81
THE IDEA OF NOSTALGIA
Jean Starobinski
In tracing the history of emotions and of mentalities, one is
immediately confronted with a question of method resulting from
the interplay of emotions and language.
The emotions whose history we wish to retrace are accessible
to us only from the time when they find expression, verbally or
by other means. For the critic, for the historian, an emotion exists
only beyond the point at which it attains a linguistic status. No
facet of an emotion can be traced before it is named, before it
is designated and expressed. It is not, then, the emotion itself
which comes before us; only that part which has passed into a
given form of expression can be of interest to the historian.
An emotion can attach itself to a word (especially to a word
in fashion), but this does not occur without rather important
consequences. On the one hand, as soon as the name of an
emotion is brought to light, the word, through its very efhcacy,
helps to fix, to propagate, to generalize the emotion which it
represents. Emotion is not a word, but it can only be spread
abroad through words. At one extreme, and when certain words
Translated by William S. Kemp.
82
are at the height of their power, they reach a point where they
include elements which have little relation to that word. La
Rochefoucauld said forcefully and simply: &dquo;There are people who
would never have been in love if they had never heard tell of
love.&dquo; During the First World War, Andre Gide noticed that
the language of the journalists (who had not been at the front)
furnished the cliches which the soldiers returning from the front
used to describe their feelings. Nowadays, the language of psychoanalysis
presents us with a model permitting us to understand
the significance of our emotions; it proposes a form for them.
Although simply &dquo;applied&dquo; to inner experience, this form does
not remain dissociated from it for long; the verbalization of
i
emotion is intertwined with the structure of that which is experienced.
The history of emotions, then, can not be anything other
than the history of those words in which the emotion is expressed.
The task of the historian in this domain is connected with that of
the philologist: he must be able to recognize the diverse stages
of language, the style and modality through which an experience
(individual or collective) has found expression. This leads us in
.the direction of historical semantics.
In this outline of a history of nostalgia, I shall endeavor to let
these antiquated languages speak for themselves, and I shall
refrain from interrogating these documents from the perspective
of contemporary psychology. At most, I shall proceed in this
manner only occasionally and as a last resort. I should like to
let the obsolete (but original) voice of a psychology which is no
longer our own be heard. We shall see that this psychology made
use of a quite coherent language, no less acceptable (in the context
of its age) than the systematic explanations of modern psychology
are to us. This leaves the impression that, given the relative
imperfection of this science, its language is also threatened with
obsolescence. Thus, we have another reason not to make it the
final arbiter. For, in this case, revision would become rapidly
necessary.
Of course, nothing prevents us from applying the knowledge
which we have at our disposal today to an exploration of the
past, to an analysis of the emotions of man of another age. We
have the right to speak of the sadism of Nero, just as we have the
right to measure the radio-active carbon in prehistoric chipped
83
stones. Only we must not forget that the word sadism, to the same
extent as the Geiger-counter, forms part of our modern intellectual
equipment. It is a vocable which the exegetist has at his disposition
; it is not a reality which is pre-existent to its designation.
Here, again, it is necessary to take the instrumental function of
the word into account.
Whatever our desire to attain the reality of the past may be, we
have no other recourse than to that of the language of our age in
order to establish what is to be the learning of our time. But it
is one thing to interpret the emotions of eighteenth-century men
in our own way, and another to pay attention to the way in which
they themselves interpreted their emotions. Historical distance,
which gives to the past its quality of pastness, must be respected
as far as possible. In our desire to project, without precaution, the
ideas which are familiar to us today, we amalgamate languages
which should remain separate, we create a false present out of
the past, and we make it impossible to respect the unavoidable
gap between our system of interpretation and that which is
subjected to it. We lose sight of the operational and conjectural
character of the interpretation, thus amalgamating the interpretation
and its object. Inevitably, we speak the language of on
time; it is possible, however, to avoid attributing the tenor of
our present emotional states to men who lived in the past, to
avoid confusing the voices which call upon us from elsewhere
and the tone of voice of our own interpretation.
