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Nostalgia
and Autobiography: The Past in the Present
SAGE Publications, Inc.200610.1191/0967550706ab048oa
HilaryDickinson
University of Greenwich, UK
MichaelErben
University of Southampton, UK, mde@soton.ac.uk
Address
for correspondence: Michael Erben, Centre for Biography and Education, University
of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK; Email: mde@soton.ac.uk
This paper explores the
meaning of nostalgia as a personal experience that is undergone by many and
that is a significant element in the formation of the autobiographical self.
The concept of nostalgia is introduced and considered in terms of its history,
cultural origins and emotional and psycho-social content. A small-scale qualitative
empirical study conducted by the authors is outlined and the findings explicated
and analysed. The dual aspect of nostalgia — that it is both an experience
of pleasure and of regret — is very much a central theme of the paper; and from this we argue that nostalgic memories go toward the personal development
of our normative evaluations and toward a general appreciation of the unfolding
of selfhood in time.
INTRODUCTION
Nostalgia is a culturally derived emotion. In these terms it dates from the
seventeenth century, as will be explored later. Unlike basic primary emo-
tions such anger and fear, nostalgia is a secondary emotion composed of both
positive and negative feelings. It is a personal contemplation of a valued
experience in the past – is an experience that one does not expect
to have again, so a pain of loss accompanies the contemplation, but so too
does a regretful kind of pleasure. Nostalgic thoughts mourn a loss, but they
also include acceptance of the loss, and it is that acceptance that makes
possible a pleasurable feeling along with an out-rush of regret. In short,
nostalgia is a bittersweet emotion, that is in part consciously constructed
and that can be reflected upon at will. The definition of an emotion is somewhat
contested (Damasio, 2003: 28–37) and it is important that we say how
we are using the word, and the
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associated
term, feeling. Emotion-inducing stimuli need to be processed in the brain
using the sensory cortices and the limbic system. Many of such produced emotions
can then be available to conscious experience (i.e. the feeling of an emotion).
Such consciousness potentially allows choice of reaction to physiological
response. It can be said that feeling one's emo- tions allows `flexibility
of response based upon the particular history of one's interactions with the
environment' (Damasio, 1994: 133; Power, 1999). We can distinguish (although
there is sometimes overlap) between primary emotions – that is, those
least subject to immediate methodical reflection, such as, for example, fear
or disgust – from secondary emotions that require for actualization
a pre-set of acquired cultural socialization. In other words, an already existing
combination of beliefs and repertoire of experiences are antecedent. These
secondary emotions, in turn, form a hierarchy of intensity from, for example,
great sadness to mild embarrass- ment. While nostalgia as a secondary emotion
does not carry the strength, for example, of hate or grief this does not make
it any less an emotion – it allows it to be an emotion that we can,
as it were, contemplate as we expe- rience it, rather as we might a play or
a novel. In this way, it becomes a species of emotion that can accommodate
its interiorization without signif- icant ultimate psychic distress. We will
employ, in common with usual practice, the terms emotion and feeling interchangeably.
Nostalgia is experienced in some socio-historical circumstances and not in
others. Shaw and Chase (1989) consider that nostalgia is connected with a
linear concept of time, and with an industrial, secular, or seculariz- ing,
society. They contrast this with a cyclical concept of time in which change
is part of a repeating circle of events, where change is not absolute, and
in which the past is not lost forever. By contrast, industrial societies,
with their continual social change, future orientation, tendency to secular-
ization, and reactive systems of planning, have seen marked increases in linear
concepts of time, both generally and individually. Rapidity of change on its
own is not sufficient to foster nostalgic feeling; there also needs to be
a sense that the present is deficient in relation to the lost past. In relation
to secularization Shaw and Chase (1989: 3) comment that `redemptive histories
are infertile ground for nostalgia. If the unsatisfac- tory present is ...
an antechamber to some better state ... its deficiencies are tolerable'. A
further two points important in the construction of nostalgia are that it
is often connected to some notion of a past innocent childhood, and it is
frequently associated with nature and the countryside. To be nostalgic is
not simply to be interested in the past, or to have the opinion that some
past events or objects are (in some respects at least) better than their replacements.
Such a view sees the past in an analytic, historical perspective, even if
a cursorily thought-out one. There is no automatic particular feeling associated
with the observations, say, that
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train
restaurant cars were nicer for travellers than the modern buffet car, or that
nineteenth-century arcades are more attractive than contemporary shopping
malls. Or, if there is feeling associated with such observations, it is often
not nostalgia, but in the case, say, of the shopping malls, has to do with
an affronted aesthetic sensibility. Nostalgia, by contrast with a historical
perspective, does not seek to be analytic, but is allusive. This quality of
allusive vagueness exists because nostalgia is primarily a feel- ing and not
a cognitive process. Some commentators have applied the term nostalgia to
literature that expresses intense feeling about the past but this is not necessarily
nostalgic feeling. Following the definition of nostalgia as a secondary emotion
it will be noted nostalgia is a tender rather than an overpowering feeling.
Proust's great novel A la recherche du temps perdu is centrally about the
past and feeling about the past. This feeling is, however, contrary to the
claim of Milton L. Miller in Nostalgia: a psychoanalytic study of Marcel Proust
(1957), not nostalgic feeling. A la recherche does not mourn the loss of the
past; it seeks to recreate the past, to deny that it is lost. Proust's novel
is about the recapturing and reinstating of time past. Additionally the extrem-
ity of grief that is often expressed in A la recherche is not compatible with
the variety of intensity that is the experience of nostalgia. Here the narra-
tor is recalling the emotion he experienced when he and his parents returned
later than usual from a walk, and he was told that as a conse- quence of the
lateness of the hour his mother would not be able to visit him when he had
gone to bed to supply a goodnight kiss: `How readily would I have sacrificed
them all [pleasures in life], just to be able to cry all night long in Mamma's
arms! Quivering with emotion, I could not take my anguished eyes from my mother's
face, which would not appear that evening in the bedroom' (Proust, 1981: 199).
