assumption that we already do so. It’s easy to  carry around with us, and exchange with others,  

surface intellectual descriptions of key painful  events that leave the marrow of our emotions  

behind. We may say that we remember - for example  - that we ‘didn’t get on too well’ with our  

father, that our mother was ‘slightly neglectful’  or that going to boarding school was ‘a bit sad.’ 

It could - on this basis - sound as if we  surely have a solid enough grip on events.  

But these compressed stories are precisely the  sort of ready-made, affectless accounts that  

stand in the way of connecting properly  and viscerally with what happened to us  

and therefore of knowing ourselves adequately; if  we can put it in a paradoxical form, our memories  

are what allow us to forget. Our day to day  accounts may bear as much resemblance to the  

vivid truth of our lives as a postcard from Naxos  does to a month-long journey around the Aegean. 

If this matters, it’s because only on the basis  of proper immersion in past fears, sadnesses,  

rages and losses can we ever recover from  certain disorders that develop when difficult  

events have grown immobilised within us. To be  liberated from the past, we need to mourn it  

and for this to occur, we need to get in  touch with what it actually felt like;  

we need to sense, in a way we may not have  done for decades, the pain of our sister being  

preferred to us or of the devastation of being  maltreated in the study on a Saturday morning. 

The difference between felt and lifeless memories  could be compared to the difference between a  

mediocre and a great painting of spring. Both will  show us an identifiable place and time of year,  

but only the great painter will properly seize,  from among millions of possible elements,  

the few that really render the moment charming,  interesting, sad or tender. In one case,  

we know about spring, in the other, we finally  feel it. This may seem like a narrow aesthetic  

consideration, but it goes to the core of what  we need to do to get over many psychological  

complaints. We cannot continue to fly high over  the past in our jet plane while high-handedly  

refusing to reexperience the territory we  are crossing. We need to land our craft, get  

out and walk, inch by painful inch, through the  swampy reality of the past. We need to lie down,  

perhaps on a couch, maybe with music, close our  eyes, and endure things on foot. Only when we have  

returned afresh to our suffering and known it in  our bones will it ever promise to leave us alone.