ABSTRACT
Benjamin Constant almost never speaks about the first five years of his life, and it is not difficult to see why. During those years he wanted for nothing material. As an infant prodigy he was doted on and spoiled, his every utterance was applauded, and he soon learned how to captivate an audience of female relatives. Nevertheless his later life seems to tell a different and sadder story about the pattern of his childhood experience. Let us begin with the first catastrophe of his existence, the loss of his mother. There is no way of knowing how such a separation can affect so young a baby, and child psychologists maintain a prudent silence on the subject. All the evidence tends to suggest that the effects of what happened to Constant could have been mitigated, as common sense would suggest, by the establishment of a continuous and loving bond with a substitute for the mother, for example a nurse. Whether this happened in Constant’s case we do not know. Constant’s father Juste was a highly impulsive and quarrelsome man and, for all we know, may have changed his son’s nurses as he would later change his tutors-often. The long-term effects of such treatment have been exhaustively documented in our own century, notably by such clinical specialists as Michael Rutter and the late John Bowlby, and several of their conclusions remind us unmistakably of Benjamin Constant.4
