Concerning Nostalgia
A psychoanalysis of the nostalgic experience
A little while ago, I co-wrote a video essay for the YouTube channel Internet Impact. The primary argument of the video was that contemporary urban planning movements on the web right now are operating on a certain psychology of nostalgia. That is, they represent the psychodynamics of nostalgia in their idealization of the city and the devaluation of suburban life. Many of the comments on the video demonstrated a misunderstanding of the argument. We were not making any specific claim about the quality of life in suburban vs. urban centers, nor were we claiming that the current urban planning movement online is just a passing fad. In fact, I personally endorse more intelligent urban planning, and I wrote a piece some time ago criticizing American urban planning and suburban development. The basic premise of the YouTube video was an attempt to look at what urban planning can tell us about the psychology of nostalgia, and vice versa.
What I want to do here is elucidate a psychoanalytic theory of nostalgia, irrespective of its object (which we will call the nostalgic object) and further some of the arguments made in the video essay, particularly concerning the psychology of nostalgia and how it functions in urban planning.
Frustration and Loss
For psychoanalysis, subjectivity is constituted by a primordial loss.
When we are infants, we have immediate (that is, un-mediated) access to pleasure: M(O)ther [1]. She is always there for us. When we cry, we are fed or cleaned or rocked. We are touched and caressed regularly. We are provided with warmth and comfort. In short, the early infant’s life is full of satisfaction. This is what Winnicott refers to as magic [2].
However, we never quite have full satisfaction. There is something already missing in our early experiences. From birth (and some today would argue that even our experience in the womb is replete with loss), we are thrown into a world of frustration. Even the most devoted, attentive, and attuned mother in the world cannot stop the impeding reality principle.
Indeed, Winnicott argued that there is no perfect mother, and that we can only hope for a “good-enough mother.” And, further, that frustration is not to be shunned, but embraced as a universal human experience.
Freud’s theory of psychosexual development drives right at the core of our gradual experience of frustration right from birth. We are, from birth, quite the little nexuses of enjoyment. Every orifice and inch of our tiny bodies is a site for pleasure. In modern parlance, our brain is not simply located “in our head”, but we have nerves calculating every stimuli all over our body.
Development, for Freud, cannot be understood in isolation of parental and societal demands. As we age, our parents will begin to demand things from us. We suddenly must stave off hunger and be exposed to different forms of food rather than being directly satisfied by mother. Rather than relieving ourselves whenever we feel the need to, we must subject our anal orifice to the right time and place of someone else’s clock. You can imagine potty training is immensely frustrating for a small child — hence the “terrible twos” [2].
As Bruce Fink states,
Without even counting the hundreds of things they make us do or not do day in and day out (wake up at certain times, get dressed, brush our teeth, eat this and not that, hold our forks one way and our knives another, sit still, sit up straight…), it is no stretch to say that our parents make us do a plethora of things we do not want to do, and prohibit us from doing a great many enjoyable things that we really want to do. [3]
There is, obviously, something lost along our way to adulthood. In acquiescing to another’s demands, we give way on our own desires. Our enjoyment is what is lost. The subject, for psychoanalysis, is properly “born” into the symbolic world of adults and society when it has said to the Other, “Fine, fine. I’ll give you my enjoyment as long as I get something in return.” This wager, the “something in return”, looks different for everyone.
It is, in essence, the creation of the symptom. The symptom is basically our way of dealing with the loss imposed on us by some other or others. [4]
We, as a human species, could not enjoy the pleasures of a social agreement or organized society without us all undergoing some fundamental loss. And it is this loss which is at the center of our subjectivity.
Ultimately, this process of psychosexual (implying that psychology is always bound with bodily enjoyment) development that Freud outlined culminates in the Oedipal conflict and the final nail in the coffin of unmediated enjoyment: castration. Understood symbolically, castration simply refers to the stage of socialization which demands that we renounce our desires for full enjoyment because of another structural obstacle: the Father.
Lacan develops this idea to infer that Freud was really talking about language. Once born into language, we must even think and dream and wish about our desires in something borrowed from someone else.
Let’s bring this into the dynamics of nostalgia.
The Nostalgic Object: An Epoch of Rest
In the 1890s, William Morris wrote a series of installments in the Commonweal newspaper collected under the title “News from Nowhere.” The story describes a socialist laborer, William Guest, in industrial England who is debating with his friends as to “what would happen on the Morrow of the Revolution.” The rest of book is what follows, under what Morris comfortably gives it the subtitle: “An Epoch of Rest: Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance.”
Mr. Guest then goes to bed and falls asleep after the discussion. He wakes up in a vaguely familiar place, certainly his home and suburb in London but not quite so. It was winter when he went to bed — now it is summer. The sun is bright, the Thames is clear of debris.
Mr. Guest begins to explore this “new” London, and is struck by natural order of things, the wonderful architecture, even the beauty of the people.
There is no money, no corporations, no alienation, no oppression, and no big cities. The story is certainly reminiscent of the Arthurian tales with beauty and magnificence abounding.
There is much to be said of Morris’ work. It is a beautiful exploration of socialist ideals from an intelligent and committed Marxist. However, for the purpose of this article, it will be useful enough to point out the dreamy characteristic of Morris’ “News from Nowhere.”
