lacan renames the invented symptom
of the subject. The knot is the way of the psychotic subject to retrieve his
own body to himself, which is currently under risk of explosion and
which does not hold.16 In the ball, the knot provides Lol with a body, a
body that functions as the center of the knot she has created.17 It means
that the threesomes in the story, both during the ball and Jacques Hold
and Tatiana in the woods function for Lol as a type of sinthome.
During the hours of the ball, the walls of the casino safeguard the lov-
ers, and together with Lol, they represent the structure, the body that
surrounds Lol and holds her together. Montrelay points out that Duras
repeatedly constructs walls in her books, for example in The Lover
(L’Amant) and in The Sea Wall (Un barrage contre le Pacifique) to protect
herself against la mèr-e.18 In The Lover, as well as in her other autobio-
graphical novels, Duras describes how her mother purchased rice fields
that everybody knew were prone to floods by the river. They planned to
fight the gushing current of the river with barricades, but these did not
work, and the family lost everything they had. A possible reading would
be that the gushing river and the sea represent in Duras’ books the jouis-
sance of the mother, feminine jouissance that is too much alive in ravage,
and is infinite, overflooding the system. In The Ravishing, the walls hold
Lol together as part of the ternary, separate her from feminine jouissance
that is coming from the other, protecting her from devastating jealousy.
The knot that Lol creates with the lovers at the ball is “retying itself
there”19 a decade later with the novel’s narrator, Jacques Hold, and her
old high school friend Tatiana Karl. Like Holden Caulfield, Hold and
Tatiana are Lol’s catchers in the rye, as this new threesome provides Lol
with another body to enjoy when she is lying in the rye field, watching
them having sex through the window frame. Lol enjoys in her ravissement
when she watches the couple make love at the hotel room and when the
couple dances at the ball.
16
Miller et al. (1999).
17
Lacan (1965).
18
Montrelay (1977).
19
Lacan (1965), 8.
At the story’s ending, without the other woman to hold her body or
her pain, Lol breaks into pieces. When Lol is left alone with Hold in bed
at a Town Beach hotel, the knot of three untangles again. Lol remains
alone with the pain of the real of (non)separation from the Other woman.
Lacan quotes poet Guillaume Apollinaire in reference to Lol: “je me deux
[d’être tout seul],”20 as she renders herself two in this last scene by asking
Hold to call her Tatiana Karl.21 Once the room closes down on Jacques
Hold and Lol, Lol cannot face the “nakedness”22 of her body, she makes
herself deux, which comes from douloir, douleur in ancient French, of
being alone. Thus, in this final scene, Lol uses the double to treat this
error of her knot; she imagines herself as both Tatiana and Lol, as she
cannot survive without the covering of the other woman.
What exactly is this ravissement the story circles around? As I described
above, Lol enjoys in the threesomes she creates, and as long as the other
woman is there, she does not feel jealousy. But is she really not jealous?
avissement, Nothingness and Being as Close

R
as Possible to das Ding
Marguerite Duras referred to The Ravishing of Lol Stein as moments of her
“delirium.”23 Through Duras’ delirium, we can learn about jealousy in
subjects whose body is not completely there, whose mirror image is miss-
ing, like the character of Lol who is described as not really being “there.”
The unique writing and perspective of Duras teach about jealousy from
the position of the subject whose body is disintegrated, whose sense of
self is fractured, and who carries a void in the psyche.
The emptiness of Lol reflects ravissement. How would you describe a
word that describes nothingness? Through Montrelay and Lacan, The
Ravishing of Lol Stein introduced a new signifier into the theory of
20
Qtd. In Lacan (1965), 8.
21
Duras (1964).
22
Lacan (1965), 10 (translation mine).
23
Qtd. in Montrelay (1996), 37.
psychoanalysis. In his “Homage” to Duras, Lacan reminds his readers

that the effect of beauty on the soul that is as close to das Ding has a rela-
tion to ravissement.24 Das Ding or the Thing can be interpreted in multi-
ple ways. It is, for example, the mother’s penis, the ultimate lost object
that was never really there and that cannot be attained. According to
Lacan, the Thing is “that which in the real suffers from the signifier,” 25
something that is unrepresentable, represented in art as emptiness.
Pain, the unsayable word Lol cannot find, and Duras’ writing, are
involved in what Lacan calls, following Freud, das Ding. Francois Peraldi,
a French- Canadian psychoanalyst who was Lacan’s student, designated
Anne-Marie Stretter as a ”living metaphor” 26 of das Ding, a stranger, a
piece of the real, to which Duras’ writing strives. Das Ding is what answers
the most primal need. It is the mythic body of the mother, the “most
archaic of objects” 27 to which the subject is attached. It is also the locus
of real satisfaction, and it “will never be found again” but is sought
nonetheless.28
The pleasure principle is designed to circle around the Thing while
maintaining a safe distance from it.29 Pain serves the pleasure principle as
a limit that protects the subject from too much excitations, thus regulat-
ing the quantity of libido in the psyche. Lacan draws our attention that
this field of pain “opens precisely onto that limit where a living being has
no possibility of escape.” 30 However, reading the tragedy of Antigone,
Lacan finds another limit, a limit that protects the subject from absolute
destruction in front of radical desire, which Biberman and Sharon-Zisser
articulate as : “an effect of splendor that is the effect of beauty of the char-
acter Antigone.”31 However, this splendor, the writers argue, is “gener-
ated[…] also from an encounter […], with the unrepresentable hole of
24
Lacan (1965).
25
Lacan (1992), 129.
26
Peraldi (1990), 20.
27
Lacan (1992), 106.
28
Ibid., 52.
29
Ibid.
30
Ibid., 60.
31
Biberman and Zisser-Sharon (2017), 94.
the lost object or Thing. ”32 According to French psychoanalyst Éric

Laurent, Lacan situates ravissement in a place of misery: the place where
Antigone stood, crossing the limit of beauty, without any identifications,
when she insisted on burying her brother in violation of the law of the
state.33 Ravissement, therefore, is beyond two limits: the limit of the plea-
sure principle and the limit of beauty. It is a sort of misery that is the
result of crossing all boundaries and being close to the devastating Thing,
which is also the closest possible relation to desire.
In “Homage,” however, Lacan wrote about the woman who ravishes as
someone who is “exiled” from things.34 This exile is related to the empti-
ness of the self, which is also the emptiness that Lol experiences.
Psychoanalyst Marie-Hélène Brousse stated that ravissement is what can-
not be spoken, an emptiness of the body that “seeks to write itself. ”35
This ravissement, the emptiness of the body, is what happens to Lol in the
locus in which we would assume to find jealousy, that is, when the limit
of pain, which is also a part of jealousy, as will be described, does not
exist. There, Lol crosses the limit of beauty so as to arrive in the realm of
ravissement.
Jealousy and Pain: Lol’s Deflection