Nostalgia is then a complex feeling, or more accurately, set of feelings,
and the conditions (social and individual) that give rise to nostalgia are
likewise complex. This paper will now explore in some detail the tangled and
sometimes contradictory feelings that comprise the experience of nostalgia.
At the core of nostalgia is a sense of a loss that is both mourned and accepted – and the social and personal conditions that are associated with the feeling.
A small-scale empirical investigation, based on discur- sive responses to
a request for extended writing about nostalgic experi- ences will be a significant
part in our investigation into nostalgia. This investigation, though small-scale,
is of particular importance in view of the lack of empirical study in the
field. One of the reasons for some neg- lect in this area may well be the
need for interdisciplinarity in researching nostalgia. Current research practices
(particularly in universities) often rigidify subject boundaries. Auto/biographical
and life history study are two of the few areas that allow research protocols
to extend beyond a
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subject
base and permit a rigorous comprehensiveness. There seems to be only one sociological
analysis of nostalgia, that by Fred Davis in 1979 – a monograph with
many interesting insights, but suffering from a defective system of reporting
its empirical findings. Before outlining our investigation, there are several
issues to be explored. In the next section, we will sketch a history of the
concept of nostalgia followed by a review of contemporary views of the concept,
which will lead to a description of how the concept is be used in this paper.
The final two sections will be an outline of the empirical study, and a discussion
of the themes that emerged. Finally, there will be concluding remarks. HISTORY
OF THE CONCEPT OF NOSTALGIA AND A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSIONS A history
of the term nostalgia is found in Starobinski (1966), Davis (1979) and Boym
(2001). It was coined by a Doctor Johannes Hofer in 1688, using two Greek
words, nostos, meaning home, and algia, meaning pain or sorrow, to denote
a pathological yearning for one's home country (Hofer, 1688). The concept
of homesickness was not new and there already existed words for it in many
European languages; what was new was that the condition was elevated to a
disease, not just a state of feeling, and carried the implication that this
condition was to be henceforward a subject for scientific investigation (Starobinski,
1966: 84). The particular context of Hofer's work was the distress and illness
of Swiss soldiers serving abroad, but the term was soon applied to any uprooted
individuals or groups. Nostalgia was considered to be a serious illness, in
some cases resulting in death, and physical as well as emotional causes were
proposed for it (Hofer, 1688; Starobinski, 1966: 86, 95). Boym argues that
nostalgia, the new disease, arrived at `the historical point when the conception
of time and history were undergoing radical change' (2001: 8). There was a
notion of linear rather than cyclical time, and an increasingly secular and
scientific outlook, based on ideas about human progress, rather than on a
vision of a an immutable religiously ordered cosmos. By the end of the eighteenth
century, nostalgia had lost its disease connotation, and returned to being
a feeling – a process helped by the fact that tuberculosis, which had
sometimes been diagnosed as nostalgia, became clearly classified as a separate
disease (Boym, 2001: 11). However, nostalgia did not revert to the pre-1688
state of being an uncomplicated longing for a home or a homeland, but became
the com- plex bittersweet emotion that it is today. Boym (2001: 9) considers
that the semantic developments of post-eighteenth-century notions of nostalgia
are connected with a process by which there came to be a new division into
`local' and `universal'. Before this, there had been a plethora of
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`locals'
and no `universal' (or a very small and elitist one). A person leaving their
local home place had to acclimatize to a new local home place; but to leave
one's locality after the eighteenth century meant enter- ing a universal,
impersonal sphere not another local place. Moreover, the `local' shrank to
being the family only, as the universalistic sphere expanded and took people
into it whether they actually left home or not. Boym does not mention Durkheim,
but the division into `local' and `universal' has great similarity to his
distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity (Durkheim, 1984). The
temporal dimension of human life, the perception of the passage of human lives
in time, is particularly protean in terms of what Brockmeier (2000) calls
autobiographical time. This is the process by which an indi- vidual, in reflecting
on and living through his or her life course, `con- stantly links the past
with the present ... in the light of present events and future expectations'
(Brockmeier, 2000: 55). Roberts (1999), Brockmeier (2000) and Sparkes and
Smith (2003) have developed or used concepts of autobiographical time more
complex than the linear or cyclical models that we have employed so far. Roberts
(1999: 23) has a diagram that examines the way past, present and future interweave
in autobiographical narrative. Brockmeier (2000: 61), in distinguishing six
models of auto- biographical time adds the circular, the spiral, the fragmentary
and the static to the more familiar linear and cyclical models. The elaboration
of notions of temporality put forward by Roberts and Brockmeier offer frames
of analysis for the complex threads through time of a life narrative. But
this possible complexity of time frames highlights the important way in which
a nostalgic contemplation is almost by definition a memory placed in linear
time; it of its essence that the event reflected on will not recur. The nostalgic
experiences of the seven participants in our empirical study were, with one
possible exception, related in a linear time frame. The one partial exception
will be discussed in the section reporting our research; generally, a nostalgic
memory yearns for something that has gone forever, except in memory. The yearning
of nostalgia, originally formulated as a longing for a spe- cific place, need
not be for a real place, or indeed a place at all, but may be for past relationships
or people, real or imaginary. However, places, specific locales, are consistently
