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.