The Psychology of Nostalgia

Nostalgia is one of the strangest emotions we can experience. It is a longing for the past, especially for a time or place associated with happy memories, accompanied by a sense of sadness for what has been lost. One has the feeling that the core of one’s existence is touched. Nostalgia is remarkably common, with many experiencing it at least once a week.[1] Most people regularly take nostalgic trips down memory lane. Nostalgia, in fact, has become a defining feature of the 21^st-century zeitgeist. Yet people often find it difficult to say what exactly they yearn for.

Introduction

We may simply be going about our day when a memory comes out of the blue and suddenly fills us with nostalgia. It is triggered passively by external stimuli, such as the sight of a familiar object or place, a particular sound or scent, a certain taste, or even the weather. Nostalgia can also be evoked deliberately, when we intentionally reflect on the past by looking at childhood photographs, watching old cartoons or TV shows, replaying a game we once enjoyed, listening to familiar music or soundtracks, or talking with friends and loved ones about bygone times.

In either case, a comparison is made between past and present experiences. This is juxtaposition is an essential aspect of the nostalgic experience. We are transported back to an earlier time, and are reminded of the warmth of childhood, past relationships, or the “good old days.” For a brief moment, the distance between past and present is overcome, but when we return to the present, that distance re-emerges, and we find ourselves longing for what we have lost.

Before we delve deeper into the psychology of nostalgia, its origins and historical development, and how it can help us to find meaning in life, we will explore the inner world of childhood, the development of ego-consciousness, and the nature of memory itself. After all, nostalgia depends on our ability to remember the past, although our access to our earliest memories is surprisingly limited.

But we need not fear, for many memories that have faded from consciousness continue to live within us and may be brought into awareness again. This explains why nostalgia can be so overwhelming: something seemingly lost suddenly comes alive again in the present.

Our conscious intention influences how the unconscious responds to us. The more we work to understand ourselves, particularly our childhood, the more we may become aware of what has remained unconscious. This is an essential part of the lifelong journey of individuation: becoming fully yourself. Just as the destiny of the oak is contained in the tiny acorn, each individual bears a unique potential that asks to be lived.

To understand who you are, you must first understand who you were. For who you were has not disappeared; it still forms part of who you are. Many of us carry wounds from the past that can interfere with our daily duties and relationships. We must tend to those wounds, for only the wounded healer heals.

The Inner World of Childhood

Carl Jung describes what might have been his earliest memory, a rather hazy impression dating from around the age of two or three:

I am lying in a pram, in the shadow of a tree. It is a fine, warm summer day, the sky blue, and golden sunlight darting through green leaves. The hood of the pram has been left up. I have just awakened to the glorious beauty of the day, and have a sense of indescribable well-being. I see the sun glittering through the leaves and blossoms of the bushes. Everything is wholly wonderful, colourful, and splendid.

Carl Jung: Memories, Dreams, Reflections

When we look back on our childhood, we may feel it was a completely different world, experienced with heightened beauty, as if we had lived in a paradisiacal or dream-like state of consciousness that we outgrew as we aged. It is often remembered as warm or magical. Inanimate objects seem to take on a life of their own, while particular places become charged with emotional meaning.

The subject and object are not yet experienced as completely separate. Jung refers to this as mystical participation, a term he adopted from anthropology, which describes a state in which “the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity.”[2]

Because the child has not yet acquired a clear sense of “I”, his or her own psychic life appears to live within the external objects. A favourite toy may therefore be experienced as part of oneself, so that its destruction can feel almost like an injury to the child.

The boundaries between the inner and outer worlds have not yet been fully differentiated, which could help explain why children often have so-called “imaginary friends” or “imaginary worlds.”

This may also explain why, in certain primitive societies, it is believed that each person has a “bush soul” as well as his own, and that it is incarnate in an animal or plant. Jung writes:

If the bush soul is that of an animal, the animal itself is considered as some sort of brother to the man… an injury to the bush soul is interpreted as an injury to the man.

Carl Jung, Man And His Symbols. Part I: Approaching the Unconscious

For Jung, this lack of differentiation between subject and object reflects the primordial unconscious state, present in our ancestors who instinctively acted out patterns in the world before they thought about them. Jung also saw this state in children before the acquisition of the ego, in primitive people, and in the unconscious of the modern adult. As Jung states, “every civilized human being, however high his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.”[3]

The inner world of childhood is therefore richer than it may appear.

The child’s psyche, prior to the stage of ego-consciousness, is very far from being empty and devoid of content… The most important evidence in this respect is the dreams of three- and four-year-old children, among which there are some so strikingly mythological and so fraught with meaning that one would take them at once for the dreams of grown-ups, did one not know who the dreamer was. They are the last vestiges of a dwindling collective psyche which dreamingly reiterates the perennial contents of the human soul… from this sphere also spring those flashes of insight and lucidity which give rise to the proverb: Children and fools speak the truth.

Carl Jung, C.W. Vol. 17: The Development of Personality

Childhood: A Lost Way of Being

The puer aeternus, or eternal child, is the archetype whose positive qualities are associated with play, simplicity, innocence, creativity, growth, of really being alive and living in the present. Integrating the inner child is not a regressive return to childhood, but rather a recovery of these qualities on a higher level of consciousness. Nietzsche writes:

A man’s maturity—consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

As children, we wanted to become adults. As adults, we find ourselves looking back to childhood. Nostalgia for childhood is not merely a longing for what we experienced, but for a different way of experiencing reality. The world was full of mystery and possibility. We could become so absorbed in play that we forgot about time, no longer worrying about the past or being anxious about the future, but simply immersing ourselves in the world around us, happy in timelessness. What we long for, then, is not merely particular childhood events, but a lost way of being.