important in nostalgic memory, and a psychoanalytic perspective is valuable
in showing that locales often rep- resent people and forgotten or repressed
relationships with them. `What was at first defined in relation to the place
of birth is thus redefined in rela- tion to parental figures and to early
stages of personal development' (Starobinski, 1966: 103). Locales are an important
factor in participants' memories in our empirical investigation, as will be
seen. It is likely that these places do, in part at least, represent persons,
but that a narcissistic
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identification
of the place with the child that one once was is more important than a representation
of an adult. Daniels notes that a disturb- ing element may be found in nostalgic
memories and comments that in the American artist Wyeth's paintings `the uncanny
lurks close by in nostal- gia's dalliance with the hidden, pointing to the
unconscious ... the unheimlich' (Daniels, 1985: 378). Below the surface of
the idealized memory of nostalgia there may be hidden conflicts, a point that
may explain some of the `bitter' component of bittersweet memories. As we
indicated in the Introduction, the only empirical sociological exploration
of nostalgia is Fred Davis's (1979) Yearning for yesterday. The only information
about his methodology is found in the Preface, where he explains that he used
an `open ended interview guide' with 12 persons, and that he gave a `brief
questionnaire' to students in several of his university classes (Davis, 1979:
ix). He does not follow the usual prac- tice of including a copy of the interview
guide and the questionnaire in the book. He supplies many quotations from
his respondents but in the absence of adequate contextualizing of his research
findings it is hard to draw any conclusions. However, one very striking difference
between the expression of nostalgia in his material and that in our sample
is that adolescence emerges as a significant period for nostalgic memory in
his study, whereas in ours it is childhood. Possibly there are national differ-
ences in the expression of nostalgia, as Davis's study is American, while
ours (with one exception) is English. One of the participants in our study
is French, and it is interesting that her nostalgic recollection is markedly
different from the others in the group – but it is similar in the respect
that it focuses on childhood. Clearly, with such small numbers and in the
absence of proper information about Davis's study, it is not possible to do
more that mention the intriguing possibility of national differences. The
central features of nostalgic feeling are the contemplation of an experience
in the past that was valued and will not return, accompanied by a mourning
of loss that is less anguished than the misery of grief. There is pleasure
as well as pain in this contemplation, and – importantly – there
is an acceptance of the loss, sometimes nearly amounting to a sense that the
loss was deserved. Almost always the loss has some connection with childhood – the loss of the contemplator's own childhood, or, and partic- ularly in literary
evocations of nostalgia, an imagined ideal childhood. DISCUSSIONS OF NOSTALGIA
OF PARTICULAR RELEVANCE TO THIS PAPER While nostalgia is a culturally acquired
feeling it can be conceptually linked to some basic emotions – most
notably those of grief and depres- sion. This is particularly so in Freud's
discussion of these emotions in his `Mourning and melancholia' (1957b), where
melancholia may be
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represented
in current usage by the term depression. Grief and depression are reactions
to the loss of a loved object – though in depression the suf- ferer
may not be able to perceive what the actual lost object was because it may
be masked by repression. The symptoms of both involve feelings of misery focused
on the lost object (or, in depression, on an unfocused feeling of loss). This
pain is accompanied by withdrawal of interest in the world and loss of the
capacity – and the desire – to form or sustain relationships
with other people (Freud, 1957b). Freud explains that: Reality-testing has
shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that
all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object. This demand
arouses understandable opposition... This opposition can be so intense that
a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through
the medium of a ... wishful psychosis. (Freud, 1957b: 244) In ordinary grief,
gradually and painfully, libido is withdrawn from the lost object, so that
when the mourning process is completed `the ego becomes free and uninhibited
again' (Freud, 1957b: 253). However, in melancholia the libido continues to
be attached to a lost object, and the pain of loss does not lessen in the
normal way – a not surprising reaction when, as so often in depression,
the sufferer is unaware what it is that is mourned. There is a further important
contrast of depression with ordinary grief to be made; the former is usually
accompanied by feelings of worth- lessness and self-vilification that are
absent in mourning. Freud explains this anger and vilification as feelings
that have been displaced from the lost or rejecting love object on to the
self. In normal mourning, libido is gradually withdrawn from the lost object,
and after a period of time is free to be attached to new objects. In depression,
the libido: `was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into
the ego. There, however, it was not employed in any unspecified way, but served
to establish an identifi- cation [emphasis in original] of the ego with the
abandoned object' (Freud, 1957b: 249). The consciousness of the loss has been
repressed, and then the disappointment and anger that would, as well as grief,
ordi- narily be directed at the lost object of love, is displaced on to the
sufferer's own ego. Part of the sufferer's self is then vilified as worthless
and con- temptible. The melancholic reaction, as opposed to the mourning reaction,
to loss results from complications and repression in attachment formation
in infancy and childhood. It is unconscious feelings of anger and guilt from
this period in a person's life that re-emerge at a later date as depres- sion,
either in response to an immediate loss or, apparently, spontaneously. There
is some similarity between the grief/depression reaction and the nostalgic
reaction, since both are responses to loss. It would be possible then to see
the nostalgic feeling as a stage in the healing process of grief.