Montrelay describes the feeling of jealousy, based on her experience with
her patients, as a moment in which the soul is torn from the body. The
“jointer”36 between body and soul does not function, in a horrible sensa-
tion of the woman (or man) who feels dismembered, “disjointed.” 37 This
is reminiscent of the description of Lol as someone whose being is miss-
ing from her. 38 According to Montrelay, when the man’s gaze is turned to
32
Ibid.
33
Laurent (2017).
34
35
Brousse (2010), 2–3.
36
37
Ibid.
38
Duras (1964).
another, a woman’s desire is lifted from her, leaving her feeling empty up
to the point of not even producing the pain of jealousy. In that case, jeal-
ousy is not felt: it is outside of her, as Lol depicted.39
At the ball, Lol is rapped by feminine jouissance as an effect of her pain-
less jealousy, a jealousy without a body to feel it, which is why she uses
the body of Anne-Marie Stretter to protect herself from such affect.
However, the manner in which Lol uses the body of the other woman
does not permit her to rebuild herself anew, as she does not feel the neces-
sary pain of jealousy.
Jacques Hold wishes to love “tout Lol,” 40 (all of Lol), only Lol has a
hole, as Tatiana Karl describes, one which is related to her inability to feel
pain and her being not being entirely there.41 Feminine jealousy, this
devastating affect situated at the heart of feminine jouissance, ravishes the
body of a woman, and makes her feel empty, disjointed, and discon-
nected. This experience is depicted in The Ravishing after the ball, once
the couple leaves the room. During the ball, Lol watches how her fiancée
changes under the influence of the stranger with whom he dances, yet
until dawn, which brings her mother along, she does not move, does not
talk, and does not suffer:
La nuit avançant, il paraissait que les chances qu’aurait eues Lol de souffrir
s’étaient encore raréfiées, que la souffrance n’avait pas trouvé en elle ou se glisser,
qu’elle avait oublié la vielle algèbre des peines d’amour.42
In the Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud found that the “failure”43
of the neuronal system results in pain that is inscribed in the psyche.
According to his research, when there is an excess of neuronal quantity
(Q), they turn phi neurons (ɸ) to permeable and reach the psyche, where
they register pain as unconscious memory representations, what Freud
calls “Vurstellungsrerasentanz. ”44 Freud describes pain as a limit to the
39
Montrelay (1977).
40
Duras (1964), 12.
41
Ibid.
42
Duras (1964), 12.
43
Freud (1966), 368.
44
Ibid.
increasing degree of excitation that arrives from the outside world.45

According to Lacan, physical movement works together with the pleasure
principle to reach homeostasis.46 Through movement, the body can dis-
charge libido, the excess psychical energy (neurons) that was accumulated
in the system. However, excitation in the system can also come from
within the subject. Then, movement will not be of help, and pain will
thrive.47 During the hour of the ball, Lol does not move and does not feel
pain. But when the scene alternates, when the couple escapes and dawn
breaks, Lol screams and falls to the ground. According to Montrelay,
there are “white stripes of shores of insensitivity in Duras’s novel, of Lol’s
inability to suffer.”48 The white stripe is at the center of pain, a pain that
Lol cannot experience.
The thought of Lol’s inability to suffer as white shores of insensibility
provokes the idea of sand that no line can draw on, sand that is washed
up with water and wind. Pain is registered in the psyche during an event
that raises “excitation,” that is, a traumatic event with an excess of libido
that floods the system and does not receive registration in the form of
unconscious representations. Lol represents oblivion both during the
ball, and a decade later, when she is lying in the rye field, watching Tatiana
Karl and Jacques Hold doing their deeds. In ravissement, there is no reg-
istration of the pain of jealousy: it is forgotten, erased, forclosed.
Montrelay states that pain is what situates a limit to feminine jealousy:
“It is a diabolic limit, but a limit nonetheless,” which does not operate for
Lol.49 The one who is not entirely there is not jealous at the same way we
understand and experience jealousy: Lol knows only half of the move-
ment of jealousy, which means that she experiences jealousy without feel-
ing the stinging pain of it.50 Pain is what lifts the anchors of the jealous
subject and enables her to become mad.51 Pain enables psychical move-
ment, if the external change is not possible. Lol is ravished, enraptured in
45
Ibid.
46
Lacan (1992).
47
Ibid.
48
49
Ibid. (translation mine).
50
Ibid.
51
Ibid.
her jealousy, as pain does not function for her, and its limits do not con-
tain her jealousy. This ravissement is depicted in the narrator’s description
of Lol’s thoughts, how she enjoys the vanishment of her body that occurs
upon the turning of the man’s gaze to the other woman.52
Being completely consumed in jealousy, without the limit of pain, Lol
cannot hold herself together. Lol needs the gaze to sustain her body, and
when that gaze disappears, she draws it back by assimilating with the
other woman, the one who is being looked at. The more Michael
Richardson is hypnotized by the other woman, the more Lol vanishes in
her jealouissance and ravissement. Anne-Marie Stretter functioned for Lol
during the ball as a body that held her together, yet Lol does not manage
to construct herself through her desire, that is, through the other wom-
an’s desire. Rather, she becomes a parasite to a body that is not hers.
After the ball, even though pain is still not quite there for Lol during
those months in which she does not leave her mother’s house, there are
signs of it: “La prostration de Lol, dit-on, fut alors marquée par des signes de
souffrance. Mais qu’est-ce à dire qu’une souffrance sans sujet?”53 Lol is mani-
festing signs of suffering, of pain. It is somewhere there, but it is “sans
sujet,” without a subject to hold it together. Duras asks her readers a
peculiar question, probably not without a relation to her own subjective
experience: what is pain without a subject?
The effects of the confused image we have of our body, and the fact we
talk about our body as something that we possess, is the explanation
Lacan gives to the apathy Joyce describes in his novel, A Portrait of the
Artist as A Young Man, while being attacked by his classmates; it is as if his
body is not his own.54 This is the same way Mary Gower treats her body
after its transformation. This description is also similar to the suffering of
Lol, a suffering that remains without a subject. There is something in the
psyche that reacts to the event, but this something remains under the
possibility of the relationship to one’s body as foreign.55 It is as if suffering
here is foreclosed, the term Lacan uses to describe the psychical rejection
52
Duras (1964).
53
Ibid., 23.
54
Lacan (2016).
55
Ibid.
of an affect, which, in legal jargon, also implies a foreclosure of property,

that is, in this situation one has an asset in one’s ownership which is unus-
able because of a certain debt. In this metaphor, the psychotic cannot use
his body as his own: he has it, but not really, because he did not pay his
debt to castration, the debt that requires a consent to lose something, and
therefore, his body is foreclosed.
In conclusion, Lol’s jealousy is feminine jealousy that goes beyond the
pleasure principle. Lol does not feel the pain of jealousy, and therefore
does not fight or resist the presence of the other woman (Anne-Marie
Stretter or Tatiana Karl), but assimilates into her body, delights in it, and
devours it with her gaze. During the ball, Lol is a woman whose lover
abandons her for another, but the pain expresses signs only afterwards,
when jealousy leaves Lol bedridden in her mother’s house and drains her
of her desire to live. As soon as her fiancé’s gaze was turned from her to
the other woman, Lol’s body and body were pulled away from her. Her
emptiness, which was there all along, is the emptiness of her body, the
hole in the imaginary and the symbolic that renders her inability to expe-
rience pain, pain that is necessary for her to be able to get out of bed and
fight for her being by following the Other’s desire.
Duras’ Pain: Melancholic Jealousy