To reconnect with this part of yourself, it can be useful to create a chronology of your childhood. Photographs can help piece together the different years of your early life, especially when memories have faded. As you look at them, try to immerse yourself in the images and imagine yourself as your past self.

You might also keep a childhood journal, recording whatever feelings arise, whether agreeable, disagreeable, or indifferent. Include your earliest memories, dreams, and reflections, especially those that carry emotional significance. Pay particular attention to memories and feelings that arise through nostalgia. You can also draw upon other traces of childhood: objects, drawings, video recordings, family stories, or places you once knew.

Your feelings may change as you revisit your childhood over time. As you work on understanding yourself, something that once seemed insignificant may suddenly become meaningful.

Another thing you can do is to return to places where you spent time as a child, such as a park, school, or home. The familiarity of a place can make you feel that your sense of “I” is somehow linked to it through the person you once were. At the same time, you may feel a sense of loss, because your present self can no longer experience the place in quite the same way. Time has passed, and things are no longer as they used to be. This is both beautiful and poignant.

A familiar childhood place can therefore become liminal, existing between two states. It may take on an uncanny quality when encountered outside the context in which you remember it. You are standing in the same place, but in a different time.

The Awakening of the “I”

Before the development of a stable ego, children often refer to themselves in the third person, saying things like “Charlie wants that.” They speak about themselves as they would about someone else because they are not yet aware of their own independent existence. However, this does not necessarily demonstrate an absence of self-awareness.

The beginning of enduring personal memories coincides with the development of a continuous sense of “I.”

A marked change occurs when the child develops consciousness of his ego, a fact which is registered by his referring to himself as “I.” This change normally takes place between the third and fifth year, but it may begin earlier. From this moment we can speak of the existence of an individual psyche, though normally the psyche attains relative independence only after puberty.

Carl Jung, C.W. Vol. 17: The Development of Personality

As Rudolf Steiner points out in Theosophy, the important question is not simply when children first use the word “I”, but when they begin to grasp what it means. A child may imitate adults and use the word before fully understanding the idea behind it. The “I” is unique in this respect. We can all use words such as “table” and “chair” to refer to the same objects, but when we say “I”, we can only mean ourselves. Each of us stands alone in our experience of being an “I.”

German writer Jean Paul Friedrich Richter described a sudden awakening of this self-awareness as a small child. He was standing in the front door looking toward a pile of wood on the left, when suddenly the experience “I am an I”[4] struck him like a lightning bolt from heaven, giving him the unmistakable sense that his “I” had seen itself for the first time and for all time.

Such an experience may occur only dimly to some people, while others experience it as a distinct awakening. For many, however, it does not occur at all, or at least they do not remember it. For Jung it came around the age of eleven or twelve. He describes walking to school when he suddenly experienced an overwhelming sense of having emerged from a dense cloud:

I knew all at once: now I am myself! It was as if a wall of mist were at my back, and behind that wall there was not yet an “I.” But at this moment I came upon myself. Previously I had existed, too, but everything had merely happened to me. Now I happened to myself… Previously I had been willed to do this and that; now I willed. This experience seemed to me tremendously important and new: there was “authority” in me.

Carl Jung: Memories, Dreams, Reflections

False Memories and Childhood Amnesia

Though we may be almost certain that some of our memories are true and based on direct experience, we can also unconsciously create false memories and come to believe that they are true. In fact, “all memories are to some degree false in the sense that they do not represent past experience literally.”[5] Memories are time-compressed and do not literally reproduce the experience from which they derive. They also contain details of which we are unconscious of.

The scarcity of memories from very early life is known as childhood amnesia. One encounters a kind of “boundary” when trying to recall the earliest events of childhood, which is typically identified by asking individuals to describe their very earliest memories.

Studies show that the earliest autobiographical memories adults recall typically date from 3 to 4 years of age, with the average being around 3 and a half years. These may include mundane everyday experiences, play, visits, trauma or accidents, and transitions such as the birth of a sibling.[6] Before this age, much of what we remember may come to us only as “islands of memory afloat in a sea of vagueness, each by itself, apparently with no connection between them.”[7]

Childhood amnesia has also been studied throughout the preschool and early school years, before approximately age 7, “with children older than 7 forgetting substantially more about preschool events than younger than age 7.”[8]

Psychologist Carole Peterson[9] and colleagues[10] found that recalling one early memory can internally cue others from the same period, many of which turn out to be chronologically earlier. We therefore appear to have more early memories than we initially recognise. Older events are remembered as more recent than they actually were, a phenomenon known as forward telescoping. An event that happened when we were two and a half, for example, might be dated to around three and a half. Interestingly, this effect appears to be specific to our earliest memories and does not occur in the same way for memories from around age four onwards.

Our earliest memory may therefore not necessarily be a single, fixed memory, but rather a moving target. Thus, what many people provide when asked for their earliest memory is not a clear boundary marking the beginning, before which there are no memories. Rather, there seems to be a pool of potential memories from which both adults and children sample.

Fictional Memories and Narrative Identity

The evidence seems to suggest that the earliest full autobiographical memories “do not emerge before about 24 to 36 months of age”[11], and may, if anything, emerge somewhat later.

