We feel and talk a lot about nostalgia, especially post-pandemic. We go back to our favourite childhood shows when we seek comfort. We talk about the past with a sense of longing. The wish to watch a show for the first time again, the fleeting, yet common thought of wanting to go back to your childhood days, free from worries that exhaust you nowadays. Even the word ‘nowadays’ is said sentimentally; a word that draws comparisons between the past and present. Nostalgia is many things—an aesthetic, a feeling, a marketing tactic—and it has a much more interesting and complicated history than one may think.
The modern definition of nostalgia is a “sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.” However, this definition does not hint at its several centuries-long history. Nostalgia was once considered a disease, a sickness of the mind that required odd remedies, and one that scientists constantly changed their views on as time passed.
The early history
An attempt to medically diagnose this particular feeling of longing occurred in the 1600s, and the emotion was named as el mal de corazon, translating to “the evil of the heart.” In 1668, Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer became the first to use the term nostalgia, combining the Greek words nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain). Hofer believed that nostalgia was a neurological affliction, a “cerebral disease of essentially demonic cause” as he studied its impact on Swiss mercenaries. He attributed the cause to be animal spirits who “impressed traces of ideas of the Fatherland [people] still cling [to].”
Swiss physician J.J. Scheuchzer claimed nostalgia was due to changes in air pressure which consequently affected body pressure, and thus hindered blood flow from the heart to the brain, causing the affliction. At the time, it was widely believed that nostalgia was a disease restricted only among the Swiss. This definition remained until the 18th and 19th centuries, where this disorder was also seen in French soldiers.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, immigrants came to the United States, and nostalgia was dubbed as an “immigrant psychosis.” An “intense unhappiness” that arose from the yearning of “returning to one’s fetal state,” and a regressive mental disorder. It was labeled as a form of depression, and was now associated with soldiers, sailors, immigrants, and university students.
The different types of nostalgia
Nostalgia was then a consequence of change, a feeling of anxiety caused by the irreversibility of time and a need to transform the present. As Ekaterina Kalinina noted in her article, “nostalgic experiences are impossible without having a memory anchored in the human faculty to remember and forget.” But not all memories are nostalgic, as “one can remember without being nostalgic, but one cannot be nostalgic without remembering.”
Nostalgia takes on many forms, depending on the situation and individual. Literary scholar and professor Svetlana Boym defined two types of nostalgia—restorative and reflective in her book The Future of Nostalgia. Hal McDonald, a professor at Mars Hill University, contrasted the difference of these two nostalgias. According to McDonald, restorative nostalgia “looks back longingly—even jealously, on the past, and desires to re-create or relive it in the present” and reflective nostalgia “savors the past with the full knowledge that it is, in fact, past and can never be relived again.”
There was also personal (individual) nostalgia, a person’s subjective experiences of the past, and collective (group) nostalgia, a group’s collective memories and emotional experiences. Personal experiences are memories specific to the individual and collective memories are rooted in cultural experiences. These memories and experiences can be direct, which alluded to events in a person’s life, or indirect, which resulted from second-hand information told by friends or family, or media.
At this point, nostalgia was taking on a larger meaning than an ambiguous disease of the mind. Theorists began to form criticisms of the phenomenon, and examined its positive effects along with its negative consequences.
The criticisms and oppressive roots of nostalgia
Nostalgia was seen as a form of escape from one’s present-day reality, the incompetence of those experiencing the phenomena to accept and take control over their new circumstances. It was seen as a passive way of coping with loss by thinking more about the past than the present. Nawas and Platt (1965) claimed that nostalgia can disclose a person’s uneasiness over the future, whereas Peters (1985) claimed that nostalgic yearning had a range of intensity, from experiencing a moment of sadness to a draining desire that can interfere with an individual’s daily functions.
This view of nostalgia was supported by scholars who examined the emotion in Eastern Europe, who defined it as a “social-cultural phenomenon caused by a certain chain of events” such as the rise of globalization and the popularization of Western beliefs.
As a result of the changing world, nostalgia was not only linked to medicine, but also to politics, bringing forth nostalgia-bashing and nostalgia-shaming. Groups who failed to successfully adapt to the shifting economy were dubbed as losers, who grieved the loss of the communist welfare state among many things, and were thought to be psychologically sick. Gradually, whether or not one experienced nostalgia was used to indicate their political beliefs and social status.
In addition, it was also believed that women were more susceptible to nostalgia than men, and a man showing any signs of nostalgia was considered to be feminine and lacked the appropriate masculine traits. Thus, men were forced to deny they were experiencing this supposed psychological affliction in fear they would be stigmatized.
Hence, these views and examples showed that nostalgia was used to disempower individuals, to establish a hierarchy, and create distance through the reconstruction of memories and assigning negative qualities to determine subordinate groups.
Nostalgia can move us forward
But there are also positive views on nostalgia, as Cavanaugh (1989) proclaimed that nostalgia can help individuals understand changes over time, and Kaplan (1987) concluded that nostalgia can be a coping mechanism for young adults to accept the loss of their childhood and innocence. Thus, nostalgia can also be viewed as a way for people to adapt to the continuous, unavoidable changes in life and society.
It can give a sense of community and connectedness, according to Batcho (2007), an effective way to counteract alienation. Various researchers of this viewpoint argued that nostalgia is a “dynamic, motivational force that enables the individual to look ahead and take proactive action.” It is a way for the individual to create a relationship with the past, present, and future, to secure a future that they find satisfying and attainable.
Most notably, according to Assmann, nostalgia constitutes “a perpetual interaction between remembering and forgetting,” it is the convergence of individual and cultural memory.
So, why do we feel nostalgia?
There is much said about nostalgia’s history, how it disempowers others, its bright and debilitating side, and it is only natural to speculate on why. Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut touch upon the motivations of nostalgia, specifically youthfulness, inspiration, and risk-taking.
Youth is fleeting, and people often desire to return to it. Much of our society and media reflect this desire. A study done by Abeyta and Routledge suggested that nostalgia can foster this youthfulness we are constantly chasing. In their study, participants in the nostalgia condition picked out a nostalgic song on Youtube, and participants in the control condition listened to a song they recently found and enjoyed. Participants then wrote about how the emotions the song brought, and nostalgic participants wrote of feeling younger.
Nostalgia can also increase self-esteem through social-connectedness and inspiration. It can also be associated with risk-taking as it can lead to recognition of familial support.
The future is today
Nostalgia has a long, complicated history. We may use nostalgia as a way to cope with the ever-changing future. We may constantly want to return to our innocent childhood, put all our attention to the past to ease our anxiety about the future, to hopefully forget about the present. But nostalgia shouldn’t be the only thing we feel all the time. Our past isn’t our present, and the future isn’t decades from now, but rather, it is today.
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