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However,
a better explanation is to see the nostalgic loss as a different kind of loss; in most cases the object lost in nostalgia is regretted rather than yearned
for in distraught misery, and never has been thus overwhelmingly felt. The
loss is experienced not, for example, as the terrible loss of an infant for
a parent. The loss in nostalgia given by the participants in our investigation
shows in most cases, the loss of childhood; and childhood is a state that
we expect to lose. It is normal and desirable to lose it. There is regret,
certainly, in the loss of childhood and our memory of its way of perceiving
the world, but in normal maturation it is not an over- whelming regret. Freud's
account of the stages of an infant's attachment formation and of problems
with these stages can add to the discussion of grief and depression and loss
in the life course. A particular problem of attachment formation outlined
by Freud is the narcissistic reaction; and this will be shown to be relevant
to some expressions of nostalgia. The infant has initially two love objects – its own self, and the mother figure (Freud, 1957a: 87). In normal development
as the child moves on from the early oral phase to the anal and then the genital
phases, the nature of these early attachments is modified through the working
of the Oedipus com- plex. The early, all consuming, loves for the self and
for the mother figure are transmuted into adult attachments and to a range
of love objects. It may happen however that a person will remain more or less
fixed in the narcissistic phase and continues to seek his or her self – or some equiva- lent of the self – as a love object. Freud (1957a:
90) asserts that according to the type of narcissistic response a person may
seek: a) what he himself is; b) what he himself was; c) what he himself would
like to be; d) someone who was once part of himself. Particularly in choices
b) and d) we can see narcissism's connection with children and childhood,
and the trope of idealized childhood so often encountered in nostalgia. Freud
observes that `[t]he charm of a child lies to a great extent in his narcissism,
his self-contentment and inaccessibility' (Freud, 1957a: 89). However, narcissism
is a normal stage in growing up, and is not cast completely away in adulthood,
even in normal individuals, so that affection for the child one once was lingers
in nostalgic memory. Such affection will be seen in several of our participants'
accounts. THE EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION The empirical data for this research
were gained through a small-scale sample of written descriptions of nostalgic
experience. This information
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was
obtained by the use of a qualitative questionnaire. The sample group consisted
of volunteers who had been members of a postgraduate programme at a UK university
and were personally known to one of the authors. All members of the respondent
group had completed modules in biographical studies. The proposal for a research
exercise into nostalgic experiences, using a qualitative questionnaire, was
put forward to the group. The definition of nostalgia for the purposes of
the research was discussed with the group. In addition to the request for
a description of a nostalgic experience the questionnaire requested basic
information on age, sex, education, occupation and place of birth. The preliminary
definition statement relating to nostalgia that was included in the questionnaire
was as follows: For the purposes of this research nostalgia is regarded as
more than the recalling of an agreeable past event. It must be stronger and
deeper than that. It refers to the sense of loss of a past positive time.
Your thoughts about the recalled experience must be accompanied by both a
real ache of longing and an intensely pleasurable contemplation. Seven members
(out of ten) of the group volunteered to undertake the ques- tionnaire. Participants
were given a month to complete and return the ques- tionnaire. It was important
that respondents should have enough time (and privacy) to properly consider
the nature and character of an experience that held considerable significance
for them. The identity of the participants has been kept anonymous (apart
from being known to one of the authors). The names used in the accounts are
fictitious. Feedback to the participants will be provided. All of them expressed
interest in taking part in any follow-up research. The data were collected
during the spring and summer of 2005. Although separate the accounts have
a degree of communal meaning by virtue of the fact that they are the recognizable
experiences of a specific group located in an understood sociocultural context.
They therefore pro- vide information on the way in which selves are cognitively
and affectively constructed, established and developed, and have particular
ways of being- in-the-world. The questionnaire returns are best characterised
as life documents (Plummer, 2001) and more specifically as autobiographical
accounts on a particular topic. As such the study comes under the heading
of life history or biographical research – an approach, though of distinguished
vintage (for example Thomas and Znaniecki, 1918–20; Dollard, 1935),
that has in recent years gained reinvigorated recognition. It is located within
a broadly interpretive paradigm (for example Denzin, 1989; Ricoeur, 1992; Kelly and Dickinson, 1997; Roberts, 2002). Biographical research prioritizes
the narratives by which lives are lived – the stories that constitute
for the self the meaning of its personal encounter with the world. Such narratives,
no
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matter
whether partial, fractured or fluent, are an expression of the identity of
the individual in society. Nostalgia is a well-known experience that, while
individually unique, is generally recognizable to others; and it is as such
that the respondents' accounts are credible within the parameters of the wider
culture. Nostalgic descriptions are a variety of autobiographical form – a variety of `self-telling' – that emerged from historical circum-
stances and that have been incorporated into a culture (Bruner, 1987). In
these terms the present research is a contribution to the theory and practice
of sociological biographical analysis. Of the seven participants in the research
most were in their mid-fifties, but one was 62 and one 48. There were five
women and two men. For all except one the nostalgic experience was of childhood.
The natural world and the outdoors were important parts of the recollection
for five people. A feeling of freedom and independence from adults was important
for five people. Sometimes the feeling of freedom was explicitly related to
a period in life free from adult responsibilities. For four of the participants
the nos- talgic experience was connected with an awareness of transition – that life would not continue in the way it seemingly always had. How these
themes emerge from the different accounts and the meaning of the themes will
be explored; but first, here is a summary of each of the seven experiences. • Mary, age 62. The experience was of childhood between 3 and 6 years. The locale
was Edinburgh, and the valued experience that of visiting known adults, either
alone or with her brother. The feeling that went with the visiting was of
freedom and exploration. This period in Mary's life came to an end when the
family moved to Manchester (less beautiful than Edinburgh), a second brother
was born and a strict grandmother joined the household. • Brigitte, age
54. The experience was of childhood from as far back as she can remember.
The memory is of family reunions, organized by her grandmother and then by
her godmother, where up to 20 family members would sit down to a meal. The
children were allowed to leave the table to play between courses. The feeling
accompanying the memory is of safety, belonging and security. • Joy,
age 52. The experience was of childhood at the age of 11 or 12. The family
lived in Kampala, Uganda, but was about to leave for England. This was the
first time Joy had become aware that life could change. The memory is of being
with her sister at the end of the garden, playing at explorers, as they often
had, but with a heightened consciousness that this pleasure would not continue
indefinitely. • Glenda, age 54. The experience occurred at the age of
31; Glenda was about to leave her job and was clearing her filing cabinet
of personal things, many of which she had forgotten. She came across
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photographs
that brought back a memory of a beautiful place by a river and a special person
who had been present. • Keith, age 52. The experience took place in childhood
between the ages of 7 and 15. He lived in mining village, and remembers the
free- dom of exploring woods and fields and spoil-heaps. There was fishing
and escapades with friends. • Sheila, age 48. The experience was between
3 and 7 years, of living near Biggin Hill, of fields and woods and freedom
to play. • James, age 51. The experience was at about 11, of exploring
country-, river- and pond-side with two other boys of about the same age.
