IV
Psychoanalysis starts with the assumption that the entire past in a man's life, beginning with the first day of his birth, is always with him and is really never forgotten. That which has seemed to pass out of the haunts of memory, has become part of our unconscious, and is often revived in dreams. Nothing is really ever forgotten. De Quincey understood this and discourses on the subject in his Confessions of an Opium Eater and thus anticipates an important modern psychological discovery.
Longfellow said, "Let the dead past bury its dead." Ah, if it only could! Ghosts of sorrows and griefs that we thought laid away still revisit us even in our waking hours. They stalk before us and open up closed wounds and we learn that these are not yet healed. They awaken memories of agonies that again smite us; they make us hearken back to unkind words dealt us, to suffering inflicted, to injustice done. Shocks which time had made obtuse are revived; we reap the harvest of anxieties garnered in our hearts; and we discover that the old despair has not altogether vanished but still occasionally gnaws us.
The dead rules the living; forgotten incidents, soul-wrecking mistakes, chance misfortunes still dominate us. We recall the mortification of a decade or two ago and as its details are resurrected, we again live through the madness of past years. Prejudices are thus built up, unreasonable indeed. We become averse to a face that reminds us of a countenance belonging to a person who troubled us.
The old poverty still haunts us in our present prosperity; memories of unpleasant toil in the past may make us shrink in terror in our newly found leisure or congenial labour. Mark Twain describes how in his prosperity he would dream that he had to return to the hated lecture platform or that he was again a pilot on the Mississippi River. Past solitude may still send its roots down to the present and leave us lonely in society. He who has known a starved body or many unfulfilled desires, he who has been the victim of ridicule or persecution or never before been encouraged or sympathised with, remembers the past only too well, even when the world honours him with recognition.
Impressions are strongest in youth and hence molest us in old age. The finer our nerves, the less easy is it to forget. The mother who has lost a child cannot forget the misfortune even after other children are born.
It is life's grimmest tragedy that we carry within us ghosts of our old days—ghosts which take us by surprise with their vigour. They mock us at their will; we are tormented unawares; we travel about with them and cannot shake them off. They stand beside us when we love; they take the savour out of our food; they dangle at our footsteps when we go to the house of mirth; they trail us in ghastly pursuit long after we have emerged from the house of mourning. Hence when the poet sings and the philosopher speculates, when the storyteller gives us a tale, unconsciously those old ghosts are with him and get between the lines of his writings. An unseen spirit seems to move his pen and he tells more than he had desired and he gives voice to emotions that he had sought to suppress or regarded as long since buried in a sepulchre that was impenetrable. But the dead passions and tear stained griefs come gliding forth and pierce all barriers and dictate to him. They even wish to be remembered, to be made as enduring in art as in life. They never weary of uttering their sentiments; they pursue the human race to eternity. And when we read of the troubles of man whether in the Bible or the Iliad, they are familiar often to us because they are our own. The author cannot escape the past and he always opens up more channels of his heart than he has suspected. His work shows that his old sorrows rise up like the phœnix from its own ashes. His ghosts appear in his art; the fires that were thought smouldering are lighted and we as readers are caught in the flames and are purged in them.
Psychoanalysis tries to rid us of the evil influences of the past by making us aware of the unconscious disturbances.