If any contemporary psychotherapist were to spend 5 minutes in Lincoln’s presence he would readily conclude that Lincoln suffered from chronic clinical depression.
Why?
Perhaps because Lincoln’s childhood was plagued by a steady, unmitigated stream of frontier tragedy: his grandfather, named Abraham, was killed by Indians; his illiterate father more than once fell victim to shoddy surveying and land title practices that forced him and his family from his Kentucky farms; his nurturing mother died a slow, agonizing death in a one-room cabin [no place to hide] in front of her 9-year-old son; his beloved sister, a few short years later dead at childbirth, along with her child.
If your life or mine had been exposed to a similar barrage of negatives at such an impressionable age, surely our adult life, like his, would be deeply stamped by bottomless sadness, by yawning despair.
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