This is not in any way to over-rate the elusive, the unobjectifiable
&dquo;object&dquo; of our search. We can never recapture the
subjective experiences of an eighteenth-century man as they were.
We can only try not to attribute our problems and our &dquo;complexes&dquo;
to him too unknowingly. We can kindly grant him the
attention due to a foreigner, to an inhabitant of a distant country
whose customs and language are different and must be learned
patiently.
For sociologists since Montesquieu, these are first principles.
It does not seem to be the same for the majority of psychologists,
who have been too inclined at all times and in all places to
rediscover the behavioral patterns which they have observed and
theorized upon. The history of the theories of nostalgia will not
be useless if it is capable of dislocating us somewhat, it
84
it compels us to observe the distances which have been poorly
apprehended up to now.
*
In the first place, we have to deal with the actual creation of a
disease; for, historically, the word nostalgia was coined for the
express purpose of translating a particular feeling (Heimweh,
regret, desiderium patriae) into medical terminology. The fact
that exiles languished and wasted away far from their native land
was not an original observation in the year 1688, when Johannes
Hofer, of Mulhouse, defended his thesis on nostalgia.’ The novelty
was in the attention which the candidate paid to it, in his efforts to
convert this emotional phenomenon into a medical phenomenon,
exposing it, in so doing, to rational inquiry. At this time, when,
in medicine, doctors were beginning to carry out an inventory
and a classification of disease, and thus, in imitation of the system
established in botany, to set up a table of the genera morborum,J
it was necessary to be on the watch for varieties which might
enrich the repertory. Medical tradition was very familiar with
melancholic love; it was capable of describing in detail the symptoms
and symptomatic lesions provoked by the loss of a lover.
But this same tradition had never formulated the possibility of any
difficulties arising as a result of a temporary separation from one’s
.
normal surroundings. The strength of this tradition was so great
that the medical interpretation of the desiderium patriae was slow
to arrive, however close it was to the love-melancholy. Was it
not, in both cases, simply a matter of the extreme effects of
unhappiness?
Before they are recognized as abnormal conditions, certain
diseases are seen as simple disturbances within the normal course
of life, disturbances which no one thinks of distinguishing as of
medical importance. As long as the patient does not think of
summoning the aid of a doctor, as long as medical terminology
1
Fritz Ernst has written the most complete history of the idea of nostalgia
(Vom Heimweh, Zurich, 1949); the thesis of Fortunata Rammings-Thön (Das
Heimweh, Zurich, 1958) contains some important developments.
2
Dissertatio medica de nostalgia, Basel, 1688. An English translation is given
in the Bulletin ofthe History ofMedicine, Baltimore, II (1934), p. 379.
85
does not possess any term with which to designate it, the disease
does not exist. It is scarcely a paradox to state that these diseases
exist as diseases only as a result of the attention which is paid
them.
The attention which Johannes Hofer gave to Heimweh was
decisive. First, he thought it proper to find a Greek word for it,
as it was necessary in 1688 for a disease, originally designated
by a common noun, to be invested with the appropriate classical
trappings. Hofer had a happy touch: with the words return
(v6a-co;) and sorrow (&À.yoc;), he created nostalgia; a word which
has had such success that we have completely forgotten its origin.
The term nostalgia is so familiar to us that we conceive of its
recent and very scholarly origin only with great difficulty. This
pedantic neologism has been so well accepted that it has finally
lost its original medical sense and has blended into our ordinary
speech. It was late in entering the Dictionnaire de fAcadémie:
1835. Its success has, in the end, robbed it of all its technical
significance; it has become a literary term, thus vague. This is
often the fate of those vocables which are used to designate the
mental disease in vogue at a give time. The same fate has overtaken
the word melancholy (which was so overworked that nineteenth-century
psychiatrists distrusted it) and may shortly overtake
the word schizophrenia, another Swiss-made neologism.
