First Chapter

Over the last few years I’ve begun to reminisce, about my childhood in the 90s, my adolescence, my innocence and everything behind me. The moments I remember are small, fragments of conversations, little looks, or views, or tastes. Laughing with a friend as we swung on a set of playground swings, having discovered that we both had mothers who taught us to wear underwear over our tights. Harsh words, angry fights and the consolation of the relationships that have sustained. My actions now, and my interpretations will always and continually be coloured by what I was taught and learned before, and when I seek out and delve into the past, it might be that I just need to find my place again in the world.

Johannes Hofer coined the term Nostalgia in 1688, from the greek nostos meaning homecoming, and algos meaning pain or grief. Johannes himself in naming the condition, employed outdated terminology to set himself apart from his contemporaries. The ambitious young physician diagnosed nostalgia as a physiological condition in many Swiss Mercenaries, soldiers who were distributed throughout Europe serving various armies, who’d become weak, and physically incapable due to an overwhelming sentiment of homesickness. In their condition the soldier’s were susceptible to death and for the sake of recovery, were sent home. Hofer and his peers argued on the root cause of the sickness, Hofer’s interpretation as a demonic disease, the cause of which being a “vibration of animal spirits through those fibres of the middle brain in which impressed traces of ideas of the Fatherland still cling”. Others argued that the illness was specific to the Swiss, resulting from atmospheric shifts in Alpine descents, or that nostalgia was a form of brain damage caused by frequent exposure to the sound of clanging cowbells.

It was only in the late 70s that the conceptual status of Nostalgia separated from homesickness. On these foundations, we now generally agree that Nostalgia is more concerned with a time than a place. If I catch up with an old friend over coffee we’d let old jokes, and little scenes slip into every conversation, we’d talk about the emotional tint of an event, or how nice it was to once have been close to someone, and all our conversations always dipped into the past. Even if I fondly remember sitting beside that same friend on a bench in a park, watching a herd of deer graze, it is the sense of warmth and familiarity for which I yearn, the knowledge that aspects of my development, the structure on which I’ve built my personality has been witnessed and shared by someone else. In the case that I lose sight of myself, I can always look back on to who I was before, what I have learned through past experience to inform my decisions in the present. Davis suggested that nostalgia functions as a way of protecting personal identity against threats of discontinuity. In the chaos of an ever-changing world we look to our past to maintain a sense of self-continuity. By a handful of memorable exhibitions of my values, I have learned to reinforce my sense of self in moments of fear or confusion.

Nostalgia helps us to place ourselves in the world, give meaning to current events through the lens of our our past mistakes and victories. It allows us to build up a unique identity, based upon our past experiences we manoeuvre ourselves into the future. This is not to say that nostalgia is exclusively an exercise of reminiscing on positive past experiences, some expressions are extremely negative, memories of loss, separation or injury, and are often juxtaposed into a sequence of redemption. Wildschut gives the example of a family dinner starting off with a vicious argument but ending with the reconciliation of the family singing together at the end of the meal, the narrative concludes with family values overpowering the bitterness of the initial negative experience.

Wildschut argues the nostalgia serves four primary functions; the generation of a positive experience, enhances self-regard, strengthens social bonds, and gives meaning to our lives. The role of nostalgia as a positive experience, reenforces the individuals emotional health, in the span of a human life, various chaotic and traumatic events can cause instability in self-regard and happiness, nostalgia acts as a way to counter these diversions. Memories of a better time, or social construct can help balance a persons negative outlook, increase subjective well-being and fosters psychological resilience. Wildschut proposed that nostalgia serves as a store of positive affect as in his experiments it was shown to strengthen flexible, creative and efficient thought patterns.

Our connections with the past influence our present, and so put forward our future, in many ways these three aspects of time are interlocked. Out past experiences are unique to us as individuals, and it is on the foundations of our past that we move towards our futures. It is in our past that we begin to establish our priorities, our connotations and our expectations. The existential aspects of nostalgia are embedded in an understanding of mortality. According to terror management theory the anxiety of mortality is maintained by a two-part buffer that consists in a shared cultural worldview and a balance of self-esteem. Nostalgia acts as a mechanism which allows us to perceive the passing of time as meaningful, and the soothing of existential fears.