moments guilty and innocent, masterful and dependent. Evil comes out of the apparently
good, good comes out of apparent evil. It is indeed extraordinary that the Freudian
doorway to Constant’s psyche should open onto what some of the profoundest critics of
his writings have already glimpsed: a world of coexisting antagonisms, of jostling
contradictions. In this one passage of Constant’s Ma Vie we see almost a mythical
presentation of his whole life: in it all the now angry, now helpless, now loving
paradoxicality of his existence is released and comes at us at high pressure. This opening
text is, in a word, an oxymoron, a forcing together of opposites: domination and
submission, dependency and independence, guilt and expiation.
There is, of course, one other and vital part of the story we have not yet touched on.
This is Constant’s passage from being a dumb, suffering infant to the acquisition of a
language which he would make peculiarly his own. The entrance into language marks, in
the terminology of Jacques Lacan, the entrance into the so-called symbolic order—that is
the end of the pre-oedipal phase and the child’s acceptance of the ‘Nom du Père’, the
‘Name-of-the-Father’ (also, in Lacan’s punning way, the ‘Non du Père’, the paternal ‘No’
to incestuous desires), where words are organized by the symbolic father and governed
by his laws and authority: thus the child enters the social order and accedes to culture
through rational discourse, leaving behind childish babble. But for Freudian—Lacanian
or otherwise—and non-Freudian alike there is a symbolic value in the Ströhlin episode, in
the everyday sense of the word ‘symbolic’. In it, a vehicle of culture, of civilization, is
handed on to Constant, a means by which he was later to achieve fulfilment: he became a
fine Greek scholar and an expert on Greek religion. Constant would also use the Greek
alphabet while writing in French for as it were coded self-expression in his private
diaries, the Journaux intimes of 15 May 1811 to 26 September 1816—indeed he was
perhaps already doing so when he wrote Ma Vie if it was composed in 1811.
The foregoing reading rests necessarily on a Freudian hypothesis. But Freudianism
itself is an unproven theory, pace the Freudians, as Jeffrey Masson, the French novelist
Christiane Rochefort and others have lately argued very strongly. What if we do not
accept the validity of psychoanalytical interpretations of Constant’s childhood? There is a
third way of viewing Constant’s childhood which steers a middle course between
common-sense empiricism and the rigid categories of Freud and his disciples. This is the
school of thought best represented by John Bowlby, which is largely based on the results
of clinical work with children. It is illuminating to consider in the light of Bowlby’s
findings not only the Ströhlin passage but also another text from the Journaux intimes, an
entry dated 20 April 1804:
While I am speaking about pain, I must set down here a memory
which is not from my own experience but which nevertheless two
months ago filled me with sombre emotions which well up every
time it comes to mind. It is the story of a woman of twenty-three
who was hanged in England for fraud. There was nothing
remarkable about her personality. She is not reported to have been
beautiful, witty, sensitive or distinguished in any way. But in all the
details of her sufferings, from the beginning of her trial until her
execution, there is such a depth of human misery that one isBenjamin constant 18