One of the largest studies of first memories, titled Fictional First Memories[12], found that a substantial number of participants dated their earliest memories to age two or younger, when full autobiographical memories are considered unlikely.

One possible explanation for this is backward telescoping, in which an event is remembered as having happened further in the past than it actually did. However, the authors argued that misdating alone could not account for their findings. These improbably early memories often described experiences associated with infancy, including seeing one’s pram (baby carriage), lying in a cot, taking one’s first steps, or speaking one’s first word. Memories dated to age three or later, by contrast, described more plausible childhood experiences.

If these improbably early memories are largely imagined rather than experienced events, how do they emerge? The authors proposed the concept of fictional memories, which they distinguish from false or illusory memories. Such memories may arise from visual fragments of early experiences combined with information acquired later through photographs, descriptions, or family stories. People may not be conscious that the memory comes from these sources, and instead believe they genuinely remember the event from infancy.

When these early memories are questioned, people may feel anxious because their sense of self is threatened. If memories they have long believed to be real turn out to be inaccurate, they may begin to question not only their past, but also their ability to trust their own memories.

Thus, the personal value of a fictional memory “resides in how coherent it is with other parts of autobiographical memory rather than with how well it corresponds to a previously experienced reality.”[13] Fictional memories help to preserve a consistent sense of self. Therefore, when considering the accuracy of a memory, it is useful to consider how much the details have been fictionalised, rather than to treat it simply as true or false.

Our life story is based on the facts of our lives, but it is not synonymous with those facts. Making one’s life into a story is more of an act of imagination and creativity. We are story-making creatures.

We all have a narrative identity, the internalised and evolving story of the self that aims to integrate the reconstructed past, experienced present, and imagined future, in order to make sense of our life. It is who we understand ourselves to be through our life story. Narrative identity “draws upon autobiographical memory to select key scenes, characters, plots, and themes in one’s life and assemble them into a coherent narrative form.”[14] It is therefore not an objective replay of the past, but a selective and subjective rendering of our experience that helps maintain a sense of identity.

Although the foundations of our life story are laid in childhood, we begin to consciously develop a narrative identity particularly during late adolescence and young adulthood. This process continues throughout life. Interestingly, this period is also particularly prominent in autobiographical memory. The reminiscence bump refers to “the disproportionate number of autobiographical memories, in adults over 40, dating from youth and early adulthood.”[15] Music is a particularly powerful reminder of this period, and thus “a potent trigger of nostalgia.”[16] Across cultures, older adults remain “emotionally invested in the music they preferentially listened to in late adolescence and early adulthood.”[17]

Nostalgia and the Discovery of Our Personal Myth

How, then, does nostalgia help us to make sense of our life story and narrative identity? Reminiscence and autobiographical memory involve remembering specific events in our lives, including the order in which they occurred. These events “do not have to be, and typically are not, important or affect-laden.”[18] Such remembering involves “cold” processing, that is, cognition. Nostalgia, however, goes beyond simple remembering or accurately reconstructing past events. It involves “hot” processing, that is, affect, and centres around meaningful memories.

We do not, however, feel nostalgia for everything in our past. Perhaps this is a clue. The memories we are drawn back to may hold particular significance because they form part of our narrative identity. We should therefore pay attention to our feelings of nostalgia, for they may point to the longing of our soul, the essence we are born with, which contains the meaning and purpose of our life. By following these feelings and the memories they draw us towards, we may begin to notice a throughline running from birth to who we are today, and discover what myth is being lived through us.

Jung writes:

I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness: “What is the myth you are living?” I found no answer to this question… I did not know I was living a myth, and even if I had known it, I would not have known what sort of myth was ordering my life without my knowledge. So, in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know “my” myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks.

Carl Jung, C.W. Vol. 5: Symbols of Transformation. Foreword to the Fourth Swiss Edition (Sep 1950)

At the very end of his life, Jung described his life story as the “self-realisation of the unconscious.” What we are to our inner vision, and what we appear to be sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity), can only be expressed through myth. Whether our life story is literally “true” is not the central question. What matters is whether we tell our own fable, our own truth, with all its joys and sorrows.

If we remain unconscious of our personal myth, it continues to seek outward expression at different periods of our lives. When we are cut off from the source of our being for too long, we may experience a dark night of the soul and be compelled to descend into the unconscious, where the “treasure hard to attain” lies guarded by dragons and other hostile creatures. These monsters can be understood as the symbolic expressions of our neglected emotions, forgotten memories, fears, and traumas.

After emerging from our night sea journey, we must integrate the insights we have gained into our lives, and like the alchemist, transmute darkness into light. The symbolic death of the old self and birth of the new self brings about metanoia, a profound transformation of mind that changes our whole being: our thoughts, feelings, words, and deeds, as well as our relationships with others, the world, and God.

The Origins of Nostalgia

In the late 17^th century, a 19-year-old medical student in Switzerland named Johannes Hofer noticed that people living far from home, particularly soldiers and mercenaries, could experience a psychological burden so severe that it could result in death. In his 1688 Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia, Hofer coined the term nostalgia to describe this condition. It combines the Greek words nostos, return home, and algos, pain. The term is, however, “only pseudo-Greek, or nostalgically Greek.”[19] Nostalgia was therefore originally understood as a painful longing for home.