The themes of independence and adventure, of transition and apprecia- tion
of the natural world emerge clearly from Joy's account at the age of 11 or
12: We had a huge garden [in Kampala] and down at the bottom of it was a long
flower bed full of cannas and behind that a very tall double hedge – so one could actually crawl between the two. Between the flowerbed and the
hedge was a strip of grass where a huge puddle used to form ... During the
rainy season there are massive storms and the rain pours down in torrents
for a few hours. Then it suddenly stops ... There is often a strange stillness
to the air after the rain ... The incident happened on one such day – just after the rain. Another significant feature of that day was that we were
about to leave Uganda ... Until that time, it had not occurred to me that
our stay in Uganda was temporary, as I had lived there since I was three months
old. My younger sister and I went out into the garden after the downpour ...
We were all alone in this huge garden and we went to see the puddle behind
the cannas. I can still see in my mind's eye, two little girls engrossed in
a fantasy in which we were explorers in Africa ... [T]he air was steaming
and all around was the lush, lush green of tropical Africa. ... I have never
forgotten the thrill of that adventure, the heightened sense of awareness
of the stillness after the rain ... But the memory is also now tinged with
pathos – or yearning – for magical moments in childhood. I had
no idea where we were going after Uganda or what lay ahead in life. The themes
of independence and the natural world can be seen in Keith's account: Most
of my memories are based on growing up and exploring the area round the [mining]
village. This involved playing in the local woods and fields, fishing in a
local pond or canal, and exploring the spoil heaps, slurry ponds and swamps
created by mining activity. A great place to grow up in a time when you were
simply allowed to go and play as long as you returned home by an agreed time.
School also plays a significant role in my nostalgia
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...
junior school and the secondary school ... [which] involved a two-mile walk
... across the fields. I often reflect on particularly dramatic events with
friends and one particular friend, called Andrew Taylor. [Here follows an
account of Andrew climbing into a metal beer barrel and having the lid fixed
down in order to float down a stream. The plan was for Keith and other friends
to stop the barrel after a short distance. But the force of the water was
too great] Andrew was swept along ... downstream and under a road tunnel ...
and finally grounded ... we rescued a ... shaken and ... bruised Andrew whose
first words were, `Who's go is it next?' ... All of these [memories] are based
on a time of childhood where one had no responsibilities and a great deal
of freedom to explore and experiment. The memories of the two men in the sample
focused, as here, on more active events than those of the women. Here is James
reflecting on the nat- ural world and the joys of independence. I am about
11 years old and visiting friends [two brothers about the same age as Ian]
... We are in the country and visiting a pond ... In my pocket I have a newly
bought Observer's Book of Pond Life. [Near the pond] is a river [where] water
voles can be seen and heard. Beyond the river ... is a ... railway line. Every
time a train passes we interrupt our pond investigation and wave at the train.
Always some people wave back ... The memory fills me with real happiness – the experience of the waving, the people waving back, the contemplation of
the pond life and the presence of my friends. I am also very sad that these
unreflective joyous moments were the best moments in my life and can never
return. This account is mostly in the historic present tense – a device
that suggests that the events narrated are happening now rather than in the
past. Though the men's accounts are of more physical activity than the women's,
similar themes of countryside and its associations with inde- pendence are
found. We have already seen Joy in Uganda. Here is Sheila's account of countryside
and independence: Apart from that one incident [a quarrel between her parents
while Sheila was in the garden, during which smashing crockery could be heard],
for a long time I had only good feeling from those few years when we lived
down the valley in Biggin Hill. In those days there were hardly any houses
in the valley, just woods and fields and a long unmade road ... As very few
cars drove along King's Road ... my mother gave us a lot of freedom to roam
... There is also transition in this account. The Biggin Hill period remained
a (relatively) ideal time as: `life gradually changed after we moved from
235
Biggin
Hill to Bromley ... I can ... see how much of a struggle it was at times ...
with five children to provide and care for'. The four accounts above locate
the nostalgic experience in childhood and all recall countryside, and independence
as important. Now follow the other three. The first of these, from Mary, recalls
childhood (a period between 3 and 6 years). For her awareness of transition
was important as was the theme of independence, but the latter was focused
on adults who were not family members: At this time [between three and six
years] I had a strong sense of individuality and personal identity. The world
was open and I was aware that I could explore it. In these years, it took
the form – curiously – of visiting grown ups ... often alone,
but sometimes accompanied by my brother who was about seventeen months my
senior. These visits included ... afternoon tea with my neighbours, an elderly
brother and sister ... and ... another elderly gentleman, the Parrot Man,
who kept a rather frightening but fascinating parrot. In the absence of countryside
the city of Edinburgh, where she lived, provided something to provide a sense
of the environment for Mary: My feelings of nostalgia include the sense of
personal identity and freedom, as well as a strong sense of place ... Edinburgh
which I identify as a beautiful city. [There was] a feeling of wholeness and
harmony [not damaged by the arrival of a new baby] when I was about three
and a half. The period of Mary's nostalgic memory ended with a transition
to a less agreeable life, marked by the arrival of a new baby, a move to Manchester
and the arrival of a `stern Scottish grandmother' to live with the family.
`The sense of loss was utter and complete.' The five accounts dealt with so
far have marked similarities – childhood, transition, independence – and in all but the last countryside is important. The transition theme seems
to mark a point, sometimes con- sciously noted, of a dawning awareness of
the existence of time, that things are impermanent. Of the two remaining accounts,
that of Brigitte, while different in several respects from the five already
examined, con- tains a sense of regret for change – a resistance to
transition. Her nostal- gic memory covers many unspecified childhood and adult
years in France, expressed as `it was always there', of visits to her extended
family, central to which were her grandmother, her godmother and an uncle.