As a result of the thesis of Johannes Hofer, the Heimweh
became a part of accepted nosology. This disease, of provincial
origin, was about to attain universal recognition: students were
to hold forth on the subject, to defend other propositions on its
cause and effects. Henceforth, the nostalgic individual was justified
in waiting upon the opinion of the enlightened Profession, and
no longer on the risky advice of friends and empiricists. Moreover,
this mental disease, which had until this time been limited to
common souls such as mercenaries and country-folk newly transplanted
to the city, was about to take advantage of the approval
of the Profession, eventually to penetrate to the educated classes
themselves. Aware of this, eager to prevent it, these men brought
the curse down upon themselves and transmitted it to others
through their very fears. We know that there are diseases-that
is, nervous or &dquo;mental&dquo; disease, neuroses or even psychoseswhich
are transmitted because people talk about them. Conver-
86
sation sets the mind to work and in this way serves as the
contaminating agent. At the end of the eighteenth century people
began to be fearful of extended sojourns away from home because
they had become conscious of the threat posed by nostalgia.
People even died of nostalgia after having read in books that
nostalgia is a disease which is frequently mortal.’ For the doctor
who observed the death of a little Savoyard in Paris, the diagnosis
was evident. This was, indeed, a strange century, in which the
English in order to cure their spleen, fled their native air in search
of the tranquil air of the South-while others believed that they
were risking death simply by going away from their familiar
countryside. Of course, in addition to these contradictory theories,
one must recognize the relevance of the conditions under which
the individual left his native land. It was one thing to leave
willingly, having freely chosen one’s itinerary and the length of
one’s stay, and another to be forced to leave, faced with the
prospects of a subordinate and monotonous life. From the seventeenth
century on, this was the fate of the Swiss soldier serving in
foreign lands;4 it was equally the fate of the English sailors who
were impressed into the service of the Navy:~ calenture, the
nautical variant of nostalgia, was caused by the combined e$ects
of the tropical sun and homesickness.6
*
In his interpretation, Johannes Hofer made use of the classic
3
This conviction persisted in the nineteenth century. Balzac wrote from Milan
to Madame Hanska: "Dear, I suffer homesickness... I come and go without
any spirit, without being able to say what I have, and if I remained this way
for two weeks, I should die"(May 23, 1838). In 1868, Madame Aupick
related the circumstances of a voyage which Charles Baudelaire took in 1841 to
the South Seas: "Fearing that he might be attacked by this merciless disease,
nostalgia, whose effects are, at times, so deadly, the captain urged him to accompany
him to Saint-Denis (Bourbon)." W.T. Bandy and Claude Pichois, Baudelaire
devant ses contemporains, Monaco, 1957, p. 51.
4
Cf. Richard Feller, "Alliances et service mercenaire" in Histoire militaire
de la Suisse, Bern, 1916, Vol. II, Part III.
5
Cf. J.G. Zimmermann, Von der Erfahrung in der Arzneykunst, revised
edition, Zurich, 1787, p. 556.
6
In his Zoonomia, Erasmus Darwin gives calenture as a synonym for nostalgia.
This emotion figures among the "diseases of volition," between amor sui
and spes religiosa.
87
notion of the imaginatio laesa. His description of nostalgia is
related to the psychosomatic medicine of the Greco-Roman tradition.
If some of the terms which he used cause one to think
of the influence of Thomas Willis, others send one back to the
old masters, Aretaius of Cappadocia, Galen, etc. Hofer states:
Nostalgia is born from a disorder of the imagination, from which it
follows that the nervous sap always takes the very same direction in
the brain and, as a result, excites the very same idea, the desire to
return to one’s native land... The nostalgic are affected by but few
external objects, and nothing surpasses the impression which the desire
to return makes on them: while in a normal state the soul can become
equally interested in all objects, in nostalgia its attention is diminished
; it feels the attraction of very few objects and practically limits
itself to one single idea. I should willingly admit that melancholy plays
a part here, for the vital spirits, worn out by the single idea which
occupies them, become exhausted and provoke erroneous represen-
tations.
