Is our past a shelter or a trap?

“The feeling of extreme carelessness, prosperity, thick summer warmth floods the memory and forms such a sparkling reality that, compared with it, the Parker pen in my hand and the very hand with gloss on the already freckled skin seem to me a rather clumsy deception. The mirror is saturated with a July day. A leafy shadow plays on the white stove with blue windmills. A flying bumblebee, like a ball on an elastic band, hits all the stucco corners of the ceiling and successfully bounces back out the window. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, no one will ever die,” Vladimir Nabokov writes about his memoirs in his autobiographical book “Other Shores”.

In search of a lost paradise

This piercing picture of endless happiness blinds us, and it doesn’t matter whether Nabokov’s childhood was like that in reality. This is not a criticism of the writer at all.

We enjoy the process of remembering, whether the past was happy or unhappy. Have you noticed how often during gatherings with friends we are suddenly picked up by a wave of memory: “Do you remember when we were fifteen? ..” – “Do you remember, then at school? ..”

“The pleasure of remembering is the joy that we can find ourselves again and again,” explains psychoanalyst Jacques André.

The German sentimentalist writer Jean Paul (Richter), who coined the expression “world sorrow”, offered his own explanation of this craving 200 years ago: “Remembrance is the only paradise from which we cannot be expelled.” Moreover, in an ever-hurrying world, when fate itself seems to elude us, the reliable, frozen and unchanging past is idealized and acquires additional charm.

The inscription “produced since 1875” seems to be able to sell any product, including those that simply did not exist a hundred plus years ago, and discos of the 70s, 80s and 90s are among the most popular musical genres. Do you want to feel the taste of childhood again? Ice cream “48 kopecks” and lemonade “Pinocchio” are already waiting for you. And for those who are drawn even further into the past, there is an antique-styled brand “A. Korkunov” and revived “Einem”.

Do you want to find your ancestors? Hundreds of sites will help you build a family tree. Want to find childhood friends? Social networks are at your service. We endlessly review albums with old photographs, sigh over remakes of old songs and films, and repeat the most banal of spells: “it used to be better.” We are so arranged that we strive to find only the most pleasant in the past, and hide everything else in the far corners of memory.

But sweet at first, nostalgia eventually turns into melancholy and, as a result, leads to depression. Besides, let’s be honest: do we really want to return to our five, ten or even twenty years? “In fact, no one wants to turn back the clock, lose all the experience of the past years, all the joys and happy moments, become a naive youth again and make mistakes,” says social psychologist Helen Langer. “We just want to feel younger and more energized—today.”

But even if by a miracle we manage to find ourselves in our own childhood and youth, what awaits us there? Feeling helpless in the face of all-powerful adults. Tears of resentment for being unfairly punished or, conversely, ignored, youthful complexes, lack of money, love failures … And these are just the most common situations. The memory of many people stores (or hides) much more cruel and tragic events, the consequences of which continue to affect many years later.

Backpack behind

We often talk about the “burden of the past” without thinking about the meaning of the usual metaphor. But what is this cargo? A heavy burden that you want, but can’t get off your shoulders? Or something infinitely valuable, with which in no case can not be parted? And finally, is it only the personal past that influences us? These are not empty questions. What happened to us and our loved ones often prevents us from living in the present and moving into the future.

“You can forget the past. But this does not mean that it can be healed, ”writer Frederic Begbeder is convinced. Suppressed or constantly resurrected, inherited or acquired, the past always leaves traces. Before, I had to come to terms with it. Good or not, the past was like a legacy to be accepted and “keep forever.” Today, 100 years after the birth of psychoanalysis, we refuse to live with a past that does not suit us. But is there any hope for deliverance?

“Psychoanalysis does not aim to free the patient from the past,” says psychoanalyst Andrei Rossokhin. Simply because the past does not exist. Talking on the couch about the past, which seems to him an oppressive burden, the patient is actually talking about the gravity of the present. The past continues to live in the present: not in the traumas that happened once, but in many times amplified, encrypted and layered for life.

Perhaps this is reasonable. After all, what we strive for is the opportunity to act freely and live life to the fullest today, now.

“But if the burden of the past is too heavy, like a 40-kilogram backpack, then it is already impossible to bear anything else,” Andrey Rossokhin continues. – Each new kilogram turns out to be unbearable, knocks down, causes depression and despair. The only way out is to recycle the burden of the past. Of course, the “backpack” itself will not disappear. But we will have new strength to carry it. We will begin to discover something in ourselves, accept our limitations, endure, comprehend. And after a while it will get a little easier. Recycling our past, we train the muscles of the soul.

Another’s burden?

It often happens that we ourselves do not know what is hidden in the backpack of the past. And not because we tried with all our might to forget about its contents, but because we bear the burden that we inherited. This is especially true for our country: the last hundred-odd years of Russian history have been generous with disasters. And even if the tragic events did not personally affect us or our parents, we are still involved in them, because the trauma makes itself felt after one or even several generations.

“Unprocessed trauma is transmitted both in individual history and in the history of an ethnic group,” recalls psychoanalyst Maria Timofeeva. – In Germany, for example, where the idea of ​​national guilt is still very strong, there are groups open to everyone: people gather to discuss the past of their country. Such work should be carried out in countries with a dramatic history that has not yet been comprehended, among which, of course, ours belongs. Due to the fact that we do not understand history, strange things happen at first glance. For some, vague anxiety, unaccountable fear, irritability arise, which cannot be explained in personal, individual history. And then you have to look for the causes in the collective past.

But forgetting is no less important than remembering, if we do not want the past to become the “gravedigger of the present,” warned the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “There is such a degree of insomnia, constant chewing of the gum, such a degree of development of historical feeling, which entails enormous damage to of all living things and eventually leads to its death, whether it be an individual, a people or a culture.

Real life is in the present

For some, the past is a cage, for others it is a refuge. In any case, as long as we are attached to the past, we will not be able to taste the taste of real life. Nostalgia is dictated by longing for the child everyone loves, experts explain. But this image turns out to be invented, and the search for lost love is futile: no one has ever loved (and could not love) us with the ideal love that we strive to find. And in order to stop clinging to the past, one has to part with the position of a child in need of comfort and accept the reality of an irreparable lack of love.

However, denying the past is a road to nowhere. “We cannot get rid of the past if we try to get rid of it,” says Jacques André. “Such attempts will only lead to the fact that we will constantly fall into the same stories, enter into the same conflicts, without using our experience in any way.”

Andrey Rossokhin agrees with him: “It makes sense not to recycle the problems of the past in order to forget, to get rid of their burden. The meaning of psychoanalysis is just the opposite: to help a person become strong enough not only to cope with this load, but also to be ready for every new challenge of life.

This path is not easy. We can experience bitterness and be offended even by the closest people: “Yes, I’m angry with my mother because she didn’t love me much …” But it is very important that such a “settling of accounts” happens within us, and does not spill out. Then, by continuing to move forward, we can see not only what made us suffer, but also what is really valuable that we received. We will cease to be a victim of a time that will no longer be, and become an actor in the only time that belongs to us, the present.