So for most of my life until a few years back, three generations were living
under one roof. We used to have regular family reunions, quite often on Sundays
and of course for religious festivals. The reunion usually meant a very long
meal, with ten, fifteen or twenty of us around the table in the
236
dining
room ... As children we would go out to play between courses. Then our children
would be there. The godmother organized the reunions until her death in her
eighties. The house is still in the family, but has been much altered and
modernized – `but they were anxious to maintain the dining room'. It
has never been the same since. It is nice to think the house has remained
in the family (five generations) but it is not a centre of reunions ... There
is a sadness about that. It is changing. What was it about it? It felt safe,
it was nice to belong, secure, strong. As I said earlier it was a mixture
of strong feelings, as I used to hate it as a teen-ager and I watched our
children rebelling against it at times. Although adults (godmother, grandmother)
are important for Brigitte, the form of her recollection cannot be equated
with the important adults in Mary's, since the latter are perceived by her
to be outside the family circle. Brigitte's memory is of a wide, yet all enclosing,
family circle that had diminished, or narrowed in recent years. Her nostalgic
memory, unlike those of the other participants, touches on notions of cyclical
time. Her recollection values cyclical time, a time of repeated family gatherings
in the same place, of the same family gemeinschaft exercised on the changing
cohorts of indi- viduals who grow up under its influence. But since she notes
that the warm togetherness has weakened she, like the others, sites her nostalgic
memory in linear time, even while regretting that cyclical time is no more.
The seventh account, Glenda's, is the only one that is not a childhood recollection.
While clearing out a filing cabinet, in preparation for a change of job, she
came across forgotten photographs, which at first she looked at with interest
and pleasure. It wasn't until the third one that my heart missed a beat – then the fourth and fifth photograph, by which time I had stopped smiling.
Did I really want to continue to look at them, knowing how painful it would
be? ... Of course ... I looked at the photographs, slowly sliding down the
wall until I was crouched on the floor ... acknowledging [an] ache in my chest
and the heavy feeling in my stomach ... I can instantly recall all the feeling
I had that day [of the photographs] ... The feeling of pleasure, yet fear.
The memory continues with recall of the day of the photographs: I was at the
waters edge of the river ... I could hear the water flowing past me, I could
feel the September sunshine on my face, and I could smell the countryside
... I looked up at the tree I was leaning against and I heard the sound of
a Land Rover in the distance ... ... I wept for what I had shared once – a wonderful, beautiful period of my life ...
237
...
I will take these wonderful memories to the grave, but before then I will
continue to have my private and silent nostalgic moments and be eternally
grateful to the one very special person, for giving me such beautiful, warm
memories and somewhere that I can escape to in my dreams. Glenda's experience
happened when she was 38. This breaks the pattern of the other accounts in
that it is decidedly not a childhood memory or occur- ring at a stage when
reflective consciousness would not be active. However, what is of interest
is the potency of her pleasure and her unhappiness. It is possible that the
episode is a screen memory obscuring an earlier repressed event. The possibility
of Glenda's recollection being a screen memory is perhaps strengthened by
the much greater affect that is associated with her memory, as opposed to
those of the other participants; and also by the fact that her memory had
been forgotten until stirred by the discovery of the photographs. The other
participants give the impression that their nostalgic memories are always
available to be drawn into consciousness. What Glenda recalled was a conscious
(though not readily accessible) memory that may be the echoing of a partially
unconscious one referring to an earlier experience of the same character but
carrying an emotional intensity unavailable to the conscious mind. The emotion
released by the photographs has possibly employed for its conscious articulation
a substitute, but akin to, memory. It seems that the unproblematic manner
in which others participate within or are associated with the nostalgic episode
(whether or not made much of in the nostalgic descriptions) is a key factor
in its importance for the subject. THEMES: DISCUSSION There are three notable
themes that emerge from the participants' accounts. The first is a new awareness
of transition and change, a change in con- sciousness that can be connected
to a move from mechanical to organic sol- idarity. The second is the expanding
ability to love something or someone; the third is, in Freudian terms, a release
of tension. Included in this third category, as release of tension, is a strand
that emerges, implicitly for the most part, in which is the independence and
adventure that are so valued as a part of growing up, exist at the idealized
time of the nostalgic experience without the moral dilemmas and responsibility
of a completely adult life. In the following analysis of these themes, it
is hoped that a better under- standing will be reached of the several strands
of nostalgic experience. Transition, reflective ability, and mechanical and
organic solidarity The transition theme contains two related elements, the
arrival of a reflec- tive ability and the arrival of awareness of time and
discontinuity in the life
238
course.
They are both part of the new kind of consciousness that develops in individuals
as they move from mechanical to organic solidarity. Durkheim (1984) used these
concepts to analyse change in types of society; but they can also be used
in analysing the development of individuals, for example Bernstein (1971; 1996). The individuated consciousness of organic solidarity has a well-developed
sense of the self as a reflecting entity. Such a reflective self is a prerequisite
for awareness of the disconti- nuities of time. Or, to put it the other way
round, the unreflecting con- sciousness of a person embedded in mechanical
solidarity is attuned to the small, and repetitive, changes of the passage
of days and seasons and growth, but is not attuned to the discontinuities
of historical time. The consciousness of mechanical solidarity is little differentiated
from other consciousnesses (from other people); it is not a reflective and
analytic consciousness. As James said of his own change of consciousness:
`I am sad that these unreflecting, joyous moments will ... never return.'