Hofer compared his new term with the German word Heimweh, meaning homesickness or “the grief caused by being away from home” and the French term maladie du pays, “disease of the native land”. His coinage of the “Swiss disease” both helped to identify an existing condition and contributed to its spread, turning nostalgia into a widespread European phenomenon.

Hofer regarded it as a disease of the brain, a product of disordered imagination, whose symptoms included sadness, anxiety, irregular heartbeat, loss of appetite, physical weakness, and fever. In the worst case, it could prove fatal. [20] The remedy was for the patient to return home, or at least to be given hope of returning.

When the diagnosis of nostalgia spread across Europe, a more radical treatment was undertaken, inciting pain and terror in the troops experiencing its symptoms. It later spread among soldiers during the American Civil War, who were ridiculed for being weak-minded. Thus, Hofer’s focus on military cases may have led him to mistake a natural response to separation for a disease.

In antiquity, by contrast, homesickness could be seen as admirable or noble. Approximately 2800 years ago, a blind poet named Homer told the story of a hero who was separated from his homeland for 20 years. The hero was Oddyseus, who spent 10 years fighting in the Trojan War and another 10 years struggling to return to Ithaca. The Odyssey is a nostos, a long and difficult homecoming, accompanied by the pain of separation from one’s homeland. Despite the dangers and temptations he encounters, Odysseus remains determined to return to his family and community.

Thus, what was once regarded as a sign of loyalty and love would later be classified as a disease to be prevented and cured.

Physicians eventually found that returning home did not always treat the symptoms, nor could they identify a clear bodily disease underlying nostalgia. It therefore came to be understood increasingly as “a psychiatric or psychosomatic disorder”[21] and was associated with melancholia, from which the modern concept of depression as a mood disorder arose.

The Lost Paradise of Childhood

Medical scholars eventually abandoned the study of nostalgia. However, as the field of psychology grew in the early 20^th century, nostalgia became a topic of renewed scholarly interest. In the psychoanalytic tradition, it was understood as similar to depression and as an “acute yearning for a union with the preoedipal mother, a saddening farewell to childhood, a defense against mourning, or a longing for a past forever lost.”[22]

Whereas earlier theorists had identified the home as the object of yearning in nostalgia, psychoanalysis broadened the concept. Home could now symbolise an earlier state of psychological security.

We are all born in original wholeness, and before the ego has fully developed, we exist in an unconscious unity with the mother and the surrounding world. Psychologically, this corresponds to the experience symbolised by the Garden of Eden, whereas the dawn of consciousness and the beginning of inner conflict are symbolised by the Fall from Paradise, when Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The development of consciousness inevitably leads not only to separation from the mother, but to separation from “the whole family circle and thus to a relative degree of detachment from the unconscious and the world of instinct.”[23] Yet the longing for the lost paradise of childhood continues, and when life becomes difficult, we are tempted to regress to it.

This regression can take many forms: longing for childhood comforts, excessive sleep, numbing oneself with pleasure, seeking complete dependence on others, excessive alcohol consumption, and so on. In the worst case, one prefers death over life.

In psychoanalytic terms, it is a desire to “return to the womb”, an immersion into total unconsciousness and the annihilation of the ego. The mother is, after all, the matrix from which life emerges, and creation myths often portray this feminine principle as the primordial waters from which the world emerges.

Jungian analyst Erich Neumann writes:

So long as the infantile ego consciousness is weak and feels the strain of its own existence as heavy and oppressive, while drowsiness and sleep are felt as delicious pleasure, it has not yet discovered its own reality and differentness… being oneself is still a wearisome and painful experience, still the exception that has to be overcome… Many forms of nostalgia and longing signify no more than a return to uroboric incest and self-dissolution, from the unio mystica of the saint to the drunkard’s craving for unconsciousness.

Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

Neumann uses the symbolic term “uroboric incest” for the desire to dissolve into union with the mother. It represents self-surrender through regression, something natural in infancy but which may persist in the neurotic adult. From this perspective, psychologists were continuing the tradition of viewing nostalgia as an ailment. They did not believe that nostalgia was necessarily a disease of the body. Instead, it was a “disorder of the mind.”[24]

The Home We Cannot Return To

In the latter part of the 20^th century, for most scholars, “nostalgia was no longer a concept equated with homesickness.”[25] You can’t go home again, because leaving home also means leaving behind a time in one’s life.

Some people have “far-sickness”, a longing for distant places, perhaps in the hope of finding somewhere they may feel truly at home. But sometimes we are not searching for a place at all, but a different way of being. This deeper yearning for something distant, idealised or seemingly unattainable is expressed in the German word Sehnsucht.

Nietzsche wrote:

The homesickness, not for a home, not for a father’s house and fatherland, for I had neither: but rather the pain that I have no home.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Notebooks (1884-85): Posthumous Fragments 29[57]

German poet Novalis similarly wrote, “Philosophy is properly Home-sickness; the wish to be everywhere at home.”[26]

As nostalgia came to encompass a more general longing for aspects of the past, it extended beyond one’s homeland. The words “warm, old times, childhood and yearning”[27] became associated more frequently with nostalgia than with homesickness. This divergence would perhaps disappoint Odysseus, for whom nostalgia and homesickness were one and the same.

