when you see him? What if, left only with a nurse, you begin to brood on your mother’s
death, come to the conclusion that it was your own fault, but are unable subsequently to
discuss your feelings of guilt with your father, a father who declines to talk to you for any
length of time and who recoils from any display of emotion? The likely conclusion must
be that such a person will sooner or later, unless the situation improves dramatically, be
likely to show symptoms of neurosis. The special circumstances and personality of the
sufferer will obviously affect the course of the neurosis, but it could nonetheless persist
for a very long time. The problem would be aggravated by ill-treatment at the hands of
your tutor, and by the sudden appearance of a substitute mother at the age of 4 replacing
whoever had looked after you before (even this, as we shall see, happened to Benjamin
Constant as well). We noted earlier in this chapter John Bowlby’s comments on a child’s
susceptibility to blaming itself for its parent’s death. Such self-reproach could lead to
bouts of depression and the development of a morbid sense of guilt. But there is a still
worse possibility: according to Bowlby, young adults who have lost a parent during
childhood are more prone than others to consider committing suicide. Reasons for
making a suicidal gesture include: (a) a wish to elicit a caregiving response from an
attachment-figure who is felt to be neglectful—the well-known ‘cry for help’; and (b) a
wish to punish an attachment-figure and so coerce him or her into being more attentive.
Reasons for completing a suicide include: (a) a wish to destroy the self in order to
assuage an overpowering sense of guilt for having contributed to a death; and (b) a desire
for revenge against a dead person for having deserted, which can take the form either of
redirecting towards the self murderous wishes aroused by a deserting person, or else of
abandoning another in retaliation.^31 Despair of ever finding another loving relationship
and a wish for reunion with the dead person are other reasons which, clinical evidence
suggests, induce people to go through with the act.
Now in Constant’s life chronic anxiety, depressive episodes and examples of his
proneness to dejection and melancholia are too numerous to mention and well
documented. As for suicide, even if we leave aside his notorious attempt in 1795 to win
the love of Madame de Staël by possibly faking a suicide scene, there is at least one
account in Constant’s writings of suicide contemplated and one of suicide actually
attempted. The suicide attempt is the well-known tragicomic scene recounted in Ma Vie
when Constant swallowed part of a bottle of opium rather than submit to the humiliating
confession before a stranger that he had not won the love of Jenny Pourrat.^32 The
contemplation of suicide occurred, according to Constant’s letter of 31 August 1787 to
Isabelle de Charrière, during a boat trip on Lake Windermere:
I have just experienced a kind of storm on Lake Windermere, the largest lake in this
whole region, two miles from this village [Patterdale]. I wanted to drown myself, the
water was so dark and so deep that the certainty of finding peace so very quickly tempted
me greatly. But I was with two sailors who would have pulled me out again, and I don’t
intend to drown myself—as I poisoned myself—in vain.^33
Now although both of these incidents are treated with Constant’s usual humorous
verve, and the second is a parody of the well-known scene of a storm on the Lake of
Geneva in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), it is
nevertheless difficult to escape from the conclusion that there was a measure of
seriousness about his suicidal wishes on both occasions. At the end of Ma Vie, in
The grief that does not speak 23