Thammasat University students interested in psychology, philosophy, allied health sciences, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 10 December Zoom webinar on Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion.
The event, on Tuesday, 10 December 2024 at 8pm Bangkok time, is presented by King’s College London, The United Kingdom.
Students are invited to join at this link.
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of nostalgia.
The speaker will be Dr. Agnes Arnold-Forster of The University of Edinburgh, an historian of modern and contemporary medicine, healthcare, and the emotions.
Her book, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion, is available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.
Nostalgia is a feeling of wistful longing for a time in the past, often accompanied by a sense of pleasure and a little sadness.
It can be triggered by sensory experiences like smells, sounds, or tastes that evoke happy memories.
For example, someone might feel nostalgia for their schooldays or for home.
The word nostalgia comes from Greek words meaning a return home and pain.
Nostalgia can be a pleasant emotion, but spending too much time dwelling on the past can make it difficult to enjoy the present.
However, when used appropriately, nostalgia can have positive effects on health.
At a book launch earlier this year, it was noted:
Nostalgia is a social and political emotion vulnerable to misuse and reflects the anxieties of the age. It is one of the many ways we communicate a desire for the past, dissatisfaction with the present and our visions for the future.
Agnes Arnold-Foster summarised the main arguments in her book ‘Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion.’
She describes nostalgia as an elusive term, whose meaning has changing over time.
A hundred years ago, nostalgia was a sickness that afflicted servants in seventeenth-century Switzerland because of pathological homesickness.
It attracted the attention of medicine’s finest minds in eighteenth-century England and killed Civil War soldiers in nineteenth-century America.
Today, it is no longer a fatal diagnosis. Instead, it has come to signify a longing for the past, often perceived as a weakness in individuals, but also commonly exploited by politicians or by global brands seeking to sell us something.
In right-wing political discourse, nostalgia as longing for past glory has often been exploited by leaders promising to ‘take back control,’ or to ‘make America great again.’
However, as Arnold-Foster points out, the phenomenon is by no means limited to the right: Danny Boyle’s portrayal of the NHS in the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony is an example of left-wing political nostalgia.
Nostalgia is one way to communicate a desire for the past and a lens through which to see our dissatisfaction about the present.
In this way, it can also inform our aspirations for the future.
The book examines whether nostalgia can be progressive and creative – as opposed to necessarily a stultifying force.
Instead of being isolating politically and personally, can nostalgia draw us together instead of pushing us apart?
In responding, Professor Sonu Shamdasani of University College London (UCL) SELCs and Co-Director of UCL Health Humanities Centre reflected on configurations of madness, tracing how they evolve over time.
An earlier definition of nostalgia describes it as a malady of place.
The treatment was often games and useless distractions, and in more severe cases, as Johannes Hofer recorded in 1688, “nostalgia admits no remedy other than a return to the homeland”. However, Immanuel Kant argued that “the place that the nostalgic person yearns for is not so much the actual place, but youth itself, the time before the age of maturity which, though irrevocably past, the nostalgic person associates with the simple pleasures of life,” it was a “disease of imagination.”
Reflecting on nostalgia’s journey from disease to emotion, Prof. Shamdasani concluded by referencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as the lens through which many of the symptoms previously associated with nostalgia as disease are now understood and asked if PTSD itself is on its way to becoming an emotion?
Associate Professor Emily McTernan, who teaches political theory at the UCL Department of Political Science, asked if the link between the early modern incarnation of nostalgia and what we mean when we talk about nostalgia today is sufficiently strong for a single history of ‘nostalgia’ to be possible.
She also considered how technology drives contemporary nostalgia by making available images of the past and pushing them upon us through our smartphones.
Finally, Dr McTernan reflected on the dangers of twenty-first-century nostalgia, and questioned whether the rehabilitation of nostalgia Arnold-Foster explores, might risk not sufficiently recognizing its power as a corrosive force.
As Dr. Arnold-Forster observed on another occasion,
Nostalgia hasn’t always been a tool for manipulating our emotions – it was once a medical condition
Nostalgia has somewhat of a bad reputation – particularly for its recent influence on politics and society. The emotion is supposed to persuade, delude and charm people into making electoral decisions. […]
But, while the politics of nostalgia seem to be particularly potent today, the emotion has a long, troubled history.
As I have explored in my new book Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion, there are few feelings as ubiquitous, yet tricky to pin down, as nostalgia. One of the reasons for this is perhaps because nostalgia, more so than other emotions, has undergone a particularly radical transformation over the past three centuries. Just a hundred years ago or so, it was not merely an emotion – but a sickness.
Our mission is to share knowledge and inform decisions.
Nostalgia was first coined as a term – and used as a diagnosis – by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in 1688. Derived from the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain), this mysterious disease was a kind of pathological homesickness. In patients, it caused psychological disturbances such as lethargy, depression and confusion.
But it also had physical symptoms such as heart palpitations, open sores and disturbed sleep. It was thought to be a serious, intractable disease – difficult to treat, almost impossible to cure. For unlucky victims it could prove fatal, with sufferers slowly starving themselves to death. […]
In the 20th century, nostalgia changed. It parted ways with homesickness and transformed – first into a psychological disorder, then into the emotion we know today.
However, early psychoanalysts took a dim view of nostalgia and people prone to its indulgence. They thought they were neurotic, retrograde, overly-sentimental and unable to face reality. Writing in the shadow of the second world war, they were suspicious of patriotism: “Why does an old country, often of wretched and beggarly existence, become a fairy land to victims of nostalgia?” But these psychoanalysts were also snobbish, believing nostalgia was more common among the “lower classes” than the cosmopolitan elite.
These views, while no longer held by therapists or psychologists, are still prevalent in political discussions about nostalgia. Indeed, nostalgia’s reputation today, particularly as an influence on politics, culture and society, is not so honeyed. […]
Nostalgia might not be a disease anymore, but it hasn’t shed all of its old associations. It remains, for many, an explanation for what they view as the less progressive, more irrational political choices some people make.
While no longer deadly, it remains a dangerous emotion.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)