Prayer is the most normal and useful thing; it is not simply a reflex action of your devotion to God. Take a moment and scan over the events of the last few years of your life. What kinds of things most easily come to mind? Many people find that they tend to remember happy, good events better than disappointments and irritations. A clinical psychologist would call this tendency repression, or motivated forgetting. Through repression, painful, threatening, or embarrassing memories are held out of consciousness. An example is provided by soldiers who have repressed some of the horrors they saw during combat. The forgetting of past failures, upsetting childhood events, the names of people you dislike, or appointments you do not want to keep may reveal repression. People prone to repression tend to be hyper-sensitive to emotional events. As a results, they use repression to protect themselves from threatening thoughts. I was led to examine exhaustively the phenomenon of temporary forgetfulness through the observation of certain peculiarities, which although not general, can nevertheless, be seen clearly in some cases. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 5

We were discussing the over-estimation of personality among lovers, and my friend thought it was Victor Hugo who said that love is the World because it makes an angel or a god out of a grocery clerk. Only when we are in love and have we blind faith in humanity; everything is perfect, everything is beautiful, and everything is so poetically unreal. Still, it is a wonderful experience; worth going through, notwithstanding the terrible disappointments that usually follow. It puts us on a level with the gods and incites us to all sorts of artistic activities. We become real poets; we not only memorize and quote poetry, but we often become Apollos ourselves. Judging by the conversation, it would seem that this poem is intimately associated with the idea of over-estimation of personality of one in love. I asked my friend, have you perhaps memorized this poem when you were in such a state? She became thoughtful for a while and soon recalled the following facts: Twelve years before, when she was eighteen years old, she fell in love. She met the young man while participating in an amateur theatrical performance. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 5

The young man was, at the time, studying for stage, and it was predicted that some day her would be a matinee idol. He was endowed with all the attributes needed for such a calling. He was well built, fascinating, impulsive, very cleaver, and…very fickle-minded. She was warned against him, but she paid no need, attributing it all to the envy of her counsellors. Everything went well for a few months, when she suddenly received word that her Apollo, for who she had memorized these lines, had eloped with and married a very wealthy young man. A few years later, she heard that he was living in a Western city where he was taking care of his father-in-law’s interest. The misquoted lines are now quite plain. The discussion about the over-estimation of personality among lovers unconsciously recalled to her a disagreeable experience, when she herself over-estimated the personality of the man she loved. She thought he was a god, but he turned out to be even worse than the average mortal. The episode could not come to the surface because it was determined by very disagreeable and painful thoughts, but the unconscious variation in the poem plainly showed her present mental state. The poetic expressions were not only changed to prosaic ones, but they clearly alluded to the whole episode. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 5

Another example of forgetting the orders of a poem well known to the person: A man wished to recite the familiar poem, “A Pine Tree Stands Alone.” In the line, he felt drowsy, he became hopelessly stuck at the words “with the white sheet.” This forgetting of such a well-known verse seemed to me rather peculiar, and I therefore asked him to reproduce what came to his mind when he thought of the words “with the white sheet.” He gave the following series of associations: The white sheet makes one think of a white sheet on a corpse—a linen sheet with which one covers a dead body—(pause)—now I think of a near friend—his brother died quite recently—he is supposed to have died of heart disease—he was also very corpulent—my friend is corpulent, too, and I thought that he might meet the same fate—probably he does not exercise enough—when I heard of this death, I suddenly became frightened: the same thing might happen to me, as my own family is predisposed to obesity—my grandfather died from heart disease—I, also, am somewhat too corpulent, and for that reason, I began an obesity cure a few days ago. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 5

For myself, there are circumstances when I do not want to help. There are some people with whom I do not care to work. I find marital therapy, for instance, generally to demanding. I prefer not to see both partners at the same time in the same place, even though I know that is the better strategy. My own personal history intensifies that kind of conflict for me unnecessarily. I am not prepared in myself to deal with the depths of the stress between partners in that way. There are periods when I do not care to respond. Sometimes I find myself so exhausted I am unable to mobilize more than a grouchy resentment and a rumbling irritation. Those are times when I become selectively inattentive to others’ pain. My own needs take priority. I must take time to get myself together. I have gotten out of touch with myself by giving away too much. I respond only so long and then I have to not respond. So be prepared, whenever others come, to ask yourself whether you really want to help. Have some sense of whether you are ready to risk opening yourself to the depths of others’ disturbances. We plead with you not to receive the grace of God in vain. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 5