The divorce of the Other

“The divorce of the Other” is Dr. Wagner’s name for a displacement of emotional distress: in his professional experience, patients were troubled not by their own divorces but by the divorces of other people. The expression becomes a precise and painful lens for Casaubon’s jealousy, exposing how he had mistaken the object of his distress and acted to reshape another couple’s relationship around his own desire.

Wagner’s Observation

Wagner introduces the idea playfully, apparently stepping into the conversation from off its subject. He says that in his professional life he has never encountered a patient made neurotic by that patient’s own divorce; the trouble, he insists, has always been the divorce of the Other. His use of a capital O gives the word a conceptual weight: the Other is not simply an unnamed person but the third party whose relationship becomes the focus of someone else’s distress.

The remark lands with startling force on Casaubon. He gives a start, as if bitten by an asp, because Wagner’s formulation touches a truth he has not been willing to face. The sentence is not offered as an abstract theory alone; it names the structure of Casaubon’s own emotional crisis.

Casaubon’s Recognition

After a pause, Wagner tells Casaubon that he understood what he wanted to understand. He then turns away from the charged moment, comments on the heat, hums an aria, moves a breadstick as though conducting an orchestra, eats cake, and finally asks to be taken back to his hotel. The others seem to regard Casaubon as having spoiled a symposium from which they expected words of wisdom. For Casaubon, however, the interruption has delivered something more consequential than a general pronouncement: he feels he has heard the truth.

The expression clarifies the earlier source of Casaubon’s distress. He had telephoned and discovered that the woman he wanted was at home with the Other. He then spent a sleepless night, convinced that the real problem was not Sandra but his inability to bear the woman’s relationship with her partner. Wagner’s phrase gives that jealousy its name: the pain was organized around another couple, not around Casaubon’s own marriage or separation.

The Other Couple and Its Consequences

Casaubon’s recognition is inseparable from what followed. For six dramatic months he clung to the woman, shadowed her closely, tried to undermine her relationship, declared that he wanted her for himself, and sought to convince her that she hated the Other. Their quarrels intensified; the Other became jealous and demanding, stopped going out in the evenings, and called twice a day when traveling. One night he slapped her.

The consequences sharpen the expression’s irony. The Other’s relationship does deteriorate, but not as an independent misfortune that Casaubon merely observes: Casaubon has actively tried to bring about that rupture. When she asks him for money to run away, he gathers what little he has in the bank. She leaves the conjugal bed and goes to the mountains with friends without leaving a forwarding address. The Other, desperate, calls Casaubon to ask whether he knows where she is. Casaubon does not know, but her claim that she is leaving the Other for him makes his ignorance look like a lie. Wagner’s phrase thus describes both the focus of Casaubon’s jealousy and the damaging chain of conduct it helps him recognize.