Benjamin Constant

offers us a case for comparison, as we can see in this well-known passage from the
Confessions (1782):

I was born weak and sickly. I cost my mother her life, and my birth

was the first of my misfortunes. I have never been able to

understand how my father had borne her loss, but I do know that he

was inconsolable for ever afterwards. He believed he could see her

in me, while never being able to forget that I had taken her away

from him. He never put his arms around me without my feeling in

the force of his embrace a bitter sense of loss: this rendered it still

more tender. Whenever he said, ‘Jean-Jacques, let’s talk about your

mother’, I would reply, ‘So we’re going to cry again, are we,

father?’ I only had to say that for his tears to begin to flow. ‘Bring

her back to me’, he would sob, ‘console me for losing her. Fill the

empty space in my heart. Would I love you as much as this if you

were only my son?’ Forty years after losing her he died in the arms

of his second wife with the name of the first on his lips, and the

memory of her face deep in his heart.^6

As we would expect of Rousseau, all the complexity of motive and feeling

is brought out in this intensely moving passage: Isaac Rousseau’s

reproaches, his heightened sense of his son’s vulnerability, above all the

constant reminder of his dead wife in his son’s very looks. Painful as it
was, this was an essentially healthy reaction towards Jean-Jacques on his

father’s part. There was no bottling up of grief, and although Rousseau

was clearly upset by the situation and powerless to prevent its recurrence,

he was left in no doubt about either his father’s quite involuntary feelings

of blame and resentment or about the abiding reality of his love for him. It
is my belief that in this, as perhaps in other ways, Constant was

emotionally less fortunate than Rousseau. Such a scene as the one just

described in the Confessions had no counterpart in Constant’s experiences.

For reasons which he must have tried long and hard to fathom, Constant

only knew a father who was critical, ironic, lacking in warmth, above all
who seemed permanently unable to come out into the open with what he

had on his mind.
John Bowlby has written eloquently about the possible effects of such a failure of
communication:

Without understanding and sympathy there is a danger that the

child’s thoughts and feelings will become locked away, as though

in a secret cupboard, and there will live on to haunt him. Then,

The grief that does not speak 11