What is this pain that Lol does not experience that takes away from her
being? Perhaps it is the pain that is entailed in the loss of satisfaction,
which the subject experiences in castration. Castration, lack, is what
enables the subject to desire, yet it does not come without pain.
Marguerite Duras herself has a complicated relationship with pain,
douleur, which comes from the hour, du l’heure. In the dedication of La
Douleur, Duras pronounced that it is one of the most important things
in her life: “Le Douleur est une des choses les plus importantes de ma vie. Le
mot écrit; ne conviendrait pas.”56 The written word, or writing, says Duras,
does not capture pain. What is this pain that occupies Duras so badly in
her writing, which does not occupy her character at all? La Douleur was
56
Duras (1985), 10.
written by Duras while she was waiting for her husband, who was seized
by the Nazis and sent to Dachau, to come back from the war. The extraor-
dinary thing about this book, which Duras confesses in its prologue, is
that she does not remember writing it:
Je sais que je l’ai fait, que c’est moi qui l’ai écrit, je reconnais mon écriture et le
détail de ce que je raconte … Mais je ne me vois pas écrivant ce journal. Quand
l’aurais-je écrit, en quelle année, à quelles heures du jour, dans quelle maison?
Je ne sais plus rien.57
Like in the case of Lol, there is a pain that is not registered for Duras,
something that is forgotten, which transforms pain to one of the most
important things in Duras’ life. There is a difference between Duras’ rela-
tion to pain and that of her fictional character, Lol: Lol does not remem-
ber exactly what happened at the night of the ball, except having a faint
recollection about not suffering. Duras called her book, a book that was
written in an hour of great pain, “Douleur,” yet she does not remember
writing it. In her writing, Duras writes what is not entirely registered in
her psyche. Even though she does not remember that she wrote the book,
the book has been written nonetheless, and Duras describes its writing in
a manner that is reminiscent of Freud’s description of the effect of pain
on the psyche, like “a stroke of lightening.”58
Throughout the night of the ball in its entirety, Lol does not suffer.
When does she fall apart? When her mother arrives and interrupts her
bodily attachment to the dancing couple. The night ends when dawn
arises, and Lol’s mother comes to take her.59 In this act, Lol’s mother
erects a new wall between Lol and the lovers, a wall that replaces that of
the casino. The mother interrupts the threefold phantasm, the knot that
Lol creates, which keeps her together. Lol resists this interruption. She
drops this wall forcefully to the floor, but something stops, and suddenly,
she screams: “Lol cria pour la première fois…. Lol avait crié sans discon-
tinuer des choses sensées: il n’était pas tard, l’heure d’été trompait.” 60
57
Ibid.
58
Freud (1966), 368.
59
Duras (1964).
60
Ibid., 22.
Like a baby that comes out of the womb, Lol screams for the first time,
manifesting the first sign of pain—and of life. In another Durasian work,
mentioned by Danielle Bajomée in Duras ou la douleur, Duras talks about
pain as the birth of an infant:
L’accouchement, je le vois comme une culpabilité. Plus proche de l’assassinat, ce

sont des accouchements. La sortie de l’enfant qui dort. C’est la vie qui dort,
complètement, dans une béatitude incroyable, et qui se réveille. Le premier
signe de vie, c’est le hurlement de douleur.61
In this text, Duras draws the connection between the pain of death,
assassination and birth, the separation from the mother, and the first sign
of life. At birth, the baby is separated from his mother. The first sign of
life is the baby’s scream of pain when he comes out from the womb,
which Freud termed Nos des Lebens. The pain of life is inherent to the
pain of separation between the flesh of the baby and that of the mother.
The mother gives away a part of her own body at birth, and the baby
must survive for the first time with a body of his own, without an exterior
shield. Both the mother and the baby must cope with their new body
after birth, and the pain of becoming two bodies out of one. The scream
that Lol cries out when the couple leaves the room is heard like the scream
of the child who cries for the first time when she is physically separated
from her mother. This is the scream of the separation from das Ding.
Ironically, it occurs in the story when the mother walks in, marking that
separation.
Understanding the pain with which Duras coped and Lol did not feel
as the pain of the separation from the mother, clarifies what can situate a
limit to feminine jealousy, namely separation from the mother. This sepa-
ration is made possible by following one’s desire through the other
woman, while marking the limits of one’s own body, tying a Borromean
knot that replaces the Name-of-the-Father that is lacking for the psy-
chotic, and which does not fully operate for the neurotic. The subject’s
desire is registered in the unconscious, and by articulating it in analysis it
provides the subject with an opportunity to create for herself an
61
Bajomée (1989), 11.
identifiable body. It is a body that is assembled of desire and whose com-

ponents also came to her from the Other. It is a body with limits that
separate one from the Other and from the mother.
French psychoanalyst Miren Arambourou reads the mother’s entrance
into the ballroom in The Ravishing of Lol Stein as what evokes the rework-
ing of separation, of weaning, which she attributes to the Oedipus com-
plex.62 She designates Anne-Marie Stretter and Tatiana Karl as Lol’s
semblables, in a narcissistic world that does not contain others. Recalling
the instances of jealousy which I detected in Lacan’s Complexes Familiaux,
the semblable, whether it is an image or a peer, enhances jealousy, desire,
and competition. During the hour of the ball Lol does not manage to
“kill” 63 her semblable, her rival, in the competition that is at play in femi-
nine jealousy, as she is not able to feel the pain of separation from her
mother, which is also a consent to the loss of satisfaction.
In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud discerned between the healthy
process of mourning, during which the subject conjures up the memories
of the person or thing lost, and melancholia, in which a person “swal-
lows” 64 the person that was lost in his ego, refusing to relinquish them,
entering a depressive and melancholic state. In “Certain Neurotic
Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality,” Freud equates
the process of so-called healthy jealousy with the process of mourning, as
opposed to the type of jealousy that he calls “jealousy paranoia.”65 Lol’s
behavior after the ball can be read as a sort of melancholy, or melancholic
jealousy, one which is related to her inability to let go, to separate. The
process of mourning is a process that involves pain. The one who cannot
feel the pain of losing the other, cannot really mourn and remains melan-
cholic. Feminine jealousy is a jealousy that is prior to the separation from
the subject’s first love object, the mother, and thus it does not follow the
logic of castration, of losing, and of mourning. Therefore, we learn from
both Freud and Lol that feminine jealousy has a melancholic nature.
62
Arambourou (1996).
63
64
Freud (1964), 246.
65
Freud (1923), 1.
Works Cited
Arambourou, M. (1996). Arrêt sur image. In C. Maillet et al. (Eds.), Che Vuoi?
Series no. 6: Revue du Cercle Freudien. L’Harmattan.
Bajomée, D. (1989). Duras ou la douleur. Éditions Universitaires.
Biberman, E., & Zisser-Sharon, S. (2017). Art, Death and Lacanian Psychoanalysis.
Routledge.
Brousse, Marie-Hélène. (2010). Feminine Know-How with Relationship: The
Three Rs: Ruse, Ravage, Ravishing. In NLS-Messager 669, Congres NLS VIII,
Geneva (H. Chamberlain, Trans.). AMP-NLS. Retrieved June 15, 2023,
from https://amp-nls.org/nlsmessager/2009/669.html
Duras, M. (1964). Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein. Gallimard.
Duras, M. (1985). La Douleur. P.O.L.
Freud, S. (1964). Mourning and Melancholia. In The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud XIV (1914–1916):: On the
History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other
Works (James Stratchey et al., Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1966). Project for a Scientific Psychology. In The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud I (1886–1899) (James
Stratchey et al., Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Psychoanalysis (1959–1960) (Dennis Porter, Trans. & Jacques-Alain Miller,
ed. W.W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2002). The Seminar, Book XII: Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis
(1964–1965) (Cormac Gallagher, Trans.). Karnac.
Lacan, J. (2016). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII: The Sinthome
(1975–1976) (Adrian Price, Trans. & Jacques-Alain Miller, ed. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Laurent, E. (2017). A Sophism of Courtly Love. In The Symptom 17. Retrieved
December 19, 2020, from www.lacan.com/symptom17-sophism.html
Miller, J.-A., et al. (1999). La psychose ordinaire, la convention d’Antibes.
Agalma-Seuil.