Nostalgia came to express a sense of loss not limited to space. What is lost need not be clearly remembered, nor does one necessarily know where to look for it. Nostalgia is “a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.”[28]

The Bittersweet Nature of Nostalgia

Nostalgia can be described positively as “warm feelings about the past, a past that is imbued with happy memories, pleasures, and joys”[29], or more negatively as “a fleeting sadness to an overwhelming craving that persists and profoundly interferes with the individual’s attempts to cope with his present circumstances.”[30]

By the late 20^th century, however, psychologists increasingly described nostalgia as a “bittersweet”[31] emotion, indicating a “wistful pleasure, a joy tinged with sadness.”[32] These conflicting emotions came to define our understanding of nostalgia.

Although nostalgia is ambivalent, subsequent research has found that it is a “disproportionately positive emotion, with bittersweet elements.”[33] Thus, its sadness need not outweigh its positive quality. In fact, nostalgia tends to be “more sweet than bitter.”[34]

Nostalgia, however, is not a uniquely modern phenomenon. Long before its medical diagnosis, people expressed nostalgia, particularly in literature and poetry. It is now understood as a universal experience, found across cultures and throughout the lifespan.

As this understanding of nostalgia developed, the view of it as a mental illness started to lose ground. The nostalgic individual could be distinguished from the homesick, who experiences the pain of separation; the sentimental, who indulges in excessive emotion; and the romantic, who experiences the pleasure of fantasy and idealisation.

The sweetness of nostalgia comes from the pleasure associated with the original experience, which is enhanced by idealisation. We are selective about which memories we revisit, and may emphasise the positive while overlooking the negative. A period of youth may therefore seem more harmonious than it actually was. The day becomes magical, relationships appear more loving, and we remember ourselves as more carefree and hopeful than we truly felt. This is known as rosy retrospection, the tendency to remember the past more positively than it was experienced, as though seeing things through “rose-coloured glasses.”

The bitterness is that we can never regain those moments, either because relationships have been lost or because that particular version of ourselves no longer exists. Nostalgia can become pathological when “there is a longing for the past without the acceptance that it is over.”[35]

But there is another source of bitterness which is often overlooked: even while we lived those moments, we were not entirely happy. They likely contained conflict, disappointment, insecurity, anxiety, sadness, fear, or loneliness.

Nostalgia therefore takes something that contained both pleasure and pain, holds on to the pleasure, idealises it, and then adds the pain of knowing that it is irretrievable. Our memories are not accurate representations of the past; they are our impressions of what the past was like. “Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s fantasy.” [36]

The reverse can also occur through negativity bias. Because negative information tends to influence us more than equally strong positive information, we may overlook the good, making the past seem worse than it really was.

Whether we idealise the past or dwell on its darker moments, our memories can distort our actual experience. Thus, “we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”[37]

But even when a nostalgic memory is partly reconstructed, the feeling of loss is completely real. We may therefore be mourning something that never existed quite as perfectly as we now remember it. The object of longing becomes an internal representation of the past, shaped by memory, imagination, and unconscious wishes. The object exists beyond the present “somewhere in the twilight of the past or on the island of utopia where time has happily stopped, as on an antique clock.”[38]

The Good Old Days and Historical Nostalgia

We have all probably heard people say that we are living through the worst of times, and that things were better in the past. This idea recurs throughout history. Perhaps some things really were simpler or better. But we may also be idealising our youth and unconsciously projecting our present conflicts onto the world around us. The period of our youth may feel better not because the world itself was better, but because we experienced fewer of the conflicts that come with adulthood.

What if you are living through the best period of your life right now, but only your future self will be conscious of it? Younger generations may one day remember what we consider difficult times as the “good old days.” Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.

This may explain the phenomenon of anticipated nostalgia, the “anticipation of feeling nostalgic for life experiences when looking back on them.”[39] It can arise around significant experiences such as graduation, the birth of a child, or a memorable holiday, encouraging us to preserve these moments through pictures, journaling, or souvenirs.

There is also anemoia or historical nostalgia, a longing for an idealised period in history that predates our own birth, which can make us feel like strangers in our own age. Lovecraft writes:

I am, indeed, a product of the eighteenth century living in the twentieth, and I hardly know which is the real world.

H.P. Lovecraft’s letter to Frank Belknap Long (3 November 1921)

Curiously, Jung experienced something similar in childhood. He felt he was two different persons: the schoolboy living in the 19^th century and an old man driving in an old-fashioned carriage who belonged to the 18^th century. This notion came from when he saw one of these carriages driving past his house, which gave him a sickening feeling as though he had been cheated out of his beloved past. He would also often write the date 1786 instead of 1886 and be overcome by nostalgia. These experiences eventually coalesced into his sense of living in two ages simultaneously.

Looking Back to Move Forward

In the late 20^th century, nostalgia became a topic of interest in the field of marketing, where researchers found that people often retain lasting attachments to films, music, games, and products associated with their youth. Companies consequently learned to use nostalgia in advertising, branding, and product design.

Nostalgia is a feeling that people actively seek. If it were as unpleasant as originally believed, people would not be motivated to consume products and services that remind them of the past. “People want to mentally time travel to the past. Nostalgia is a desired state.”[40]

However, “nostalgia entails mental time travel not only to one’s past, but also to one’s future.”[41] Although nostalgia is a past-oriented emotion, it influences how we approach the future. We may use nostalgic memories to reconnect with an earlier part of ourselves and bring something from it into the life we are living now. We might think, for example, “I used to spend hours drawing as a child, and I want to make time for creativity in my life again.” Nostalgia does not just make us feel inspired; it motivates us to pursue our aspirations.

