The dark side of jealousy and envy: Desire, delusion, desperation, and destructive communication

A New York Times headline screams: “Texas Executes Man who Killed his Ex-Girlfriend out of Jealousy�? (August 15, 1995). For months, television news covered the O. J. Simpson trial, with all its implications for jealousy and domestic violence. Television docudramas have been made about a teenager (Amy Fischer) who maims her alleged lover’s wife, a high school student who stabs and kills a popular girl that she idolizes (in A Friend to Die For), and a high society La Jolla, CA, wife (Betty Broderick) who kills her husband and his secretary/lover. Movies such as Fatal Attraction, which portrays a jealous, obsessive ex-lover’s acts of violence, and The Lion King, which features Scar’s envy of his brother, King Mufasa, and his nephew, Simba, earn millions of box office dollars. Indeed, if Spock had lived on earth in the 20th century, the media accounts of emotion-laden crimes would have provided ample anecdotal evidence for the validity of his statement on the human condition. Moreover, Spock would likely have concluded that jealousy, and to a lesser extent, its sister construct, envy, are prime elicitors of violence.