L’Harmattan.
Peraldi, F. (1990). The Passion of Death: A Free Associative Reading of Freud
and Marguerite Duras. In L’Esprit Créateur, 30(1), 19–27.
9
The Lover: The Writing of Feminine
Jealousy
Abstract In this final chapter the author turns to Marguerite Duras’

novel, The Lover. Through its unique narration, The Lover chronicles the
story of a young Duras in the eyes of Duras the writer, creating a split in
the subject that allows her to follow her other femininity—through writ-
ing. This chapter suggests that through writing The Lover, Duras man-
aged to find a solution to her feminine jealousy, namely by expressing
something of the unwritten of jealousy and producing a phallic third,
creating thus a separation between her and her mother, the original object
of feminine jealousy in the subject’s life. This reading is made possible,
inter alia, through a comparison between certain motifs, scenes, and
characters that repeat in The Ravishing of Lol Stein and The Lover. This
chapter suggests in its conclusion that art and creation may serve for cer-
tain subjects as a solution for the destruction and emptiness of jealousy
and ravissement, one that fills the subject with desire.
Keywords Marguerite Duras • The Lover • Feminine jealousy • Ravage

• Separation • Femininity • Writing

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3_9
The Lover: Introduction

The Lover, written almost two decades after Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein,
is an autobiographical novel in which Duras unfolds her adolescent years
as a white girl in the French colony of Vietnam. The story is told from the
viewpoint of adult Duras, 1 who narrates the story of young Duras,
referred to as “elle” or “la petite.” Elle, young Duras, is a fifteen-year-old
girl who is abused by her brother and mother, falling in love with a young,
rich Chinese man. The affair, socially “forbidden” because of age, social
and racial differences between the couple, brings some new wealth into
the family that turned poor after the death of the father and some poor
financial decisions of the mother.
The Lover was written nearly twenty years after The Ravishing of Lol
Stein and was published by Duras as a work of “autofiction,” that is, a
novel that is based on reality but that includes fictional elements as well.2
Duras’ critics said about The Lover that it should be “read as the origin of
all the other works,”3 meaning that many of Duras’ works, both fictional
and autobiographical, must be compared to it.
Author Rachel Kushner wrote an introduction to the new translation
of the novel in 2017, in which she mentioned that Duras’ close acquain-
tances suggested that she had started to confuse reality with fiction when
she claimed this book to be her memoir, because it is, in fact, much more
of a fairytale-like description of her love affair with a Vietnamese busi-
nessman in her adolescent years in the colony. Moreover, some critics
discern that works such as “Wartime Notebooks,” written by Duras and
published posthumously, reveal the exigencies between truth and
imagination in The Lover.4 In psychoanalytic terms, however, Duras’ say-
ing has a precious, subjective value.
Similar to feminist, socially oriented critiques of displays of jealousy in
literature, many Anglo-American criticisms of The Lover is concerned
1.
In this chapter, when I refer to Marguerite Duras the narrator/writer I use her last name only, and
when I refer to young Duras, the character in the novel, I call her young Duras/elle/la petite.
2
Duras was one of the pioneers of this genre (Kushner (2017).
3
Ladimer (2009), 104.
4
Ibid.
with liberal ideals against colonialism and feminist dogmas that condemn
an affair between an adolescent girl and a young man. 5 However, the
unique style of Duras’ writing and her candid exploration of her exotic
childhood produced many other types of criticisms as well, an abundance
of which following the orientation of Lacanian psychoanalysis. This is
partly thanks to Lacan’s rare declaration about Duras that “she knows
what I teach without me,”6 a saying that resonated throughout the literary
and psychoanalytic worlds. Duras’ texts, as the critic Mary Lydon said,
“exert a mesmeric power that is hard to account for, but which this reader
would attribute to the privilege Lacan and Duras both accord (the former
explicitly, the latter implicitly) to the Freudian unconscious.”7 This saying
expresses the notion that Duras’ writing is in close proximity to the writ-
ing of the unconscious. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that Duras’
writing is so loyal to the writing of the unconscious that it establishes a
new kind of pact between literary criticism and psychoanalysis.
“Ma mère mon amour”: The Story of Ravage

In The Lover, Duras, using her gentle words, paints the picture of an ado-
lescent girl crossing the Mekong River on a ferry, on the way to meet her
lover for the first time. The image that Duras writes throughout the novel
is the missing picture from the photo album of her psyche. From all her
memories, this image was not written. The novel is thus presented as an
answer, a writing of what is not represented in the psyche (the photo
album), or rather, presented there as a hole:
Ç’est au cours de ce voyage que l’image se serait détachée, qu’elle aurait été
à la somme. Elle aurait pu exister, une photographie aurait pu être prise,
comme une autre, ailleurs, dans d’autres circonstances. Mais elle ne l’a pas
été. L’objet était trop mince pour la provoquer… C’est pourquoi, cette
image, et il ne pouvait pas en être autrement, elle n’existe pas. Elle a été
omise. Elle a été oubliée. Elle n’a pas été détachée, enlevée à la somme.
5.
For one out of many examples, see the article by Thompson (2016).
6
7
Lydon (1988), 353.
C'est à ce manque d’avoir été faite qu’elle doit sa vertu, celle de représenter
un absolu, d’en être justement l’auteur. 8
A photo could have been taken, Duras writes, but the object was too
slim to evoke it. The subject of Duras’ creation is the photo that was not
taken. This photo is reminiscent of the indescribable word that repeats
throughout Duras’ novel, The Ravishing of Lol Stein. Like the word that is
unrepresentable in its essence, like das Ding or the ravissement of feminine
jealousy that is described in The Ravishing of Lol Stein, the picture of
crossing the Mekong River is a sort of void, a hole, that Duras tries to veil
or sow with her writing. For the psychotic subject, and perhaps for other
subjects as well, the signifier that marks castration—“P” for phallus, or
for “Père,” Father, is missing. The art object comes to supplement this
void, the phallus that is foreclosed for the subject who refuses
castration.9
In The Lover, Duras’ literary style receives another body, another carved
form, in a manner that provided her with a shelter from the ravaging
femininity of her mother that dwells in this void that refuses castration.
In Duras’ The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Lol’s ravage is so overwhelming that
it denies Lol from having a body of her own, yet in The Lover, Duras
delineates the relationship with her mother and its ravage to minutia.
Duras describes her mother throughout the novel as sometimes crazy,
sometimes terrifying, sometimes cruel, sometimes wise, and impressive,
but mostly desperate.
The battlefield of the mother-daughter relationship is there right from
the novel’s beginning: a man walks over to Duras, in her adulthood, and
comments to her that her face has changed. Today, he says, she is
“ravaged.”10 The readers discover that after the events told in The Lover,
and after young Duras leaves her mother and goes to Paris, Duras gained
a new face, and she testifies to keeping it.11 In the original French, Duras
describes her new face as “dévaste,”12 devastated, and in the English
8
Duras (1984), 17.
9
Miller (1988).
10
Duras (1985), 3.
11
Duras (1984), 9.
12
Ibid.
translation of the novel, the word “dévaste” is accurately translated as

