Around Christmas of every year a pale woman clad in black consults me and bewails her fate. It is a pitiful tale that she narrates tearfully. A ruined life, a ruined marriage! One of those fearful disappointments experienced by women who, utterly unacquainted with the world, and not brought up to be independent, entrust all their dammed-up longing for happiness and love to the first man who happens to cross their path. The first time she came I was touched with pity and could have wept with her. The best advice I could give her was wholly to separate from her husband, forget the past, and to build up a new life. The second time she came I was somewhat unpleasantly surprised, because the unfortunate woman had not yet screwed her courage to the sticking-point and was wasting her life in gloomy broodings about the incomprehensibleness of her destiny. But this time she promised to employ all the means and resources at her disposal to get out of her fruitless conflict and useless complainings.... Since her first visit ten years have passed, but she still stands on the ruins of her hopes and laments her wasted life. Her figure, which was once slender and sinewy, looks as if it were broken in many parts; her face shows the first traces of age. Now she has additional cause for grieving. She looks into the mirror and is unhappy that she has changed so. “What has become of me and the beauty that so many admired?” Before her mind’s eye she sees again the men who once wooed her and whom she had rejected. Every one of them would probably have made her happier than the one she had chosen!

She augments her complainings and emphasizes her despair. All her friends and all her relatives, her physicians and her confidants, know her sad lot and have no new words of consolation for her, only conventional phrases and stereotyped gestures. Because of her complainings she is becoming a nuisance to everybody. Her pain has reached that dangerous point where the tragic becomes the comic. In vain she tries to move her hearers by heightening the dramatic description of the unalterableness of her situation. She becomes aware that human beings can become partisans only in the presence of fresh conflicts and very quickly become accustomed to others’ unhappiness. And this, of course, gives her additional reason for thinking herself lonesome, misunderstood, and forsaken, and thus a new melody is added to her stale song. If she had before this compared herself with her happier sisters, her consciousness of still possessing youth and beauty afforded her a certain comfort. Hope gently whispered to her: “You can still change it! you are still young and desirable! you will yet find a man to appreciate you and to give you the happiness which the other destroyed!”

Gradually there crept into her embittered soul envy of the youth and beauty of others and augmented the poison of her depression. There was no longer any escape from this labyrinth of woes! In whatever direction she looked, she saw only grey clouds; everywhere she saw dark and confused roads losing themselves in the darkness of a ruined life. One would suppose that by this time she would have resolutely determined to end her sufferings and remove herself from a world which had nothing more to offer her.

One who supposes any such thing is not acquainted with this type of person. He has not yet discovered the secret of “sweet sorrow,” the delights of self-pity. This woman, too, found her pleasure in the tragic role which life had temporarily assigned her and to which she was clinging spasmodically with all her power. She virtually drank herself drunk with the thought that she was the unhappiest woman in the world. She directed over her own wounds all the streams of love that flowed from her warm heart. She tore these wounds open again and again so as to be unhappy and pity herself. If it did not sound so paradoxical, I would say that this woman would be unhappy if one deprived her of her unhappiness. I wonder whether an unconscious religious motive did not play a role in this self-assumed suffering. Did she hope for compensation in the life to come for all the happiness that she had missed in this world? Was her everlasting looking backwards only a voluntarily maintained attitude behind which was concealed the anticipation of never-ending looking into a radiant eternity?

All my attempts to restore her to an active life failed. The surest of all therapeutic remedies, work, failed because she never took the matter seriously. She stubbornly maintained herself in the position of looking backward, and from this position no power on earth could move her....

One who looks upon the Bible as a poetic account of eternal conflicts and has learned to recognise the symbolic significance of legendary lore will have no difficulty in recognizing in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah the significance of looking backwards. The woman who was converted into a pillar of salt because she looked back into the burning city—what a wonderful symbolisation of losing oneself in the past! Everyone has his secret Sodom, his Gomorrah, his disappointments, his defeats, his fearful judgments! Woe to him who looks back into the dangerous moments of his life! And does not one of von Schwab’s legends warn us against the dangers of past terrors? Does it not tell us that we are flying madly over abysses, that the perils of the road are concealed and that it is dangerous to retain in the mind’s eye the perils that are past?

There will be no difficulty now in comprehending my formula that to be well is to have overcome one’s past. I know of no better means of distinguishing the neurotic from the healthy. The healthy person also suffers disappointments—who can escape them?—he too suffers many a fall when he thinks he is rushing on to victory, but he will raise the tattered flag of hope and continue on his way to the assured goal. The neurotic does not get done with his past. All experiences have a tenfold seriousness for him. Whereas the healthy person throws off the burden of past disappointments, and occasionally even transforms the recollection of them to sources of pleasure, and is stimulated to new efforts by the contrasts between the pleasureable present and the sad past, the nervous person includes in his burdensome present the difficulties of the past. His memories become more and more oppressive from year to year.

