In states of insanity brought on by some great shock, we see this morbid tendency to resuscitate the dead past fully developed, and remote events and circumstances becoming confused with present ones.
On the other hand, in more healthy states of mind there presents itself an exactly opposite tendency, namely, an impulse of the will to banish whatever when recalled gives pain to the furthest conceivable regions of the past.

Thus, when we have lost something we cherished dearly, and the recollection of it brings fruitless longing, we instinctively seek to expel the recollection from our minds.

The very feeling that what has been can never again be, seems to induce this idea of a vast remoteness of the vanished reality.

When, moreover, the lost object was fitted to call forth the emotion of reverence, the impulse to magnify the remoteness of the loss may not improbably be reinforced by the circumstance that everything belonging to the distant past is fitted on that account to excite a feeling akin to reverence.

So, again, any rupture in our mental development may lead us to exaggerate the distance of some past portion of our experience.