“ravaged.”13 The devastation, the ruin of Duras’ face, is the result of the
mother-daughter ravage, which is entangled in every piece of this love
story. Duras’ ruined, perforated face is the consequence of her history;
the fact that it is ruined indicates that this is not the story of maturation,
but rather the story of re-membering, a work of psychic writing that
leaves its mark on the flesh. This act of writing provides Duras with the
new face she keeps to herself, which may be perforated but is more beau-
tiful than ever.
After describing her new face, Duras starts to talk about her mother.
She looks at a family photo in the album and describes her Mother’s
neglect, her folly, but most of all, her deep desperation.14 Duras’ mother
will accompany her throughout the love affair with the Chinese lover: she
will buy her the cloths she wears, ask the caretakers in her boarding school
to keep their eyes closed when young Duras does not return to the dorms
until early morning, and even undress and spank her daughter to punish
her for her promiscuity, which the mother herself advanced.15
When Duras tells her mother that she wants to learn French because
she aspires to be a writer, the mother becomes silent: “Jalouse elle est.”16
The gaze is then turned away, the mother’s shoulders are pulled up, not
giving much of a response, which is unforgettable for Duras: “Pas de
response, un regard bref aussitôt détourne, le petit haussement d’épaules,
inoubliable.”17 The jealousy and the aloof gaze that replaces the loving
one, are carved in her memory. Soon after, in the other form of ravage,
her mother is her lover: “Ma mère mon amour.”18
How does a young girl start an affair with a rich Chinese man? The girl
is dressed as a prostitute, says the mother, who lets her dress like that, and
who does not protect her from the gazes of older men, but rather encour-
ages it, knowing that this can endow the family with a financial benefit:
“Et c’est pour cela aussi que l’enfant sait bien y faire déjà, pour détourner
13
Duras (1985), 3.
14
Duras (1984).
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid., 30.
17
Ibid., 30.
18
Ibid., 31.
l’attention qu’on lui porte à elle vers celle que, elle, elle porte à l’argent. Ça
fait sourire la mère…”:19 The mother’s enjoyment is evident by her smile;
she advances the attention seeking of her daughter, because perhaps she
can provide for the family in one way or another. After the mother finds
out about the forbidden relationship, she is mad; however, if she had
believed that the girl only meets him for the money, she would have been
satisfied.20 In other words, where ravage inhabits, it is not acceptable for
the girl to love anyone, to have a relationship outside of the bounds of the
family, unless it is to provide for it. Eventually, the mother gives her
implicit consent to the affair, and when the girl invites the mother and
brothers to dinners at her lover’s expense, everyone agrees to the
relationship.
The mother-daughter ravage that is described so feverishly in this story,
in which Duras tells of her mother and brothers for the first time, is an
act that enables her to separate from her mother, as I will describe.
Reading The Lover vis-à-vis The Ravishing of Lol Stein, I find that it is in
the former that Duras manages to find a way to symbolize the pain that
is not registered in the latter for Lol, the pain of jealousy that is also the
pain of ravage. Through her writing, Duras manages to assume upon
herself the body of the other woman, of herself as other, which Mary and
Lol did not manage to do.
Between The Lover and The Ravishing of Lol:

The Creation of a New Knot
The Lover was the first time in which Duras wrote about her family, about
her meeting with her lover, sustained in the love and secrets they shared
with each other for the first time in their lives. Poverty, little Duras tells
her lover, is what crushed the walls of her family; the room where they
meet to love, talk, and exist, is the room she had been waiting for.21
19
Ibid., 32.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid.
In writing The Lover, Duras recreated the knot of Lol again, the knot
that provided Lol with a body in the transient threesomes she created
with the other women in the story and the men. Only this time, a differ-
ent knot is created, one that is comprised of young Duras (elle), her
Chinese lover, and Duras herself as narrator and observer. The other
woman that was Anne-Marie Stretter or Tatiana Karl in The Ravishing
becomes young Duras in The Lover. She is now participating in the sexual
act, her and not anyone else. Michael Richardson and Jacques Hold are
replaced by the Chinese lover. Lol, who was the onlooker in the two
knots, the one who created them and also their center, is now Duras the
writer and observer of her young self, the one who performs the sexual act
with her Chinese lover.
I found several motifs and recurring scenes in The Ravishing that receive
an analogous transformation in The Lover, which helped me to reach the
conclusion about the new knot that Duras ties in writing The Lover.
1. The black dress of Anne-Marie Stretter and the black hairs of Tatiana
Karl in The Ravishing and the black limousine in The Lover
In The Ravishing, during the hour of the ball, Lol dresses herself with
the black dress of Anne-Marie Stretter. Also, when Lol watches Tatiana
and Hold making love, she adorns herself with Tatiana’s black hairs:
La nudité de Tatiana déjà nue grandit dans une surexposition qui la prive
toujours davantage du moindre sens possible. Le vide est Tatiana nue sous ses
cheveux noirs, le fait. Il se transforme, se prodigue, le fait ne contient plus le
fait, Tatiana sort d’elle-même, se répand par les fenêtres ouvertes, sur la
ville, les routes, boue, liquide, marée de nudité. La voici, Tatiana Karl nue
sous ses cheveux, soudain, entre Lol V. Stein et moi. La phrase vient de
mourir, je n’entends plus rien, Tatiana est à sa place. Comme un aveugle, je
touche, je ne reconnais rien que j’aie déjà touche. Lol attend que je recon-
naisse non un accordement a son regard mais que je n’aie plus peur de
Tatiana. Je n’ai plus peur. Nous sommes deux, on ce moment, à voir Tatiana
nue sous ses cheveux noirs. Je dis en aveugle: ‘Admirable putain, Tatiana’.22
22
Duras (1964), 116–7 (emphases mine).
The curls veil the nudity, which is Lol’s void.23 The nudity spreads
everywhere, blinding Hold. The blackness of the dress and the curls that
are of the other woman (perhaps also related to the darkness of the unex-
plorable continent of femininity) protect Lol. It works until the story’
ending, until Lol is alone, naked with Hold, losing her mind because she
is not able to face the nakedness of her own body.24
Duras manages to conjure again the blackness of femininity with
which she adorns herself, in The Lover, when young Duras enters the
Chinese lover’s black limousine, after crossing the Mekong. The image
starts once she sees him stepping out of the black limousine: “L’image
commence bien avant qu’il ait abordé l’enfant blanche près du bastingage, au
moment où il est descendu de la limousine noire, quand il a commencé à
s’approcher d’elle, et qu’elle, elle le savait, savait qu’il avait peur.”25 Duras
writes here in the third person, calling herself “elle” and “l’enfant blanche.”
By referring to her young self in this way, Duras creates a separation
between herself and the image she paints of herself in her youth, the
image of the other woman that is herself. When she enters the limousine,
young Duras steps into the dress of an Other femininity, a dress that is a
veil for the void. This veil enables her to be both herself and the Other
woman at the same time, without needing another person. Also, in this
quote, Duras states that she knew from the beginning that the lover feared
her young self, while in The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Lol knew that Hold no
longer fears Tatiana. Apparently, for Duras, fear is an indication of infatu-
ation. By describing the lover’s fear of her young self, in The Lover, Duras
situates herself in the feminine position, the position of the other woman,
Tatiana, for example. After she knows that the Chinese lover fears her,
young Duras goes with him to his bachelor’s apartment, where they make
love for the first time.
2. The hotel room in The Ravishing/the bachelor’s apartment in The Lover
23
Lacan (1965).
24
Ibid.
25
Duras (1984), 44 (emphases mine).
The love making scene of Tatiana Karl and Jacques Hold in the hotel
room is recreated with elle and the Chinese lover in his bachelor’s apart-
ment, where she reveals to him her dark family secrets. Through this
scene, Duras renders herself two—only without the other woman, but
with the veil of her young self as other, as the other’s desire, creating her-
self a body. Duras described in detail how the lover undresses young her
from her clothes, and how she undresses him.26 The whore, the “putain”
that was Tatiana in The Ravishing quoted above is now little Duras. In a
scene that is reminiscent of the love making scene of Tatiana and Hold,
Duras situates herself as a woman who is the object of a man’s desire and
his gaze, doing so by identifying with the whore. In the love making
scene in The Lover, Duras is now in the position of the Other woman, the
position of her Other femininity, rendering herself two without the other
woman but with herself as other, becoming a split subject.
3. Anne-Marie Stretter
As the ghost of excess, of surplus feminine jouissance, as das Ding,