It is for all the world as if the neurotic’s soul were covered over with some dangerous adhesive material. Everything sticks to it and does not permit itself to be loosed from it, becomes organically united to it, wraps itself up in it, blinds his clear vision and cripples his freedom of motion. This not getting done with the past betrays itself also in his inability to forgive, in his craving for revenge and in his resentments. A neurotic is capable of reproaching one for some trifling humiliation or for some unconsidered word many years after the event. He treasures up these humiliations and defeats and does not lose sight of them for a single day. It might almost be said that he enacts daily the whole repertoire of the past.

How often are we amazed to find people who continue to make the same mistakes over and over again and whom experience seems never to teach anything. Nietzsche says: “If one has character he has his experience which keeps on recurring.” In reality all that life is capable of depends upon this ability to forget the past. Of course some experiences continue to live as lessons and warnings and go to make up that uncertain treasure which we call Experience. True greatness, however, shows itself in being able to act in spite of one’s experiences, in overcoming latent mistrust.

What would become of us if all of us permitted our unhappy experiences to operate as inhibitions! We should resemble a person who avoided an article of diet because it had once disagreed with him. Experience may be that which no one can learn unless one has been born with it: to find the appropriate mean from one’s experiences and one’s inclinations.

The nervous individual becomes useless as far as life is concerned because his experience becomes a source of doubt for him and intensifies his wanting will-power. In the presence of a new task he takes his past into consideration and makes his unhappy experiences serve as warnings, hesitates, vacillates, weighs, and finally does nothing. How much could any of us do if we lacked the courage to venture? What could we accomplish if we never thought the game worth the candle? I have often been enabled to prove that the neurotic’s will is weak because his will is divided. I must supplement this with the statement that his will is oppressed by the burden of his past.

Let us after this disgression turn back to the unhappy woman with whom we began. I intimated that it was within her power to alter her destiny. Virile and kindly disposed men offered her a helping hand. But her unhappy experience begot a fear of a second disillusionment. She preferred to be unhappy rather than to venture a second time and again be unhappy.

But it is not only our past unhappiness that is dangerous. Past happiness, too, must be overcome and grow pale. Who does not know persons who are ever speaking of the past, the good old days that never return? This is a particularly striking phenomenon with reference to childhood. Some people do not seem to be capable of forgetting their blissful childhood. There is an important hint here for parents and educators who wish to assure their children a beautiful childhood. One must be careful that it is not made too beautiful! Because of the pleasureable initiation into life the later disharmonies prove too painful and awaken a longing for childhood which can be fulfilled only in fruitless dreams!

Recollections must not be permitted to kill the present. We must not be permitted to be ever lured back into the past and forever to be making comparisons. Every one of us carries the key to his past about in his bosom and opens the secret portals in order to roam about in it during the night in his dreams. In the morning, just before awaking, he locks the shrine and his daily duties resume their career. But there are people who cannot tear themselves away from their dreams and are ever harkening back to the voices of the past.

In insanity this absorption in one’s past may easily be observed. The invalids become children again, with all their failings, their childish prattle, their childish pranks, and their childish games. They have come upon the road to childhood and lost the way so that they cannot get back again into the world of the grown-ups. They have looked backwards so long that finally they went backwards.

This “return to childhood” may also be observed in nervous people who have retained their critical faculty. I recall a woman of forty who employed a maid to dress and undress her, also to wash her, and who did not perform certain personal functions without the company and assistance of the maid. And I must not forget to mention the twenty-four-year-old youth who was brought to me by his mother because he was incapable of doing any work and who was not ashamed in my presence to take a good swallow of milk every five minutes from an ordinary baby’s milk-bottle. This kind of “infantilism” often attains grotesque proportions. To-day the aforementioned woman laughs at the “incomprehensible malady,” and the grown-up suckling is an industrious official who supports his family very comfortably. Both of them wished to defeat nature and return to childhood. Not infrequently a bodily change accompanies this mental state. The hair falls out, the features become softer, and the signs of adult masculinity undergo regressive changes. In all probability this condition is associated with certain disturbances of the internal metabolism. But who can say positively whether the impulse to these disturbances did not proceed from the stubborn look backwards, the yearning for childhood, and the enraptured glance into the depths of the past?

All the wisdom of life consists in the manner of our forgetting. What fine overtones of the harmonies and discords of the past must accompany the concords of the day! But every day has a right to its melody. Each one lives its own life and is a preparation for the future. One who fills his day with the delights and the pains of the past murders it. Only on appropriate occasions may we, must we, direct our eyes backwards, survey the path we have traversed, and again concentrate our gaze on the milestones of memory.

All ye who are ever bewailing your lot and are incapable of rising above your fate—hearken unto me and know that ye no longer live, that ye died ere the law of destruction robbed ye of life! Let me tell ye what ye may find writ in burning letters in the firmament of knowledge: it is never too late! Only he has lost his life who thinks he has lost it. Forgive and forget! Drink of the lethe of work and solicitude for others! Ye are egoists! For even the mirror of your woes on which your eyes are riveted shows you only your own agonized image. And measure your pains by the infinity of pain that fills the world.