character of a vendetta on his part. Ian Suttie throws light on the possible
development of both Juste and Benjamin Constant:
The repression of affection seems...to be a process likely to be
cumulative from one generation to another. The mother who was
herself love-starved and who, in consequence, is intolerant of
tenderness, will be impatient of her own children’s dependency,
regressiveness and claims for love. Her suspicion and anxiety really
amount to a feeling (rooted in self-distrust), that children are
naturally bad (St Augustine!) and require to be ‘made’ good by
disapprobation and the checking of all indulgence of ‘babyishness’.
This creates a corresponding anxiety in the children about retaining
approbation and winning more. The child feels too early that love
must be deserved or earned, and excessive anxiety may easily
reach the point of despair...it may lead to a jealous
competitiveness, the quest for power, position, ‘prestige’,
possession. Love has now become aggressive, anxious, covetous.
Unintentionally the mother has imparted her own inhibitions (on
tender feeling) to her children, has substituted the ideal of duty for
that of good-fellowship and established a morality of guilt and
distrust in place of that of benevolence and confidence which I
maintain would have developed naturally.^30This seems to hit the nail exactly on the head. The poison of défiance was
passed on from one generation of the Constants to the next, distrustfulness
both as regards others and oneself. In Juste’s case the results were worse
than with any of his brothers. One reason for his putting Benjamin in the
care of Marianne seems to have been because he did not trust his mother;
he feared she would criticize and denigrate him while he was away, and
that he would thereby lose his son’s love and respect. Ambition later drove
Juste into a series of ruinous lawsuits, which he should have known there
was a strong likelihood he might lose, in order to restore his honour after a
mutiny. Through Juste’s influence, what Ian Suttie calls ‘jealous
competitiveness’ became—involuntarily—part of Benjamin Constant’s
nature, especially during his youth. Finally, anxiety about being loved
came to be both a source of vulnerability and the focus of a cluster of
often contradictory attitudes in the older Benjamin Constant.
It is at this point in our investigation that the work of John Bowlby with disturbed
children has its relevance. What Suttie describes above is the course of what is, for all its
sadness, a fairly common misfortune. But what if you have lost your mother at birth, if it
is your remaining parent who is treating you like this—on the rare occasions, that is,
Benjamin constant 22