whenever some adverse event or threat of it penetrates to that secret
cupboard, with or without his realising it, he becomes anxious and
distressed and prone to develop symptoms, the reasons for which
neither he nor his family may understand.^7This lack of directness on Juste de Constant’s part was allied to an
emotional restraint which must have seemed very much like rejection to a
little boy who saw his father so infrequently. A child has no understanding
of a person’s character and its history beyond what it sees. Benjamin
Constant could not know at this age that genetically the Constant family
was afflicted with a certain oddity in behaviour, compensated for—if
compensation it can be called—by considerable intellectual vigour.^8 All
Benjamin could see in his father was an apparent indifference—which he
would later rationalize as being timidity—which chilled him to the quick
and destroyed all hope of trust or intimacy between them. The obvious
conclusion, in a child’s mind, was: ‘What have I done to displease him?’
and there was an immensely disturbing answer ready to hand: that he was
responsible for his mother’s death. John Bowlby describes such a situation
and its consequences:
How prone children are spontaneously to blame themselves for a
loss is difficult to know. What, however, is certain is that a child
makes a ready scapegoat and it is very easy for a distraught widow
or widower to lay the blame on him. In some cases, perhaps, a
parent does this but once in a sudden brief outburst; in other cases
it may be done in a far more systematic and persistent way. In
either case it is likely that the child so blamed will take the matter
to heart and thereafter be prone to self-reproach and depression.
Such influences seem likely to be responsible for a large majority
of cases in which a bereaved child develops a morbid sense of
guilt; they have undoubtedly been given far too little weight in
traditional theorizing.
Nevertheless, there are certain circumstances surrounding a
parent’s death which can lead rather easily to a child reaching the
conclusion that he is himself to blame, at least in part. Examples
are when a child who has been suffering from an infectious illness
has infected his parent, and when a child has been in a predicament
and his parent, attempting rescue, has lost his life. In such cases
only open discussion between the child and his surviving parent, or
an appropriate substitute, will enable him to see the event and his
share in it in a proper perspective.^9Benjamin constant 12