NOSTALGIA

Nostalgia (Sehnsucht ) refers to the moral pain of the expatriate when he is overcome with the obsession of return. The self-absorption, morosity, and feeling that there is nothing more to say about the situation are the first clinical manifestations of a secret torment that is likely to become aggravated. A state of desolation and physical malaise is soon established, which is fertile ground for infection and functional disorders, as if the subject's vitality had been sapped. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical practice, this feared diagnosis went hand-in-hand with a grim prognosis.

The word is a neologism that appears for the first time in a medical dissertation written in Latin in Basel on June 22, 1688. It records, in academic language, what was then commonly referred to as "homesickness," or Heimweh. Johannes Hofer's thesis is based on two clinical histories: a student from Bern who wasted away in Basel, and a servant who, after an accident, wasted away in the hospital far from her family. In both cases the patient was in agony and the return to the family home resulted in a nearly miraculous cure. He proposed an interpretation based on the movement of animal spirits to account for the pathological phenomena.

Hofer described a new disease, unknown to Hippocrates and Galen, one that had become the subject of debate in departments of medicine throughout Europe. There was concern that the illness may have been unique to the Swiss, associated with the geographical isolation of mountain life or the physiological effects of migration to low-altitude regions. There had been cases of nostalgia among the Swiss regiments serving the king of France, and among foreign soldiers. There was, for example, a grenadier from Westphalia who had been consumed by Heimweh, which negated the idea that the illness was confined to mountain dwellers.

Although nostalgia was a medical discovery, it also held the interest of philosophers. Haller wrote an article on the subject for Diderot's Encyclopedia. Rousseau, in his Dictionnaire de la musique, described a certain melody, the "Ranz des Vaches," that had the power to trigger an epidemic of nostalgia and desertion among the Swiss garrison at Versailles. Kant believed that nostalgia was not a disease of exile but of poverty, and that territorial ties could be overcome through social success and wealth. Later, Jaspers, in his medical dissertation showed how Heimweh could turn young adolescents who left home too early into criminals or delinquents.

A century after the Basel dissertation, circumstances contributed to a new clinical understanding of nostalgia. Between 1789 and 1815, the number of cases multiplied, especially among emigrants and soldiers away from home. Military doctors developed clinical experience and therapeutic skills, as shown in the writings of Percy, Des Genettes, and Larrey. They learned how to recognize the feverish language and false sense of shame of the true nostalgic, and developed a form of psychotherapeutic treatment that pushed the patient to recall the "pleasant memories" of home, in his own language if possible. "The treatment of essential nostalgia," wrote Baron Percy, "should be moral rather than pharmaceutical. It has been shown by experience that the administration of medicines does more to aggravate the symptoms than to relieve them."

After 1830 the triumph of the anatomical-clinical method would gradually discredit the diagnosis of nostalgia. Medical progress was based on the examination of lesions of organs and the identification of infectious germs, but autopsies and microscopes revealed nothing about the obsession with a return to one's home. Within a period of fifty years the word nostalgia disappeared from the medical lexicon. At the same time it made its appearance in literature, where it then referred to a romantic emotion and not a disease: the sadness of being born too late, the sense of exaltation occasioned by the setting sun when there was no hope of a tomorrow.

Rousseau's comments concerning the strange power of a melody that wiped away the bravura of the Swiss soldiers introduced nostalgia to the stage of history. Did the "Ranz des Vaches" have any special musicological properties? No, Rousseau answers, but it is a "sign of remembrance." There is nothing special other than a symbolic value for a native of the Swiss mountains. It suddenly restored to the abandoned and much regretted countryside a sonorous and impalpable presence, the mysterious presence of absence.

Several observations have confirmed the role of sound (a melody, a sound, a voice) in homesickness, either as a pathogenic agent that increases the pain of absence, or as a therapeutic factor that can instantly bring about remembrance. The subtleties of this intimate and subjective logic have been repressed by the progress of scientific medicine and its apology for the visible, from Bichat to Charcot.

The historian can approach the rise and fall of the diagnosis of nostalgia in the evolution of medical thought as a precursor to psychoanalysis. Within this tradition (about which Freud says nothing), it is interesting to note the points of divergence: the nostalgic individual suffered from remembrance, the hysterical patient from reminiscence. Attention has been shifted from conscious expressions of memory, involving a return home, to a veiled mnemonic utterance, often truncated or falsified, which infiltrates all speech and constitutes the first model of the unconscious.

However, psychoanalytic research on object loss has paid scant attention to attachment to the spaces and places of childhood, as if confirming Kant's arguments, which gave nostalgia a dimension that was more temporal than spatial: not a lost country but a lost time; the nostalgic individual would never rediscover his youth.

The paradox remains, however, that at a time when "displaced persons" are so numerous and when the findings of medicine and psychiatry have revealed a number of pathological phenomena related to the illnesses of migrants, the concept of nostalgia has been erased, except to sometimes refer to a miniscule and captivating territory, the maternal breast.

AndrÉ Bolzinger

See also: Abandonment; Cathexis; Ethics; Future of an Illusion, The ; Music and psychoanalysis; Reparation; Subject's desire; Thing, the; Weaning.

Bibliography

Bolzinger, André. (1989). Jalons pour une histoire de la nostalgie. Bulletin de psychologie, 389, 310-321.

——. (1992). Retour à la nostalgie. Bulletin de psychologie, 405, 331-340.

Grinberg, Léon, and Grinberg, Rebecca. (1986). Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Migration and Exile (Nancy Festinger, Trans.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Starobinski, Jean. (1966). Le concept de nostalgie. Diogène 54, 92-115.

469. Nostalgia

1. Combray village of narrator and family. [Fr. Lit.: Remembrance of Things Past ]
2. Give My Regards to Broadway singer sends well-wishes to home town. [Am. Pop. Music: Fordin, 531]
3. Happy Days TV series viewed 1950s America through tinted lenses. [TV: Terrace, I, 337–338]
4. Krapp passes the time by listening to tapes on which he had recorded his earlier experiences and reflections. [Br. Drama: Beckett Krapp’s Last Tape in Weiss, 244]
5. My Ántonia book in which author recalls her precious child-hood years. [Am. Lit.: Magill I, 630–632]
6. ou sont les neiges d’antan “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” [Fr. Lit.: Ballade des Dames du temps ladis, “Villon” in Benét, 1061]

nos·tal·gia / näˈstaljə; nə-/ • n. a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations: I was overcome with acute nostalgia for my days in college. ∎  the evocation of these feelings or tendencies, esp. in commercialized form: an evening of TV nostalgia. DERIVATIVES: nos·tal·gist / -jist/ n.

nostalgia home-sickness. XVIII. f. Gr. nóstos return home + álgos pain; see -IA1.