Anne-Marie Stretter reappears in The Lover, namely when young Duras
bids farewell to her Chinese lover, and he becomes impotent due to their
breakup. It is when they lay together in bed that suddenly, a paragraph
splits open the page; the plot evaporates and the one who is called “La
dame,” who can be recognized by her traits from other Durasian tales as
Anne-Marie Stretter, emerges in a new paragraph, without any warning:
“La Dame on l’applait, elle venait de Savannakhet.”27 After this paragraph,
the story of young Duras and the lover continues, but then, once again,
Anne-Marie Stretter emerges, this time with another familiar character,
the Vice-Consul. 28 This ping-pong between two seemingly unrelated sto-
ries continues for several pages.
The paragraphs that chronicle the story of “La Dame” in the middle of
the story of young Duras have no logical connection to the plot that comes
prior to it and that continues thereafter. It is as if another tale is suddenly
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid., 105.
28
The Vice-Consul is a character in another novel by Duras entitled Le vice-consul, which describes
Anne-Marie Stretter’s life in Calcutta after she and Michael Richardson left S. Tahala.
inserted into the story, barging in. In Duras' novella The Vice-Consul, an
unpronounceable, unspeakable word dominates the plot and drives the
Vice-Consul crazy.29 The unspeakable word, together with Anne-Marie
Stretter tie The Ravishment with The Vice Consul. The two characters emerge
in The Lover alongside another character that travels through the pages from
one story to another, the beggar. She appears when Duras feels that her
mother is disappearing and there is nothing there to occupy her picture
anymore.30 The beggar intimidates Duras, chasing her from Savannakhet to
Calcutta, Vinh Long and Sa Đéc, but Anne-Marie comes to the rescue.
These characters emerge like delirium from a hole that splits open in
the middle of the novel, inducing anxiety for the readers. When some-
thing does not work in this last bedroom scene, when the knot between
Duras, young Duras, and the lover is jeopardized, Anne-Marie Stretter is
again conjured up to designate this place which François Peraldi referred
to as “the rift of the real.”31 However, she appears only for a moment, as
a sort of reminder (or remainder) of the hole that Duras manages to veil
via her writing of the novel.
Through joint motifs, scenes, signifiers, and characters that repeat in
the two stories, I read The Lover as a retelling of the primal scene told in
The Ravishing, only this time, Duras is in the place of a woman, an object
of desire. This rewriting of the scene is what Lacan calls a “new type of
writing,” 32 the writing of the real using knots, which provides Duras
access to her femininity and a path out of feminine jealousy and ravage,
as I will now conclude.
In The Lover, something that was not written in Duras’ other novels,
The Ravishing or The Vice-Consul, finally receives a space, a patch is being
written to cover the real via the symbolic register. The new knot that Duras
ties between herself, young Duras, and the Chinese lover, will continue to
be sustained forever because of that which sustains it, the fourth, are the
readers that will continue to read, analyze, and be ravished by Duras.33
29
Duras (1965).
30
Duras (1984).
31
Peraldi (1990), 21–2.
32
Miller (2018), 31.
33
Cf. Lacan’s analysis of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in his twenty-third seminar, Le Sinthome, and also
Joyce’s epiphany as that which will be read by critics for three centuries (Lacan 2016).
riting: Duras’ Solution for Feminine Jealousy

W
and Ravage
On the very first page of The Lover, before meeting the Chinese lover,
Duras describes the face of her young self with a longing. This picture,
which does not exist, is where, according to Duras, she recognizes herself
the most, but also where she enchants herself “où je m'énchante.”34 This
enchantment indicates that the other woman for Duras is now, instead of
Anne-Marie Stretter or Tatiana Karl, Duras herself as a young girl. This
enchantment is reminiscent of the enchantment of Dora from the paint-
ing of the Sistine Madonna, on which she gazed for two hours “rapt in
silent admiration.”35 Dora’s enchantment, like Duras’, indicates her fasci-
nation with her femininity. Dora admires the Madonna, as she does Mrs.
K., as a solution for the anxiety of being an object of desire, a solution
which is a Christian one, according to Lacan.36 Duras begins the story
from this enchantment, but it is her own picture that enchants her; she is
making use of this enchantment-fascination, of herself as an object
of desire.
Another thing that enchants Duras is her writing: “Écrire, c’était ça la
seule chose qui me-plait ma vie et qui l’enchantait. Je l’ai fait. L’écriture ne
m’a jamais quittée.”37 Writing was the only thing that satisfied and
enchanted Duras in her life. Marie-Hélène Brousse wrote that “ravage is
the relation a woman produces with a man through the consummated
sacrifice of the phallic third, herself sometimes.”38 The ravage between the
mother and daughter is reenacted by the relationship between young
Duras and her lover, in which Duras sacrifices herself for the sake of her
family. But this is not the entire essence of her relationship with the lover.
Duras makes sure to underline her passion toward that man. By writing
herself as other in The Lover and creating a book, a literary work, Duras
manages to conjure up again the phallic third that is missing in ravage
34
Duras (1984), 9.
35
Freud (1953), 96.
36
Lacan (2006), 181.
37
Duras (1993), 18.
38
Brousse (2010), 2–3.
and in feminine jealousy, without sacrificing herself. The writing of The

Lover provided Duras with an empty space where she can articulate in
words something of her ravage and her femininity, which enabled Duras
to psychically separate from her mother.
Michèle Montrelay reminds her readers that in chemistry, the opera-
tion of sublimation is separation, and it occurs through combustion.
Sublimation for a woman is what castration is for a man, writes Montrelay,
in the sense that this is what enables the woman to separate.39 In another
text, Montrelay emphasizes that movement is the first attempt of symbol-
ization in the helpless state of jealousy. Symbolization is what enables us
to not be a mere body.40 To recall, in jealousy, desire is sucked out of you,
as Montrelay states. Following the other woman, the desire of the Other,
is what resuscitates the jealous woman. Integrating Montrelay’s state-
ments, I find that following the other woman is an act that involves sym-
bolization and the writing of the unconscious.
Intriguingly, in her interview with Madeleine Chapsal, Montrelay
shares her own experience of the moment before creation, the moment
before she starts writing, as a feeling that is the same feeling as being jeal-
ous in love. She mentions that she received validation that this feeling
occurs in other artists as well.41 Montrelay describes this sensation before
she starts writing as abandonment, absolute solitude, feeling of hate and
desire to destroy the Other. Only women who can create, who can over-
come this feeling of the blank canvas, Montrelay suggests, are able to
support this destructive jealousy.42 In her mass Écrire (writing), Duras
describes writing as that which comes from the bottom of the abyss, from
the hole:
Se trouver dans un trou, au fond d’un trou, dans une solitude quasi-totale et
découvrir que seule l’écriture vous sauver. Être sans sujet aucun de livre, sans
aucune idée de livre c’est se trouver, se retrouver, devant un livre. Une immen-
sité vide. Un livre éventuel. Devant rien. Devant comme une écriture vivante
et nue, comme terrible, terrible à surmonter. Je crois que la personne qui écrit
39
Montrelay (1977a).
40
Montrelay (1996).
41
Montrelay (1977b).
42
Ibid.
est sans idée de livre, qu’elle a les mains vides, la tête vide, et qu’elle ne connait
de cette aventure du livre que l’écriture sèche et nue, sans avenir, sans écho,
lointaine, avec ses règles d’or, élémentaires : l’orthographe, le sens.43
Duras’ ability to face the void and to write over it, to write a patch so
as to veil it, enabled her existence. In The Lover, Duras’ writing reaches a
level of sublimation that enables separation. If we compare young Duras
to Lol, we see that Lol does not manage to separate from the other woman
at the novel’s ending. In contrast, Duras told (or imagined) at the novel’s
ending that her lover married another woman, but it was still her who
was the object of his desire. Unlike Lol, and unlike Mary, and, possibly,
also unlike Olivia Shakespear, after separating from her mother, Duras
assumed something of her body upon herself by following the other
woman (herself ); following her Other femininity, her own Otherness
that she sought after and that she sometimes even found in her unique
writing. Duras had kept her new face, the face of Duras the writer: “Ce
visage-la, nouveau, je l’ai gardé.”44 The fact that she “keeps” her face proves
that through her writing, Duras managed to support her femininity and
accept the other woman that is in herself.
The case of Duras illustrates that jealousy veils with it the possibility of
creation. Art and writing have the potential to fill a subject with desire,
enabling her to write something of the real, of the unwritten of jealousy
and of ravage, and to veil the hole that they bore. Through creation, a
woman can follow the shimmering light and build herself anew from the
ruins like a phoenix, recreating herself from the ashes of her jealousy.45
43
Duras (1993), 24.
44
Duras (1984), 10.
45
Cf. William Shakespeare’s (n.d.) The History of Henri VIII:
ARCHIBISHOP CRANMER: Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new create another heir,
As great in admiration as herself;
So shall she leave her blessedness to one,
When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness,
Who from the sacred ashes of her honour
Shall star-like rise as great in fame as she was,
And so stand fix’d. (5.5.3425).
Works Cited
Brousse, Marie-Hélène. (2010). Feminine Know-How with Relationship: The
Three Rs: Ruse, Ravage, Ravishing. NLS-Messager 669, Congres NLS VIII,
Geneva (Heather Chamberlain, Trans.). AMP-NLS. Retrieved June 15, 2023,
from https://amp-nls.org/nlsmessager/2009/669.html
Duras, M. (1964). Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein. Gallimard.
Duras, M. (1965). Le vice-consul. Gallimard.
Duras, M. (1984). L’Amant. Minuit.
Duras, M. (1985). The Lover. Random House.
Duras, M. (1993). Écrire. Gallimard.
Freud, S. (1953). Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. In The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume VII: A
Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works 1901–1905 (James
Stratchey et al., Trans., pp. 1–122). Hogarth Press.
Kushner, R. (2017). Introduction. In The Lover, Wartime Notebooks, Practicalities
(pp. vii–xv). Everyman’s Library.
Lacan, J. (2006). Presentation on Transference. In Écrits (Bruce Fink, Trans. &
Jacques-Alain Miller, ed., pp. 176–88). W.W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2016). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII: The Sinthome
(1975–1976) (Adrian Price, Trans. & Jacques-Alain Miller, ed.). Polity Press.
Ladimer, B. (2009). Wartime Writings, or the Imaginary Lover of Marguerite
Duras. In Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, vol. 33(1), Article 7. New
Prairie Press. Retrieved December 19, 2020, from https://doi.org/10.414
8/2334-4415.1694
Lydon, Mary. 1988. The Forgetfulness of Memory: Jacques Lacan, Marguerite
Duras, and the Text. In Contemporary Literature and Contemporary Theory
29(3), 351-368. University of Wisconsin.
Miller, J.-A. (1988). Sept remarques sur la création. In Lettre Mensuelle – École
de la Cause freudienne, 68, 9–13.
Miller, J.-A. (2018). The Real Unconscious. The Lacanian Review, 6, 28–45.
L’Harmattan.
Montrelay, M. (1977a). L’Ombre et le Nom: Sur la féminité. Minuit.
Montrelay, M. (1977b). La Jalousie. In M. Chapsal (Ed.), La Jalousie: Entretiens