For three par- ticipants there was a memory of a specific, disagreeable, or
at least alarm- ingly novel occurrence that was felt to mark the end of the
nostalgic memory – and the arrival of the awareness of discontinuous
time. Mary moved with her family to Manchester and the stern grandmother,
and a not entirely wel- come brother was born. Sheila lost the freedom of
countrified suburbia, and became aware of her parents' problems. The awareness
of discontinuous time came for Joy as she contemplated a move from Uganda
to England. This process of the arrival of the organic solidarity reflective
conscious- ness and awareness of discontinuous time elucidates the mixture
of pleas- ure and sorrow in nostalgic memory. It is at a specific moment of
maturation that an individual comes to experience time as divided into historical
phases and not as a day-to-day but otherwise unbroken continuum; and at the
same moment he or she perceives the change in consciousness from mechanical
to organic. It is the mingled feeling about this change from unreflective
embeddedness in a social milieu to the indi- viduated consciousness of organic
solidarity that produces nostalgia; it is a change that is both regretted
and welcomed. In addition, a recalled episode that a person perceives as a
change for the worse is an event that often sparks – or is perceived
to spark – the arrival of a reflective consciousness. There have probably
been many disagreeable episodes in a person's unreflective past, but if they
have not been consciously reflected on as a marker of a transition they will
be forgotten. It is, we suggest, the coincidence of a disagreeable event and
the arrival of reflec- tive consciousness that is particularly likely to spark
a nostalgic memory. The happy unreflective and undifferentiated past becomes
imbued with a perception that it was all good in the period that preceded
the remembered disagreeable event, when in fact all that is necessary is that
the period immediately preceding the transition should be recalled as happy.
239
Ability
to love: the development of one's own attachments All the nostalgic experiences
recounted by the participants had other people in them as important components.
Usually these were people out- side the family circle – child friends
(Keith, James, and, to a lesser degree, Sheila) or adult friends (Mary). Joy
was with her sister at the time so not a non-family member. But the two girls
were outside the family house and were experiencing an adventure of their
own making. The feeling for the countryside of Africa is vivid in Joy's recall,
and is a reminder of the importance of countryside (its beauty and its freedoms)
in other accounts. It is particularly strong in Keith's, James's and Glenda's; and it is present in Sheila's. Mary was brought up in a city, Edinburgh, but
she records appreciating its beauty as a city in contrast to the less favoured
Manchester. Thus we have a complex consisting of strong positive feelings
for: • new relationships with people outside the family circle • the out of doors, in particular the countryside • freedom, adventure.
There is strong positive affect connected with this complex of components
and pleasure in the ability to develop these attachments. Earlier we noted
Freud's discussion of the process by which, in normal development, the child's
early exclusive love for the mother figure and its own self, is trans- muted
into adult attachments to a range of love objects. This process can be seen
at work in the recall of nostalgic experiences. The early narcissis- tic love
of the child's own self can be seen lingering in the nostalgic expe- riences
of the participants. This is particularly marked in the experiences of the
two men in our sample; for both of them other boys of a similar age attract
strong feelings of affection. These other boys may be seen as other versions
of the narrator's self, attracting narcissistic love. The importance of the
natural world is interesting (Keith, James, Joy, Glenda) in view of the association
of `idealized child' and `rural past' that Robson (2001) notes in nineteenth-century
literature and art. She stresses the `past' rather than the `rural' and sees
it as a backward-looking trope. Possibly in the context she is writing of
this is correct. But in our participants' accounts the natural world (that
is the `rural' in Robson's formulation) is foregrounded and can be better
seen as a forward-looking component in the developing attachments of our participants.
In Keith, James and Joy's accounts the countryside/outdoors is associated
with growing independence and action in the world. It is `child-in-natural-world'
that is important, and this composite can be seen as a narcissistic representation
of the child in the narratives. It is also worth observing here that it is
much more difficult in 2006 to imagine children having the freedom to roam
alone or in
240
small
groups in the manner recounted by some of our participants. Parents have necessarily
become more nervous of allowing their children to ven- ture outside than used
to be the case a generation ago. If parents have become over-protective they
have become so, regretfully, for entirely under- standable reasons. Release
of tension In relation to the attendant tension within nostalgia (between
current regret and remembered pleasure) a Freudian perspective offers some
further explanatory value. Freud asserts that while the pleasure principle
determines the purpose of life, its programme seems at odds with the world – in both its macro and micro realizations: `one is inclined to say that the
intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of creation'
(Freud, 1961: 76). None the less there are gaps and interstices in reality
where the release of pent-up needs for happiness and satisfaction can occur.
This, obviously, is not to be in any continuous sense, and can be `only possible
as an episodic phenomenon' (Freud, 1961: 76). Nostalgia, in a manner paralleling
Freud's discussion of jokes, supplies a brief experience in which pleasure
is allowed its way, circumventing briefly the constraining seriousness of
everyday reality (Freud, 1960). The movement from the psychic relocation of
the nostalgic episode, and the knowledge of its unrecoverability, supply the
defusing and raising of ten- sion. This condition is susceptible to overall
super-ego management, but in abnormal circumstances one could imagine that
it could take on a pathological aspect. This latter may be the reason why
nostalgia has in the past been categorized as a medical condition (Starobinski,
1996: 84). Tension is usually a result of conflict between what one wishes
to do and what one feels one ought to do, or is expected to do. Thus in some
of our participant's accounts there is a regretted pleasure in the memory
of a time (or an imagined time) when one had no responsibilities and there
was no `ought' – for example James talking of the `unreflective joyous
moments' before responsibilities arrived. However, this was certainly not
an amoral or immoral time, but rather that interpersonal relations were unproblematically
harmonious in the nostalgic memories. Keith's child- hood memory of the episode
when one of a group of friends was shut (by agreement) in a barrel and floated
down a river is interesting in this respect. The experience was almost certainly
uncomfortable and frighten- ing and could have led to disagreement within
the group of friends and to a very much less than happy memory. The barrel-traveller,
however, trusted that the others had not meant any harm, and continued a loyal
definition of the event as fun calling out `Who's go is it next?' as soon
as he was released from the barrel.
