I have always been prone to homesickness. As a child I didn’t really enjoy holidays, I dreaded going away on school trips and I hated sleepovers. At the beginning of 2021, when I first started thinking about the history of nostalgia, and in the midst of the pandemic, I moved across the Atlantic from London to Montreal, Canada for work. Far from home and away from my family and friends, I felt a kind of sadness when I thought about the life I had left behind. There was so much to love about my new life, but I felt anxious, constantly worried about the safety and well-being of my parents, siblings, and friends. What if, because of the time difference, I missed an urgent call or woke up to terrible news? These fears were of course unfounded, and they were also ridiculous, even childish. Grown-ups – married 30-year-olds with mortgages and full-time jobs – don’t miss their mums.
I also tend to get homesick in a weirder, more abstract way – homesickness for somewhere I’ve never been. It’s a feeling otherwise known as nostalgia. Fusing fairy tales with Horrible histories, as a child I spent hours imagining myself transported back in time to invented and romanticized versions of the past. I was an avid reader of Enid Blyton’s novels and, despite my homesick tendencies, begged my parents to take me from my 1990s London primary school to a boarding school in 1950s Cornwall. My pleas went unanswered, so I went to my uniform-free public school every day in pleated skirts and white blouses, desperate to return to a world I had never inhabited.
As I grew up, I cut these emotional ties to the past, and history and I developed a new, much more cynical relationship. I did a few history degrees and became hardened to the past – a steely, objective academic who eschewed sentimentality. Professional historians tend to have a low opinion of nostalgia and I absorbed this view at first. For many academics, nostalgia is a hallmark of history buffs – more the preserve of re-enactors, hobbyists and popularists. By contrast, we are supposed to be able to focus a critical lens on the past, see it for what it is, warts and all.
In my personal life, I also became less nostalgic. I like to think of myself as politically progressive and I’m definitely an optimist. But despite having these lofty ideas about myself, I still sometimes found myself wallowing in the romance of the past, and allowed myself a little nostalgia now and then, as an indulgence.
I’m slightly embarrassed by that, because even outside of academia, nostalgia has a bad reputation. For many, it is a fundamentally (small-c) conservative emotion, one held by people unwilling to engage with modern life – the proverbial ostriches with their heads in the sand. It is, according to sociologist Yiannis Gabriel, “The newest opiate of the people.” At best a mostly harmless condition experienced by antiquarians and sentimentalists. At worst, a kind of reactionary fallacy, blamed for a series of supposed social and political sins. But nostalgia used to be even worse. And you don’t have to travel that far back in time to find it listed as a cause of prolonged illness or even death. In the premodern world it had the ability to kill.
Nostalgia was first coined as a term and used as a diagnosis in 1688 by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer. Derived from the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algae (pain), this mysterious disease was a kind of pathological homesickness. It caused lethargy, depression and disturbed sleep. Sufferers also experienced physical symptoms – palpitations, open sores and confusion. For some, the disease was fatal – the victims refused food and slowly starved to death. In the 1830s, a Parisian man was threatened with expulsion from his beloved home. He went to his bed, turned his face to the wall, and refused to eat, drink, or see his friends. Finally, he died, succumbing to a “deep sadness” and a “raging fever” just hours before his house was to be demolished. His diagnosis? Nostalgia.
As the 20th century dawned, nostalgia loosened its grip on the medical mind, parting ways with homesickness and morphing into, first, a psychological disorder and then the relatively benign emotion we know today. While they no longer viewed nostalgia as a physical illness, early psychoanalysts still had little patience for the nostalgia they encountered on their couches. They accused people with nostalgic tendencies of being neurotic and unwilling or unable to face reality. Like many political commentators today, they were snobbish, arguing that the middle classes were less likely to be nostalgic than “lower-class” or “tradition-bound” people.
It was not until the 1970s that these views softened. Today, psychologists believe that nostalgia is a nearly universal, fundamentally positive emotion—a powerful psychological resource that provides people with a variety of benefits. It can boost self-esteem, increase meaning in life, promote a sense of social connectedness, encourage people to seek help and support for their problems, improve mental health and alleviate loneliness, boredom, stress or anxiety. Nostalgia is even now used as an intervention to maintain and improve memory among older adults, enrich psychological health, and alleviate depression.
Nostalgia is now supposed to be pleasurable for the individual experiencing it, but its reputation as an influence on politics and society is not so honeyed. Populist movements worldwide are repeatedly criticized for their use and abuse of nostalgia. The images these movements paint of the past are condemned for being too white and too male. It is also seen as the preserve of those who are retrograde, conservative and sentimental. Writers berate those who voted for Trump and Brexit for their nostalgic tendencies and this remains, oddly enough, a kind of diagnosis – an explanation for what the critic sees as wayward or irrational acts. As the historian Robert Saunders states that, referring to Brexit, the prevailing rhetoric branded the Leave vote as, “a psychological disorder: a pathology to be diagnosed, rather than an argument to engage with”.
This trend is as widespread as it is strange. Not least because nostalgia is a feature of left-wing political life, just as it is of conservatism and populism – think of the NHS, for example. It’s also weird, because if you take contemporary psychology seriously, everyone is nostalgic, pretty much all the time.
Most experts agree that nostalgia is a predominantly positive emotion that arises from personally salient, tender, and wistful memories. And nostalgia is more than just benign; it can be actively therapeutic. As one psychologist put it, during moments of nostalgic reflection, the mind becomes “people”. The emotion affirms symbolic bonds with friends, lovers and families; the nearest other comes to be “momentarily part of one’s present”. People with nostalgic tendencies feel more loved and protected, have reduced anxiety, are more likely to have secure attachments, and are even supposed to have better social skills.
Perhaps I would have felt less unhappy if I had spent more of my time abroad indulging in nostalgia. Rather than wallowing in sadness and thinking about all the people I wasn’t with, I could have used those memories to remind me that I have friends and family to miss. enabled me to detach my feelings from the assumptions I had about what normal, appropriate emotional responses to change were supposed to look like.
The process of research nostalgia shifted my intellectual relationship to emotions. Society as a whole, and academia in particular, tends to view emotions as annoying. There is now a certain amount of cultural pressure to talk about feelings and publicly acknowledge trauma and distress (a bit like I’m doing here) and seek help and support when unhappy, anxious or depressed. But at the same time, some emotional reactions are still considered more appropriate or mature than others; and political and professional decisions seen to be driven by feelings continue to be taken less seriously than those deemed motivated by reason, rationality or research. As a historian, I am keen on research. But as a historian of emotions, I also fancy feelings. I am interested in their variety, curious about their range and I take their power seriously. Nostalgia could do with a makeover – it needs to be rescued from its associations with the sick, the stupid and the sentimental.
Because emotion is everywhere, a source of both pain and pleasure, and it explains so much about modern life. Expressions of nostalgia are one way we communicate a desire for the past, dissatisfaction with the present, and, perhaps paradoxically, our visions for the future. Progressive, as well as conservative; not only hindering, it is also creative. Homesickness should also be treated with more respect. In its harmful, pathological forms, it should be taken more seriously. And even in its more benign manifestations, like mine, we have to see it for what it is. Not as a pollution, nor a thing that stands in the way of us living our lives, but as evidence for deep feeling – for connection and commitment. Proving that we love and are loved in return.
Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion by Agnes Arnold-Forster is published by Picador at £22. Buy a copy for £18.70 guardianbookshop.com