Peraldi, F. (1990). The Passion of Death: A Free Associative Reading of Freud
and Marguerite Duras. L’Esprit Créateur, 30(1), 19–27.
Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). History of Henri VIII, V, 5 3425. Retrieved December
19, 2020, Opensource Shakespeare: https://www.opensourceshakespeare.
org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=henry8&Act=5&Scene=5
&Scope=scene
Thompson, Z. B. (2016). Beyond Symbolic Rape: The Insidious Trauma of
Conquest in Marguerite Duras’ The Lover and Eileen Chang’s “Lust, Caution”.
Feminist Formations, 28, 1–26.
Index1
A C
Aggressiveness, 28, 29 Castration, 51, 52, 55, 56, 58,
Alienation, 34, 35, 43, 44 84, 92, 95
Antigone, 87, 88 Chapsal, Madeleine, 46
Anxiety, 77, 108, 109 Charron, Pierre, 15
Arambourou, Miren, 95 Christian, 12, 13
Aristotle, 9–18 Copjec, Joan, 16, 17, 35
Augustine, St., 24–26, 28, 29
Autobiography, 6
D
Dark continent, 56
B Das Ding, 58, 86–88, 94
Bajomée, Danielle, 94 Delusional jealousy, 55, 71–79
Beauty's Hour, 3–5, 33–47, 53 Derrida, Jacques, 17
Biberman, Efrat, 87 Desire, 3, 4, 10–18, 25, 26, 33–47,
Bible, the, 9 51, 52, 56–58, 63–67, 87–89,
Borromean knot, 84, 94 91, 92, 94, 95, 107–111
Brousse, Marie-Hélène, 88 Dissolution of the Oedipus
Buhler, Charlotte, 29 Complex, 50
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3
116 Index
Dora, 4, 29, 44, 45, 61–69 H

Duras, Marguerite, 2, 3, 5, 6, 81, Hatherley, Mary, 37, 41, 43, 45, 46
84–87, 90–95, 100–111, Hillis Miller, J., 17
100n1, 107n28 Hold, Jacques, 82, 83, 85, 86, 89,
90, 105–107
Homosexual, 61–69
E Homosexuality, 72, 74, 75, 78, 79
Empathy, 29, 62, 64–66, 68
Envy, 9–18
Even-Shusan, Avraham, 9 I
Idealization, 64, 66
Identification, 25, 29, 38, 42,
F 45, 61–69
Feminine identification, 63, 66 Identifies, 40, 43–46
Feminine jealousy, 45, 46, 49–59, Identity, 40, 42, 44
66, 68, 71–79, 89, 90, 92, 94, The imaginary, 35, 42
95, 100–111 Imago, 25
Feminine jouissance, 45, 46, 52, Invidia, 25–28
55–58, 85, 89, 107
Feminine sexuality, 6
Femininity, 3, 4, 6, 36, 41, 44, 45, J
53, 54, 56, 62, 64–66, 68, Jealouissance, 26, 27, 91
71–79, 102, 106–111 Jealous, 12, 16–18, 37, 38, 43–45
Fleiss, Wilhelm, 49 Jealous hatred, 26, 28
Following the other woman, 44, 46, Jealous identification, 66
66, 86, 89, 91, 92, 94 Jealousy, 1–6, 9–18, 22–29, 33–47,
Freud, Sigmund, 1–5, 22–24, 49–59, 61–69,
26–29, 35, 38, 45, 49–57, 81–95, 100–111
50n5, 61–68, 71–79, 87, 89, Jouissance, 24, 26, 28, 34, 42, 44, 85
93–95, 109n35 Joyce, James, 36, 42, 91
Full satisfaction, 22, 27
K
G Karl, Tatiana, 105–107, 109
The gaze, 34, 35, 43 Klein, Melanie, 15, 16
Gonne, Maud, 36, 46, 47 Knot, 104–108
Gower, Mary, 36, 37, 43, 46 Kushner, Rachel, 100, 100n2
Index 117
L N
La Rochefoucauld, François, 13, 14 Name-of-the-Father, 84, 85, 94
Lacan, Jacques, 2–6, 5n9, 17, 18, Narcissism, 24, 24n17
23–29, 29n44, 34, 38–45,
46n59, 51, 52, 55–58, 62,
64–67, 76–78, 83–88, 90, 91, O
95, 101, 108, 108n33, 109 Object a, 25, 26
Lack, 34, 35, 40, 41, 51–54 Object of desire, 64–66
Ladimer, Bethany, 100n3 Oedipal phase, 53, 54, 57
L'amant, 6, 102n8, 102n11, Oedipus complex, 22, 49–51,
103n14, 106n25, 108n30, 50n5, 57, 58
109n34, 111n44 Oral drive, 23, 24, 24n17,
Laurent, Eric, 88 26, 29
Little Hans, 71–79 Oral jealousy, 22–24
Lol V. Stein, 81–83 The other woman, 82, 86,
Love object, 63 104–107, 109–111
The Lover, 3, 6, 100–111
Lydon, Mary, 101
P
Pain, 81–95, 104
M Paranoia, 55, 72, 74, 75
Mack Brunswick, Ruth, 55 Passion, 12–15
Masochistic, 27, 28 Penis envy, 51, 52, 55
Masquerade, 40, 41, 59 Peraldi, François, 87, 108
Masquerading, 40, 41 Phallic, 40
Melancholic, 95 function, 56
Miller, Jacques-Alain, 5n9, 26, 34, identification, 64, 67–69
85n16, 102n9, 108n32 jealousy, 49–59, 68
Mirror image, 39, 42, 45 jouissance, 52, 56
Mirror stage, 24, 25, 29, 33–47 mother, 51
Montrelay, Michèle, 4–6, 5n9, 17, Phallus, 41, 51–53, 56,
22, 24, 24n17, 33, 34, 39, 43, 58, 59
44, 46, 52, 53, 56–58, 66, 69, Phantasm, 27, 28
76–79, 83–86, 88, 90, 110 Phantasy, 73, 74, 77, 78
Mother and daughter, 57, 58 Pity, 13
Mourning and Melancholia, 5, 95 Pre-Oedipal phase, 53–55, 57
Mr. K, 61–65 Pre-Oedipus, 50, 54
Mrs. K, 61–66, 68 Proust, Marcel, 17
118 Index
R Sinthome, 85
Ravage, 6, 57–59, 85, Stein, Lol. V., 81, 82, 105
102–104, 108–111 Stretter, Anne-Marie, 82, 87, 89, 91,
The Ravishing of Lol Stein, 3, 5 92, 95, 105–109
Ravissement, 5, 81–95, 102 Symptom, 84, 85
The real, 84, 86, 87
Repères, 34
Repressed femininity, 71–75 T
Repressed jealousy, 74, 75 Transitivism, 29
Repression, 54, 56
Rival, 50, 54, 62, 65, 67, 95
Rivalry, 11, 13, 57 V
Riviere, Joan, 41 Varchi, Benedetto, 14, 15
Rose, Jacqueline, 55, 64
W
S Widdler, 76, 78
Sadomasochistic, 27, 28 The Woman, 41, 45
drive, 28 The Woman does not exist, 46
jealousy, 27–29 Writing, 100–111
Satisfaction, 22, 23, 25, 26
Schreber, Daniel Paul, 71–79
Scopic drive, 24–27, 29 Y
Scopic jealousy, 24–27 Yeats, W. B., 36, 46, 47
Semblable, 25, 29, 29n44, The Young Homosexual, 4
57, 95
Separation, 51, 56, 58, 86, 94, 95,
106, 110, 111 Z
Shakespear, Olivia, 2–4, 36, 38, 41, Zelos, 13
44, 46, 47 Zisser, Shirley, 87
Sinthom, 84 Zupančič, Alenka, 26, 27