To paraphrase Kierkegaard, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” Sometimes we need to step back in order to make a better jump. We look to the past, digest what we have lived through, and then continue towards the future in a more meaningful way. The intensity of our faith in life can be measured by our readiness to say “yes to the past and yes to the future.”[42]

The Shared Experience of Nostalgia

Nostalgia is self-relevant, meaning that we are the protagonists of personally meaningful memories. These include significant life events such as graduations, weddings, family holidays; but they can also be ordinary experiences such as walking home from school, eating a particular meal, or playing a game with friends. What matters is not how important the event was objectively, but what it meant to us.

Although the self is a central component of the nostalgic experience, the memories we hold dear are typically social in nature. We often revisit personally valued experiences shared with friends or loved ones. Social nostalgia involves “discussing shared meaningful past experiences with others”[43], allowing people to revisit special moments in the past together, and thus increasing social connectedness.

At times, others may relate to our own personal nostalgic memories through similar experiences of their own. For example, two people who grew up watching the same TV series may bond over their memories of it, even if they never watched it together. Their separate memories can thus become an opportunity for mutual connection through a shared experience of nostalgia. At other times, however, people may struggle to relate to what is deeply meaningful to us, leaving us isolated. A song that brings back vivid memories for us, for example, may mean very little to someone else. This is why, when sharing something that evokes nostalgia in us, it is useful to ask others what makes them nostalgic. Rather than simply recounting our own past, we invite others to share theirs.

Nostalgia is closely associated with a sense of belonging. We are wired to belong to a group that values our skills and contributions to it, and where we feel valued ourselves. But physical closeness does not necessarily overcome psychological distance: we may remain inwardly separated from others even when we are beside them.

Overall, “nostalgia does not simply make people feel connected. It inspires people to connect to, empathize with, and help others.”[44] But nostalgia can do more than connect us with others. It can also help us remain connected to ourselves across time.

Nostalgia and Self-Continuity

We are constantly changing. Just imagine who you were when you were three years old and who you are now. Nostalgia gives us a sense that, despite these changes, there is continuity between our past and present self. This becomes especially important during difficult life experiences, such as bereavement, illness, job loss, relationship breakups, or existential crises, as nostalgia “counteracts self-discontinuity and restores self-continuity.”[45] In this way, it can “quiet our fears of the abyss.”[46]

Indeed, we are particularly likely to feel nostalgia when experiencing unpleasant emotions, such as meaninglessness, loneliness, or disillusionment. Therefore, “distressing or psychologically threatening experiences inspire nostalgia”[47], whereas historically, “nostalgia was believed the cause, not the effect, of distress.”[48] Thus, nostalgia can help to restore psychological equilibrium, though it does not necessarily decrease negative affect.

Interestingly, one study found that “nostalgia—an emotion with a strong connotation of warmth—is triggered by cold”[49], suggesting not only that people may be more nostalgic on cold days, but also that certain physical discomfort may influence the experience of nostalgia.

Nostalgia’s adaptive role is particularly significant during adolescence, when we struggle to leave childhood behind while still longing to hold on to it. Out of this tenson emerges a new, bittersweet emotion: nostalgia. It is during this period that we can, for the first time, “experience nostalgia for the lost past and a sense of the irreversibility of time. What has once been is gone. It cannot be brought back—except in memory.”[50] Things become precious precisely because they are fleeting.

Everything once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies: Ninth Elegy

Because what has passed cannot be recovered, nostalgia can make a relatively short period of life feel long and rich. When we look back on childhood, it can seem like an enormous, distant world.

In later life, nostalgia can likewise help people preserve their narrative identity by reweaving the threads of their life story. Overall, “nostalgia is an experience that brings out the true self”[51], helping us feel more in touch with who we really are. This contributes to a sense of authenticity and meaning in life.

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet

The Silver Key

As we grow up, we seem to lose the key to the magical world of childhood. But many of us continue to search for it, consciously or unconsciously. Perhaps nostalgic memories are hints of our higher Self, inviting us to continue our search.

When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened upon him he felt these liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut off altogether… Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions… Calm, lasting beauty comes only in dream, and this solace the world had thrown away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood and innocence.

H.P. Lovecraft, The Silver Key

Carter, a largely autobiographical alter ego of Lovecraft, realises that adulthood had severed him from the dream-worlds of his youth. No vista seemed fully real to him, but “only served to remind him of dreams he had once known and [made] him homesick for ethereal lands he no longer knew how to find.” He attempts to regain his sense of wonder by writing novels, which were very successful, and “because he knew how empty they must be to please an empty herd, he burned them and ceased his writing.” They were graceful novels in which he laughed at the dreams he sketched, but “he saw that their sophistication had sapped all their life away.”

At fifty, he becomes absorbed in nostalgic memories of his youth and despairs of ordinary existence.

Instead of ending his life, however, Carter rearranges his house to resemble his boyhood home. His childhood relics become physical links to the lost past, and eventually the wonder of childhood returns in his dreams, which “made him think of little inconsequential things he had long forgotten. He would often awake calling for his mother and grandfather, both in their graves a quarter of a century.”

Then one night his grandfather reminded him of a key. The grey old scholar, as vivid as in life, spoke long and earnestly of their ancient line… In the dust and shadows of the great attic he found it, remote and forgotten at the back of a drawer in a tall chest… His dreams were meanwhile increasing in vividness, and though shewing him none of the strange cities and incredible gardens of the old days, were assuming a definite cast whose purpose could not be mistaken. They were calling him back along the years, and with the mingled wills of all his fathers were pulling him toward some hidden and ancestral source. Then he knew he must go into the past and merge himself with old things.

