psychiatrists would call ‘negative transference’, the process in the course of analysis
whereby feelings deriving from an earlier phase of a patient’s life are displaced and
relocated in the person of the analyst, so that the analyst ‘becomes’ that figure from
earlier life. Like the ideal analyst Isabelle took a very great interest in Constant, tried to
be non-possessive about him and, in their long conversations and letters, encouraged him
to talk about himself and understand himself. However, one can ask whether by a curious
process of displacement, she did not come to signify someone else, whether she did not
cease to be the benign friend and, as if now seen through a distorting lens, became the
bad mother, the mother he had lost—or who had lost him—so many years before. Or
indeed whether the suppressed resentments Constant felt vis-à-vis his father were not
now channelled against Isabelle. Such speculation is hardly fanciful given that Constant
was now entering a period of severe nervous depression during which long submerged
feelings can surface in extreme, exaggerated and aggressive forms. The recurring theme
in Constant’s letters to Isabelle now becomes his accusation that she is full of ‘défiance’
towards him, that is, that she is distrustful of him, no longer open with him, as if she is
forever holding something back from him.^34 A vicious circle is quickly created, familiar
to those who have encountered someone going through a severe depression: the
aggression coming from Constant, in this case, prevents Isabelle from expressing herself
freely, for fear of antagonizing him further. To which Constant’s reaction is to see this as
proof that Isabelle is indeed holding back, expressing herself in imperiously laconic
terms. Isabelle sees that she cannot win, the letters grow shorter and finally the
correspondence dries up completely.
Minna returned to Brunswick and from September 1789 to May 1790—the period
when he stopped writing to Isabelle almost completely—Constant laboured intensively
on his father’s behalf, alone in Holland. His hard work won people’s admiration, but,
perhaps more important to Constant, it won his father’s approval. Juste wrote to his
brother Samuel on 2 October 1789: ‘I am extremely pleased with my son. He appears to
be behaving with much wisdom and prudence. People tell me he is well liked. However
things turn out, his journey [to Holland] will do him no harm.’^35 In the meantime, in a
fury at Isabelle whom he accused of listening to ill-informed gossip circulating about his
father in Switzerland, Constant told her to burn his letters—as he had burnt hers before
leaving Switzer-land, he added cruelly (letter of 14 September 1789).^36 With the
exception of a letter at the New Year, it was not until 11 May 1790 that Constant resumed
his correspondence with Isabelle. Working on his father’s behalf—and, as it was to turn
out, fairly fruitlessly—he had been kept too busy to reflect on the state of his own life.
Now he appeared anxious to be on good terms with Isabelle again, but on his return to
Brunswick he seemed if anything to be sinking deeper into depression. On 4 June 1790
he told Isabelle, in terms that suggest he had been reading Pascal:
I feel more than ever the nothingness of all things; how everything
seems so promising and nothing lasts; how what we are capable of
seems worthy of something better than where we are all destined to
finish up; and how that huge discrepancy [disproportion] cannot
but make us unhappy. In my next letter we shall laugh at the
indignation of stathouders and rulers at the French Revolution,
which they claim is the result of the innate sinfulness of mankind.^37The brunswick years 135