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.