H.P. Lovecraft, The Silver Key

Carter believed the silver key would help him unlock the gate to his lost boyhood and to the fantastic realms visited only in elusive dreams.

After many decades, Carter returns to the old family property. The landscape seems enchanted, and the past begins to overlap with the present. While walking through the woods, he suddenly becomes a child. He eventually discovers a strange cave and instinctively draws forth the silver key.

Carter disappears, and although his heirs assume he is dead, the narrator does not.

There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine; and from what I know of Carter I think he has merely found a way to traverse these mazes. Whether or not he will ever come back, I cannot say. He wanted the lands of dream he had lost, and yearned for the days of his childhood. Then he found a key, and I somehow believe he was able to use it to strange advantage.

H.P. Lovecraft, The Silver Key

In Through the Gates of the Silver Key, Carter passes through the Ultimate Gate with the aid of the silver key and discovers that the Carter he has known throughout his life is only one manifestation of an “ultimate, eternal ‘Carter’ outside space and time.” His individual self is revealed as part of a far greater reality, encompassing his ancestors, both human and non-human, as well as countless forms of existence scattered across different worlds and extending into the distant future.

Carter begins by seeking the lost world of his youth, but ends up discovering a deeper unity underlying the different stages of his existence, transcending the boundaries of time itself.

The Search for Home

As long as we lack an adequate understanding of “home” as a symbol, nostalgia can keep us trapped, causing us to unconsciously repeat our attempts to recover something that no longer exists in its original form.

Homecoming is not found “out there.” It is found within. Nostalgia draws us back to the soul, and to remember our soul is the task of homecoming. The author of your soul is God. To know yourself is to know God, and to know God is to know yourself. Self-knowledge and self-transcendence therefore go hand-in-hand, leading us to theosis or union with God, the perennial and universal longing of humanity.

A fundamental aspect of the human condition, however, is exile. Jungian analyst James Hollis writes:

Our histories embody a paradox that humming beneath all our lives is a strange rhythm of exile and homecoming… Rising from deep within us, the call comes to change—to die unto the old comforts and compromises—and when we resist the call of our psyche we grow sicker and sicker… Accepting the necessity of exile is also to accept the possibility of homecoming.

James Hollis, What Matters Most

The archetypal theme of the “lost paradise” expresses this exile. Myths are not false stories about the past, but universal patterns that express fundamental aspects of the human condition. Myths portray the unconscious drama of the psyche, so that inner truths are projected outward and presented as though they were external events. The Golden Age, the Garden of Eden, and the Satya Yuga all express an original state of harmony, abundance, and closeness to the divine.

In Time Regained, Marcel Proust wrote, “the true paradises are paradises we have lost.” We recognise paradise as paradise only after it has become inaccessible.

Nostalgia therefore exists between personal and collective memory. Personally, we long for particular moments from our own lives. Collectively, humanity longs for the “lost paradise” and its ultimate restoration.

Russian-American writer Svetlana Boym writes:

Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values; it could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the Edenic unity of time and space before entry into history.

Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia

Every society has its image of an archetypal paradise, believed to have existed and perhaps to exist again. Unfortunately, attempts to establish a utopia (literally meaning “no place”) often end up producing something closer to a dystopia instead.

Every epoch dreams of the next one, and in dreaming of the future, precipitates its awakening. We inherit not only the past itself, but also the dreams that past generations had of the future. Their hopes, fears, and expectations become part of our present.

The Longing for Another World

The overwhelming bittersweet yearnings we feel may be merely signposts to what we truly desire. They are not the thing itself. As C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world… Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.”

We are in this world, but not of it. One day, perhaps, we shall finally return home.

Our Life is no Dream, but it may and will perhaps become one… All Fabulous Tales are merely dreams of that home-world which is everywhere and nowhere. The higher powers in us, which one day, as Genies, shall fulfil our will, are, for the present, Muses, which refresh us on our toilsome course with sweet remembrances.

Novalis (as quoted from Thomas Carlyle’s Critical and Miscellaneous Essays)

Myths and fairy tales awaken a memory of home that may feel strangely familiar to us, as though our soul recognises what we cannot consciously remember. During our temporary journey in this world, we may occasionally encounter a faint memory of home. German poet Eichendorff writes:

It was as though Heaven
Had softly kissed the Earth,
So that she in a gleam of blossom
Had only to dream of him.

The breeze passed through the fields,
The corn swayed gently to and fro,
The forests murmured softly,
The night was so clear with stars.

And my soul spread
Her wings out wide,
Flew across the silent land,
As though flying home.

Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, Moonlit Night. Translated by Richard Stokes

In Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis describes joy as “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” It is not simply happiness or pleasure, but a desire pointing beyond what this world can satisfy. It is that unnameable something, the desire for which pierces us like a sword.

[O]ur lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Awakening and the Eternal Home

We must be careful not to turn this longing into an escape from human existence, or view our body as a prison for the soul. The spiritual world and physical world are inextricably tied together, and we must reconcile the opposites within our soul: suffering and joy, exile and homecoming. Without this tension, no growth is possible.

