Nostalgia is a feeling that struggles between sadness and fullness, sadness for what it is no longer. Fullness to relive the memory of what it was. The word comes from Greek and means something like ‘pain to go home’.
Nostalgia is worth feeling absent.
- Although the word nostalgia is commonly used.
- It was coined by the physician Johannes Hofer in 1688.
- Who in her doctoral thesis analyzed the cases of a student and an employee with serious health problems.
Both were in agony, but for several reasons, each was taken home to die with his family and miraculously both have improved.
At the time, nostalgia was considered a serious symptom, if a soldier had that feeling, he was immediately sent home, as were sailors.
“I can only notice that the past is beautiful because you never understand an emotion at the moment. It grows later, and therefore, don’t we have complete emotions about the present, only about the past?Virginia Wolff?
It seems that nostalgia is always associated with elements or feelings of what we can call home. Actually, the word? Home: This can be much more complex than it looks at first glance.
The house is childhood with its games and its constant surprise to the world. At home, it’s all these people and situations that welcome us deeply, as if we were at home. The house is also the homeland, this place where I’m not feeling like a stranger.
More than a specific place, the house is a state of the soul, characterized by a climate of trust, peace and fullness.
Memory is primarily an emotional function. We rarely remember people and things as they really were, but how we feel them. Our memory is not like that of computers, which store data without changing it.
On the contrary, human memory is quite modelable, does not always adapt to the facts as they occurred and gives them different meanings depending on the circumstances.
This simple act takes on new meanings and, therefore, we sometimes attribute gestures or words that may never have occurred, but that complement the emotional memory that we have built.
As Milan Kundera reminds us, nostalgia has one main word: desire
Nostalgia can also be understood as suffering derived from ignorance, not knowing where you are or how someone is, this is what happens in case of death: the people we love are gone and something in us wants to know more about them.
Those who believe will want to know whether they have come to 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.
An American university experimented with 175 participants. Everyone should create a story based on a memory that made them feel nostalgic.
The story should include a princess, a cat, a race car, or start with the phrase: “On a cold winter morning, a man and a woman were surprised by the sound of an alarm coming from a nearby house. “
The result was that all those who managed to evoke a nostalgic event more clearly achieved a significantly higher score than those who could not remember an event that aroused great nostalgia.
The researchers concluded that nostalgia fosters creativity, this is because it releases feelings of security, belonging and meaning, which is an excellent means of giving way to imagination.
Image courtesy of Claudia Plebani.