A romantic, and clearly quite disgusted with his contemporary politico-economic climate, Morris seeks refuge elsewhere. Enjoyment, for him, is located in the medieval, a particular setting where he finds unmediated enjoyment and pleasure. Marriage and friendship are seamless, education and enrichment are inclusive, and work and labor are passions.
William Morris (apropos William Guest) is suffering from a bout of nostalgia. The nostalgic object in this particular psychodynamic is the long lost age of the honest, pure, and warm relations of the age of guilds.
The Other’s Enjoyment: Utopia
What is peculiar about the psychodynamics of nostalgia is their external character: it is always something else that provides one with that sumptuous enjoyment which one has been longing for. For Morris, it was another place and time, a particular romantic setting: medieval England.
For many, it is glimpses of our childhood memories. We look back with fondness on some other, lost time. Perhaps it was when mom and dad were close by, or when our siblings and friends all lived on the same street. Or it was our high school years of being a rewarded football player, a kind of “golden age.”
Whatever the object, they all share this characteristic: it is the Other’s enjoyment that we are longing for. We think, in our current deprived state of affairs, that the Other has access to something that we don’t, some key to unlock unmediated enjoyment. The Other being, for Morris, the lost medieval era.
There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with nostalgia. Revealing the dynamics behind its existence does not simultaneously place a value judgement on the experience.
Morris’ story elucidates alienation and the socialist conception of labor beautifully. Synth pop as a genre appeals to so many in the Millennial and Gen Z not only because it reminds us of spending hours in our bedrooms listening to “cool” funk and pop, but also because many of the songs are catchy and well-crafted.
What is couched in this dream of some other place or other setting or other time is the following: the current denizens of that other setting are enjoying themselves more than I am — and the only difference is the setting.
This unconscious reflection is complex, and it reveals the primordial frustration that is inherent in all of our subjective experiences we talked about at the beginning of this essay. The nostalgic subject longs for an existence wherein its full enjoyment can be returned to it. There is a similar dynamic at play when the addict chases that “first high.”
In other words, the nostalgic object is our fantasy of de-alienation, born from a state of alienation. Research has found that a “trigger” for feelings of nostalgia is indeed negative feelings, particularly of loneliness, while the nostalgic object is associated with happiness, satisfaction, beauty, and love.
Unfortunately for us, alienation is fundamental. There is no going back to a pre-symbolic existence. In fact, some would argue that there was never a pre-symbolic existence to begin with, and the subject is always already off-centered.
Urban Life as the Nostalgic Object
In the 1890s, when Morris was writing “News From Nowhere”, anti-suburban movements sprang up in England of a peculiar nature. More and more urban-dwelling laborers were moving out of the cities, like London or Birmingham, to escape the terribly unhealthy and cramped living conditions. The landed aristocracy was particularly fond of this, and argued that the urban-dwelling workers were spoiling the once-great and divine countryside of England [6].
Of course, at the time, the urban center was most certainly the breeding ground for alienation, loneliness, menial work, and relentless labor. And the aristocracy, already having lost their immense power to the bourgeoisie class, pined for the glorious days of England’s past — when “things made sense.”
But of course, we can see that the pristine and divine stature of the English aristocracy never really existed — they never really fully enjoyed “Englishness,” just as medieval folks never enjoyed the warm and radiant socialist relations that Morris wrote of.
This sentiment has been revived in different forms throughout the urban planning movements of the 20th century [7]. Today, the nostalgic object — for Americans — is either the suburbs or European-style cities. Naturally, this often falls on American political divisions, but one also sees this divide depending on the age of the individual.
For instance, a middle-aged conservative might long for the white picket-fenced, the large yards, the TV sets in the living rooms, and so on. Hence, the oddly disturbing nature of some of Lynch’s films. They seem to point to something reminiscent of the American suburban way of life, but always with something not quite right. Lynch was getting at the fantastical substrate of nostalgia, of course.
On the other hand, more liberal-minded younger crowds have sworn off the suburb — and their internal organs, the car. Swaths of internet presences exhibit disdain for the suburbs and a longing for European city designs: walkable, cobblestone streets, public transit, and so on.
Of course, I will always advocate for more advanced urban planning, and I did not enjoy living in the suburbs before I moved to a city. That said… I’ve always considered myself a nostalgic subject.
[Detours]
Notes
[1] We will be confining ourselves to “mother” in the symbolic sense, not in the biological sense. That is, mother is the object which is central to our experience of safety, protection, warmth, attachment, and pleasure. A caregiver, grandparent, or sibling can function symbolically as “mother”. However, it must be noted that the majority of us still grow up in heterosexual monogamous/nuclear families: Mother more often than not means our physical and biological mothers.
[2] D. W. Winnicott, “Primitive emotional development” (1945).
[3] One can sense that this psychodynamic is evident today among young adults with work-from-home and no-work movements. Nobody wants to subject their day to someone else’s time with clocking in and clocking out.
[4] B. Fink, Clinical Introduction to Freud (2017).
[5] I am in the process of writing an article explaining this concept of the psychoanalytic symptom in detail. For now, we will leave it there.
[6] [7] R. Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History (2006).
