Riddles of the jealous man

While the best minds of psychotherapy from various countries were hoarse (I myself was a repeated participant in such disputes, sometimes reaching sharp points) arguing: what is this - jealousy? Neurosis obsession? Special, independent disorder - paranoia? Paranoiac disorder in a more serious mental illness?
Leicester with a group of employees in San Francisco undertook an arduous study of men whom their wives divorced due to jealousy 3 or more years before.
For the purity of the study, ethnic Latin Americans and Italians were excluded from it, for whom jealousy could be part of the culture, and only Anglo-Saxons aged 30 to 50 were left who also had a secondary specialized or higher education (i.e., by American standards educated!). The results of the study struck the scientific world: most of the men of the study group were re-married and did not show any particular suspicion towards their wives in their new families.
This time (for the second time!) They chose such modest women, such nondescript gray mice as wives, that even the thought of the possibility for such a quiet “novel on the side” was not born. The men studied themselves were quite successful, attractive and socially adapted, so that the new wives made a striking contrast with them. One gets the impression that these men realized their problem, adapted to it, and selected a partner for the new union, which does not provoke jealousy in them. By the way, the new wives had no idea that their husbands were jealous, that their first families were destroyed precisely for this reason, and in many cases, substantial compensation was paid to the first wives of the court. How surprised they were when they found out about their “such” husband (but, of course, they didn’t learn it from psychologists).

These men hid their “pathological” past thoroughly (and successfully!), And they themselves were, as a rule, quite critical of their behavior, and spoke to the experts who examined them extremely reluctantly (although they received a certain fee for participating in the study). Lester came to the conclusion that the phenomenon of jealousy is closer to borderline disorders from the range of obsessions - after all, obsessions are characterized by almost complete disappearance of symptoms in a different situation and a critical attitude to these symptoms.