PRACTICAL PSYCHOLOGY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26228, 12 August 1946, Page 6

PRACTICAL PSYCHOLOGY

MEETING OF CLUB

The subject under discussion at the weekly meeting of the Practical Psychology Club was " Jealousy.” Psychologists, it was stated, were by no means agreed about jealousy. Most of them regarded it as among the natural tendencies of human nature, and there were some who, like the late Professor William McDougall, even went so far as to defend it. It could be noted in very young children and even in domestic animals. In its more advanced and extreme forms It was a dangerous thing, and could become an obsession akin to a form of madness. It had been stated that jealousy was akin to the instincts, but, like all our instincts, it needed to be governed and guided by inelligence and controlled by a right attitude both to ourselves and to life at large. Any kind of favouritism on the part of parents (whether conscious or unconscious) would breed a sense of rivalry between children and would lead on to jealousy. There were some aspects of our education system which encouraged rivalry and formed breeding grounds for jealousy. Prizes were presented to the most brilliant pupils in schools, although psychology had made it clear by now that we could no more help our intelligence quotient than we could help the texture of our hair or the colour of our eyes. Of course, there was a healthy form of rivalry, as when schoolboys or athletes competed in a race or a game where the prize was trifling and the game which counted most. Not all competition was unwholesome or undesirable. Business life, too. encouraged rivalry and bred jealousies. The cure for individual jealousy was first to analyse ourselves to discover just where our particular from of jealousy had its roots, and then a wholesome system of values should be adopted. We should remind ourselves that jealousy of itself accomplished nothing, except to make us unhappy. We should also realise, and act upon the principle, that the only real worth of any of us was in what we were and not in what we possessed and that our business in life was not to copy or envy others, but to develop our own innate faculties and propensities to the utmost.