People who have near-death experiences sometimes describe entering a realm of unconditional love and peace where they finally feel at home again, as if they had always belonged there. The experience feels hyperreal, “a reality that feels more real than the one we live in.”[52] Ordinary life seems dreamlike by comparison, as though death were an awakening to ultimate reality. Some also describe being told, “You must go back”, because their time has not yet come and there are still lessons they have to learn. Returning to ordinary life can feel like an exile from one’s true home, which can be deeply distressing. Jung similarly stated, following his own NDE, that reality seemed to have been artificially built up into a “box system.”

Novalis wrote, “We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.”[53] Becoming aware of the dreamlike nature of our experience is a metaphor for an expanded state of consciousness. One who is “asleep”, by contrast, sees the sensory world as the only reality there is.

We become caught in illusion when we are so absorbed in daily life that we forget the deeper reality beyond our ordinary experience, a reality that transcends time, space, matter, and duality. Awakening means seeing through the illusion and choosing to play our part consciously, instead of rejecting physical reality.

For the seeker, death is no end, but a birth into eternal life. In The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius defines eternity as “the complete possession all at once of endless life.” Eternity therefore does not simply mean lasting for an infinitely long time, but rather existing beyond the succession of time, with past, present, and future united in an undivided “now.”

As is stated in Ecclesiastes, God “has put eternity into man’s heart.” The desire to return home is ontological, concerning the very nature of one’s being. As St. Augustine wrote in Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” To reach home may be defined as the bliss that is attained when one’s soul is fully united with God.

Although in this life we may experience a foretaste of the perfect bliss awaiting us, the seeker is taught that true peace and joy are to be had in the next life. Christ communicates this idea in the Beatitudes, through the fact that each of the rewards is indicated in the future sense, such as, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”

We may never fully bridge the gap between exile and homecoming in this life, but the longing itself can become a guide to our eternal home. Herman Hesse writes:

It [eternity] is the kingdom on the other side of time and appearances. It is there we belong. There is our home. It is that which our heart strives for…we have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our home-sickness.

Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

Conclusion

Nostalgia points to something deeper than particular events in our past, our longing for childhood may be a longing for a different mode of experiencing reality, one characterised by wonder, joy, play, innocence, and timelessness. As we grow up, the door to this world begins to close. Nostalgia, however, give us fleeting glimpses into this lost paradise, reminding us to continue our search for the silver key, not through a regression into the womb, but by recovering what was valuable in childhood on a higher level of consciousness.

For this reason, it is important to know our life story, and especially our childhood. Our earliest memories, even when fictionalised, may reveal something about our personal myth. But ultimately, we must transcend even ourselves. The deepest longing expressed through nostalgia is not simply for yesterday, but for home.

The beginning of homecoming is to remember the soul, and the final homecoming is the union of the soul with God. Nostalgia begins with the longing to go back. Homecoming, however, requires us to go forward.

No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

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[12] Ibid., 1-8.

[13] Ibid., p. 6.

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[24] Routledge, C. (2016). Nostalgia: A psychological resource. Routledge, p. 5.

[25] Ibid., p. 6.

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[27] Davis, F. (1979). Yearning for yesterday: A sociology of nostalgia. Free Press, p. 4.

[28] Boym, S. (2001). The future of nostalgia. Basic Books, p. xiii.

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[35] Kaplan, H. A. (1987). The psychopathology of nostalgia. Psychoanalytic review, 74(4), 465.

[36] Boym, S. (2001). The future of nostalgia. Basic Books, p. xiii.

[37] Seneca. (1917). Epistulae morales ad Lucilium (Vol. 1, R. M. Gummere, Trans.). William Heinemann. (Original work written ca. 62–65 CE)

[38] Boym, S. (2001). The future of nostalgia. Basic Books, p. 13.

[39] Cheung, W. Y., Hepper, E. G., Reid, C. A., Green, J. D., Wildschut, T., & Sedikides, C. (2020). Anticipated nostalgia: Looking forward to looking back. Cognition and Emotion, 34(3), 2.

[40] Routledge, C. (2016). Nostalgia: A psychological resource. Routledge, p. 7.

[41] Sedikides, C., & Wildschut, T. (2016). Past forward: Nostalgia as a motivational force. Trends in cognitive sciences, 20(5), 319-321.

[42] Hammarskjold, D. (1972). Patterns for peaceful change. In A. W. Cordier & W. Foote (Eds.), Public papers of the Secretaries-General of the United Nations: 1953–1956 (Vol. 2, pp. 98–99). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1953)

[43] Routledge, C. (2016). Nostalgia: A psychological resource. Routledge, p. 38.

[44] Ibid., p. 68.

[45] Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Routledge, C., & Arndt, J. (2015). Nostalgia counteracts self‐discontinuity and restores self‐continuity. European Journal of Social Psychology, 45(1), 52-61.

[46] Davis, F. (1979). Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press, p. 41.

[47] Routledge, C. (2016). Nostalgia: A psychological resource. Routledge, p. 37.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Zhou, X., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Chen, X., & Vingerhoets, A. J. (2012). Heartwarming memories: Nostalgia maintains physiological comfort. Emotion, 12(4), 678.

[50] Kaplan, L. J. (1984). Adolescence, the farewell to childhood. Simon & Schuster, p. 150.

[51] Routledge, C. (2016). Nostalgia: A psychological resource. Routledge, p. 81.

[52] Greyson, B. (2023). Researchers’ and experiencers’ descriptions of near-death experiences: In search of a conceptual model. Journal of Near-Death Studies, 41(3), 169-201.

[53] Carlyle, T. (1859). Critical and miscellaneous essays. Phillips, Sampson and Company, p. 180.