Nostalgia

Nostalgia is commonly understood to be a condition of mourning or yearning for a past when things were better or more certain or simpler: when, in short, today's nostalgic person would not have been beset by the troubles of the present and would have been all the more content for it. Nostalgia, as a human condition, presupposes that the past has gone, along with those times and particulars, people and places, mourned and missed. To live in the present as if in the past would be better termed as anachronistic and gives rise to a melancholy or sentimental disposition; one experiences nostalgia, for better or worse, freely or otherwise, from a later point of one's own narrative. One “looks back” and revisits the past so that one can then look forward again and take leave of the past. Attempts to undo or “cure” nostalgia through the re-creation of the past in the present are made in vain. So re-creating your parent's cooking long after leaving home (despite having subsequently lost a taste for it) or flicking through the pages of Tatler magazine long after you yourself were a debutant or attending a religious service (even a service conducted in Latin) long after abandoning the practices of religion are all enjoyable and harmless nostalgic practices.

Yet the condition of nostalgia, if overindulged, can lead to an unhealthy obsession with this past at the expense of the need to live in the present. Everyone enjoys periods of revelry, a tendency to reminisce and to return to the experiences of and so become reacquainted with one's younger self—in the sense of the ideals, hopes, and aspirations from earlier times, even the more carnal and questionable desires that have since been grown out of or cast aside. To lose touch with one's younger self is considered to be at the root of psychological problems and often the foundation of urban alienation, not least in respect of the mass migrations from open rural or semi-urban spaces to the confines of the slum dwellings that proliferate around the majority of urban conurbations (cf. Davis 2007) and the resultant eradication of traces of an earlier existence. The profound psychological impact of being wrenched out of one way of life naturally gives rise to an attempt to deny the trauma of the present and to focus instead on a time of earlier harmony.

In psychoanalytical terms, the person who denies traumatic events in his or her own history (e.g., the loss of loved ones, sexual assault, or the untimely destruction of the family unit) and so suppresses grief through a refusal of nostalgia becomes open to a “return of the repressed.” The sudden reemergence of the troubled personal history forces the subject to belatedly deal with difficult reactions and emotions, often in ways detrimental to his or her own interests. The reductive characterization typical in much British television comedy where the class rebel is revealed to be of middle class stock (or the pedantic stickler for the mores and social codes of the bourgeoisie who turns out to be of humble origins) is effectively predicated along the lines advanced by Sigmund Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious: defensive, deceptive behavior indicative of unresolved feelings about, or a failure to comes to terms with, the past. Thus, grief and grieving can be interpreted as a way of allowing nostalgia to proliferate, not least in respect of the inevitable erosion of the family unit.

...