241
CONCLUDING
REMARKS Although individual, the nostalgic accounts presented earlier have
a shared degree of meaning by virtue of the fact that they are generally identifiable
experiences belonging to a widely recognizable sociocultural context and historical
period. They therefore provide information on the way in which selves are
cognitively and affectively developed. In this respect, given their context,
they can add to the emotional repertoire from which normative evaluations
relating to the selfhood of others may be formed. Nostalgic memories can become
part of an emotional stock from which we may make normative evaluations, have
sympathetic understanding and express appreciations of the development of
selfhood in time. These considerations chime with the movement in moral philosophy
and the human sciences that links narrative experience with an understanding
of ethics and moral reasoning (for example MacIntyre, 1985; 1999; Nussbaum,
2001). Here the reference has been not to extraordinary, highly extreme narra-
tives but to the stories of everyday lives lived in ordinary ways. And, of
course, much of life is not lived in extremis but in a broad affective range
that, in most cases, is in real crisis only occasionally; in any case, intense
experience by no means always carries with it loss of rational function or
physiological trauma. It is in these situations that the majority of interac-
tions occur, that most of living in complex western societies takes place
and in which the nostalgic examples we provide are realized. For the participants
the nostalgic recollections are vivid, and also encapsulate a set of intersubjective
relations that are guileless, uncoercive and which take their place as part
of the subject's view-of-life, whether they take the form of Brigitte being
a child close to a large affectionate family, or James waving from a distance
to passengers on a passing train. The transposi- tional duality made between
the adult, contemporary, self and the pre- reflective self refers to nostalgia
as the simultaneous holding within the self of a place that is at once haven
and also a place from which one has been banished. While nostalgic feeling
is a regretful one for an unrecoverable, pre-reflective past the lasting information
its conscious retrieval supplies is a recognition that mature, current relations
with others are often best grounded in an appreciation that lives are generally
characterized by a mix- ture of hope and regret. The content of each of the
nostalgic accounts would be intelligible to all participants – in this
sense the authors of the accounts share, in Habermasian terms, a pre-reflective
life-world solidarity (Habermas, 1990). Further, the dual emotional aspect
of nostalgia suggests for the subject that the value of autonomous existence
is often best under- stood through the acknowledgement of interdependence.
In these terms we can say that the individual experience of nostalgia can
be a type of social learning as well as a private feeling. The episode of
Keith and his friends
242
with
the barrel is an illustration of this process; a potentially unpleasant incident
is remembered with pleasure. Keith draws no explicit moral points from the
event, but it is possible to point to implicit social learning of sev- eral
things – the value of loyalty, trust and fortitude. It is not the event
itself that is of central importance in this process of learning, but the
reaction of the participants and their definitions of what took place. It
seems possi- ble that quarrels and distrust could have arisen – in
which case of course the memory of the event could not be a nostalgic one,
in that remembered pleasure is a key element in nostalgia. It could be said
that nostalgic experiences not only have good things in them (that they are
thought of as pleasurable and worthwhile) but that they are also indicative
of a moral environment, that could not exist without the kindness of others.
The depiction of nostalgic events does not provide in itself patient moral
analysis, but our reflections on them allow us to see that what were occasions
for imaginative feelings can produce insight into the best and simplest ways
that life could be – not in the reclamation of the same experiences
but in the establishment of a moral perspective. Perhaps it may be argued
(and we have earlier broached this point) that the others in the nostalgic
reverie are versions of the self. If this is sometimes so, it does not seem
to matter in interpersonal terms for we must also be rehearsing what it is
like to be interactive and intimate and to have taken within us the possibility
of the recognition of others, and of having har- monious, uncaricatured relations
with them. We would say that the inter- personal self of the nostalgic event
provides, in Charles Taylor's terms, `a heightened sense of interconnectedness
with others [that acts as a] remedy to the loss of resonance, depth [and]
richness [found] in our current human surroundings and allows us to refine
our interior contemplations and dealings with others' (Taylor, 1989: 501).
As for each of our participants nostalgic recollection is per se significant
it is a form of autobiography that has within it communitarian, epistemic
gain (Taylor, 1989). The recall of nostalgic moments develops the autobiographical
facility and nostalgic accounts provide a significant category for analysing
selves. If nostalgic recall is more common in a contemporary society that
offers individuals few effective general meaning systems it is likely to be
not because of a simplistic wish for golden days, but because the integrative
features of the nostalgic episode are needed to bolster the integrative capacity
of the present self. Perhaps nostalgic experience will become a genre within
autobiography and find its place as a part of a project recom- mended by Jerome
Bruner: `I cannot imagine a more important psycho- logical research project
than one that addresses itself to the `development of autobiography' – how our way of telling about ourselves changes, and how these accounts come
to take control of our ways of life' (Bruner, 1987: 32).
243
What
we have produced in this paper is our initial account of nostalgia and its
relationship to autobiographical identity. There is more to elabo- rate and
extend in the area at historical, conceptual and empirical levels. This is
a study we propose to contribute to ourselves. There is consider- able information
worthy of analysis relating to the way we have spoken about nostalgia in children's
literature (particularly that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries).
Further, in terms of our partici- pant data, we have yet to explore all its
content and ramifications. Also, the connections between emotion, episodic
memory and neurological science are still to be extensively related to that
continuum of pleasure and regret that is the nostalgic experience. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Our thanks to Brigitte, Glenda, James, Joy, Keith, Mary and Sheila.
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NOTES
ON CONTRIBUTORS
HILARY
DICKINSON is honorary research associate in sociology at the University of
Greenwich, UK. MICHAEL ERBEN lecturers in sociology and biographical studies
at the University of Southampton, UK.