- vulnerability to another loss or the threat of a loss which will produce a
feeling of unrelieved hopelessness;
aggression, truculence, defiance against attachment-figures;
a manic exuberance and apparent euphoria, a tendency to present
oneself in an attractively comic light.
38
The correspondence between such a pattern of behaviour and the well-
known traits of Constant’s character which I outlined earlier is
unmistakable. No doubt we all behave from time to time in one or two of
the ways listed above: the point is that Benjamin Constant behaved in all
of those ways—and frequently—during adolescence and early manhood.
My contention is that this resulted from the emotional deprivations he
experienced as a child and which, at some level in his mind, he never
forgot. It seems quite implausible that a pattern of response of such
complexity could be innate.
I have so far avoided discussing the most interesting and provocative view of
Constant’s life and work to be published in recent years, that of Han Verhoeff in his
‘Adolphe’ et Constant: une étude psychocritique of 1976.^39 I have done so in order to be
able to summarize beforehand the biographical facts and character traits to which
Verhoeff alludes in his theory. Writing as an admirer and follower of the French Freudian
literary critic Charles Mauron but also drawing on the work of Melanie Klein, Verhoeff
traces the central theme of Adolphe, which he sees as Adolphe’s ambivalent attitude to
Ellénore, to Constant’s loss of his mother shortly after his birth. Verhoeff defines
Adolphe’s treatment of Ellénore as being characterized by aggressiveness towards her, an
aggressiveness which alternates with a self-identification with her sufferings. This
pendulum swing between a need to love and be loved, and a desire to hurt the one by
whom one is loved is what typifies all of Constant’s relationships with women. Verhoeff
traces the tendency to what he calls the behaviour of an abandonnien or abandonnique,
using the terminology of the Swiss psychoanalysts Charles Odier and Germaine Guex.^40
Central to Constant’s psychology is the feeling of having once been let down by his
mother when he was at his most helpless and needing her love. Henriette’s death,
Verhoeff concludes, was ever after felt by Constant to have been an abandonment of him.
It made him behave towards the women he knew in later life with both a resentful desire
for retribution and an ineradicable longing to be mothered and cared for by them. The
mixture of pity and scorn Constant felt for the sufferings of women were an expression of
his permanent comportement d’abandonnien, ‘abandonian’ behaviour. For Verhoeff,
even Ellénore’s abandonment of her children in Adolphe echoes Constant’s anger and
resentment at the way he felt he had been treated in his earliest days: she becomes a ‘bad
mother’.
Verhoeff’s theory is an attractive one and fits a lot of the evidence. The principal
drawback with it, apart from the strangely disappointing analysis of Adolphe to which it
leads, is, I think, its exclusiveness. Verhoeff leaves aside all other environmental factors,
and above all neglects Constant’s relationship with his father and with his governess from
Benjamin constant 26