Jealousy, Femininity and Desire: A Lacanian Reading

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Jealousy, Femininity and Desire: A Lacanian Reading

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

THE PALGRAVE LACAN SERIES

SERIES EDITORS: CALUM NEILL · DEREK HOOK

ISSN 2946-4196 ISSN 2946-420X (electronic)

Paper in this product is recyclable.

Jealousy always intrigued and attracted me. I saw it everywhere, especially

body. I found Lacan’s formulations of desire to be, in more ways than

I would like to thank my friends and family, who have contributed to

2 What Is Jealousy? Jealousy and Envy from Aristotle to Today 9

3 Drive Jealousies in the Development of the Subject 21

8 Ravissement and Jealousy Without Pain 81

9 The Lover: The Writing of Feminine Jealousy 99

Dana Tor-Zilberstein Dana practices psychoanalysis in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Abstract Jealousy, this affect that is so common both in literature and

Keywords Jealousy • Envy • Freud • Lacan • Psychoanalysis •

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 1

philosophical reflection, I will present fragments of theories conceived by

presented as psychically or physically unseparated from the story’s female

Unlike Beauty’s Hour, which can be considered as somewhat conserva-

The term “ravage,” which characterizes the mother-daughter relation-

Keywords Jealousy • Envy • Women • The bible • Aristotle • Desire •

 ictionary Definitions for Jealousy and Envy

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 9

definitions, two of which are particularly relevant. The first, based on a

Hence, according to the most popular dictionary of English, jealousy

Jealousy and Envy in the History of Thought

justified emotion than envy. Jealousy, according to La Rochefoucauld, aims

Jealousie proceedeth from Passio, when we covet to enjoy or possesse that

This quote is intriguing because it once again propagates that jealousy

In her explanation, Klein attributed the emotion of envy to the subject’s

Abstract This chapter examines various manifestations of jealousy in the

Keywords The Mirror Stage • Narcissism • Aggressiveness • Jealousy •

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 21

In this constitutive paragraph about jealousy, Freud teaches us that

from the window.13 It should be also mentioned that elsewhere, Freud

identification that is related to the scopic drive.19 In the heart of the

 adomasochistic Jealousy in “A Child is

an unconscious jouissance the children derived from watching their sib-

Miller, J.-A. (2016). L’objet jouissance. La Cause du Désir, 3(94), 101–113.

Keywords Jouissance • Mirror Stage • Desire • Jealousy • Beauty’s Hour

The Mirror and the Birth of Desire

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 33

as “the perfect jouissance of oneself,”1 which is reminiscent of the jouis-

Beauty’s Hour: Introduction

She has gone weeping away.12

 ary’s Jealousy I: Following Desire Through

to her love as “grotesque.”29 Similarly, she describes Bella as one who is

The subject is constituted as lack when he identifies with the image in

­ sychoanalyst Joan Riviere in 1929 to designate a woman who is a man

Mary’s Jealousy II: A Shunning of Desire

be expected according to Lacan’s saying that a woman is always “other to

Riviere, J. (1929). Womanliness as Masquerade. The International Journal of

Abstract This chapter offers a differentiation between two types of jeal-

Keywords Ravage • Feminine jealousy • Phallic jealousy • The Oedipus

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 49

correspondence that Freud referred to as his “self-analysis,” which helped

having a phallus, belonging or not to the group that is subject to castra-

An example for phallic jealousy is found at the beginning of Beauty’s

of the neurosis.”22 It is worth mentioning that according to Freud, the

Based on Freud’s articulations of jealousy in the pre-Oedipal phase,

Feminine Jealousy and Ravage

Ravage is related to a woman’s relationship to her own body, which

Feminine jealousy is also the main constituent of ravage that is found in

Abstract This chapter examines feminine jealousy and identification

2 What Is Jealousy? Jealousy and Envy from Aristotle to Today 9

3 Drive Jealousies in the Development of the Subject 21

8 Ravissement and Jealousy Without Pain 81

9 The Lover: The Writing of Feminine Jealousy 99

ictionary Definitions for Jealousy and Envy

Jealousy and Envy in the History of Thought

adomasochistic Jealousy in “A Child is

The Mirror and the Birth of Desire

Beauty’s Hour: Introduction

ary’s Jealousy I: Following Desire Through

sychoanalyst Joan Riviere in 1929 to designate a woman who is a man

Mary’s Jealousy II: A Shunning of Desire

Feminine Jealousy and Ravage

The Dora Case: A Case of Hysteria

The Case of the Young Homosexual

elusional Jealousy and Repressed

Little Hans’ Solution for Feminine Jealousy

The Ravishing of Lol Stein: Plot Summary

An Analysis of Lol’s Case

avissement, Nothingness and Being as Close

Jealousy and Pain: Lol’s Deflection

Duras’ Pain: Melancholic Jealousy

The Lover: Introduction

“Ma mère mon amour”: The Story of Ravage

Between The Lover and The Ravishing of Lol:

riting: Duras’ Solution for Feminine Jealousy