Nostalgia Is Affection In Essence

Nostalgia is the pity for feeling absent.

Although the word nostalgia is in common use, it was invented by physician Johannes Hofer in 1688. In his doctoral thesis, he analyzed the cases of a student and an employee with serious health problems.

The two came to agonize but, for various reasons, each was taken to his home to die with his family. Miraculously both improved.

In those times, nostalgia was considered a serious symptom. If a soldier had this feeling, he was immediately sent home. The same was true of sailors.

home and nostalgia

It seems that nostalgia is always associated with elements or feelings of what we might call home. In reality, the word “home” can be much more complex than it first appears.

Home is childhood with its games and constant surprise in front of the world. Home is all those people and situations that welcome us deeply, as if we were at home. Home is also the homeland, that place where we don’t feel like foreigners.

More than a specific place , home is a state of the soul. It is characterized by an atmosphere of trust, peace and completeness.

nostalgia and memory

Memory is primarily an affective function. We rarely remember people and things as they really were, rather than how we felt they were. Our memory is not like that of computers, which store data without modifying it.

Quite the contrary, human memory is quite moldable. It does not always fit the facts as they occurred, and gives them different meanings according to circumstances.

This simple act takes on new meanings and, for this very reason, we sometimes attribute gestures or words that perhaps never happened, but that complement this affective memory that we build.

Nostalgia and nostalgia

As Milan Kundera reminds us, nostalgia has a prime word: nostalgia.

Nostalgia can also be understood as the suffering that comes as a result of ignorance. Not knowing where you are, or how someone is. That’s what happens in the case of death: the people we love are gone, and something inside us wants to know more about them.

Those who believe will want to know if they reached paradise or not. Those who do not believe will try to decipher the philosophical or existential meaning of death, to give it a place in the symbolic world of those who are no longer there.

Nostalgia and creativity

An American university experimented with 175 participants. Everyone should create a story based on a memory that produces nostalgia.

The story should include a princess, a cat, a race car, or start with the phrase: ” One cold winter morning, a man and a woman were startled by the sound of an alarm coming from a nearby house .”

The result was that all those who were able to evoke a nostalgic event with greater clarity scored significantly higher than those who were unable to recall an event that caused them great nostalgia.

The researchers concluded that nostalgia favors creativity. This is due to the fact that it unleashes feelings of security, belonging and meaning, which is an excellent support for making room for the imagination.

Image courtesy of Claudia Plbani.