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 [Pg 192]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 [Pg 193]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 [Pg 194]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 i............