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?