A psychodynamic etiology of retroactive jealousy

“Retroactive jealousy” (RJ) is an obsessive preoccupation with a current romantic partner’s past sexual or romantic relationships, in the absence of any present rival or actual infidelity threat. Patients typically experience these intrusive jealous thoughts as ego-dystonic, irrational, and destructive to the relationship itself. Although retroactive jealousy is widely discussed in popular psychology, it is almost exclusively considered within cognitive behavioral models that emphasize symptom management, rather than etiology and psychodynamic treatment. Psychoanalytic scholarship has given little direct attention to RJ. This paper proposes a psychodynamic account of one type of male retroactive jealousy, based on recurring clinical patterns observed in several patients. The formulation centers on an unconscious parallel between the adult patient’s demand that his partner should somehow have chosen him before she had ever met him, and the childhood oedipal wish that his mother had chosen him instead of his father before the patient himself had even come into being. One patient’s dream epitomizes the temporal distortion, helplessness, and moralistic grievance characterizing retroactive jealousy.