Lacanian Perspectives on Jealousy

Carmen Wright edits a collection of eight essays that read jealousy through Lacanian theory and the clinic. The book asks how jealousy presents in the consulting room now, whether that differs from earlier accounts, and what the emotion does both psychically and socially. Contributors including Anouchka Grose, Darian Leader, Genevieve Morel, Renata Salecl and Jamieson Webster treat jealousy alongside envy, identification and the early infantile complexes, and set it against contemporary arrangements of monogamy, relationships and family.

Rather than a single thesis, the essays hold jealousy as manifold and shifting, and keep it tied to the social bond rather than to private pathology alone. Chapters draw on clinical vignettes and on figures from popular culture, and range across sisterly rivalry, utopian politics and questions of the gaze. For a clinician, the volume offers short, argument-driven readings that place a familiar affect within Lacanian structure and within the wider culture that shapes how patients speak of it.