Why, Johannes Hofer asked himself, are the young Swiss so
frequently inclined to nostalgia when they go abroad? Obviously
because many of them have never left home before, have never
been forced to establish themselves within a foreign milieu. It is
hard for them to forget the loving care with which their mothers
surrounded them. They miss the soups which they used to have for
breakfast, the thick milk from their own valley, and perhaps also
the freedom which they enjoyed in their own country... The modern
psychiatrist should be thankful to Johannes Hofer for underlining
straight off the role of this deprivation: the loss of childhood,
of &dquo;oral satisfactions,&dquo; of motherly coaxing.
But, as Fritz Ernst has justly pointed out, this theory did not
pass without giving rise to objections from the contemporaries
or the immediate successors of Hofer, especially from those who
were possessed of a strong patriotic nature. Does the attribution
of nostalgia to a psychological cause of this sort not imply an
excessive cowardliness on the part of the Swiss youth? Does this
not undermine the just reknown of a vigorous, free, strong and
courageous race? To defend the national honor Jean-Jacques
Scheuchzer, from Zurich, proposed, in 1705 and 1719, a comple-
88
tely mechanical explanation of nostalgia.’ The scientific fashion,
after Borelli and Hoffmann, was iatromechanics and &dquo;systematic&dquo;
&dquo;
medicine: diseases were explained, in a manner more speculative
than empiric, by means of the laws which control the inanimate
bodies of the physical world; the science of the time authorized
the search for the physical causes of psychic disturbances. This
discussion continued throughout the century; in the end, two hypotheses
were simultaneously accepted: a psychological influence
on the physical and an influence of the body on the soul. We
can see this from the titles of the works of J.P. Marat and of
Cabanis, among many others: On Man: the Principles and Laws
o f the In fluence o f the Soul on the Body and o f the Body on the
soul)8 and Correspondences between the Physical and the Moral
Elements in Man.9
Recourse to a physical explanation gave Scheuchzer the occasion
to vindicate the Swiss character. For him, the necessary interplay
of physical causes did not afford an opportunity for criticism.
He was convinced that nostalgia was a question of atmospheric
pressure. The Swiss live in the highest mountains of Europe.
They breathe, they incorporate a light, subtle and rarified air. On
descending to the plain, their bodies must undergo an increased
pressure, the effect of which is all the greater because the air
inside them &dquo;which we have brought with us&dquo;) offers less
resistance. On the other hand, a Dutchman, born and brought
up on the plain, carries within a heavy air which easily resists the
pressure of the dense fog which surrounds him. At sea-level, the
poor Swiss are overcome by the atmospheric pressure; their blood
circulates with difficulty in their small cutaneous arteries; the
young suffer more because of the very suppleness of their fibres,
which, for this reason, are more easily compressed. Thus, the
heart, on receiving less blood becomes depressed and consequently
saddened. People lose sleep and appetite; soon they are overcome
by a hot or a cold fever which is often fatal. What are the
7
J.J. Scheuchzer, Naturgeschichte des Schweizerlandes, 1705, and re-edited
several times during the century. The work of Ernst Fritz contains some extracts.
8
J.P. Marat, De l’homme ou des principes et des lois de l’influence de l’âme
sur le corps, et du corps sur l’âme, Amsterdam, 1775.
9
P.J.G. Cabanis, Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme, Paris, 1802.
89
possible remedies? If one can not send the sick person back
home, release the soldier, or simply inspire him with the hope of
returning, the most logical treatment consists in quartering him
on a hill or in a tower, where he can breathe lighter air. Medications
containing &dquo;compressed air,&dquo;
&dquo;
saltpeter, prepared nitre, or
nitre spirits work with equal success. Beer and new wine, both
rich in light matter, are salutary.
At the same time, Scheuchzer’s explanation accounts for the
favorable effect of the Swiss climate. Is Switzerland not, after all,
the asylum languentium? Does one not see people filled with.
heavy air hastening from all parts of Europe to recuperate in our
mountains? In the eulogy which Scheuchzer pronounces on the
subject of light air, one catches the first intimations of the
future hotel prospectus: for it is only in this country that the
ducts of the body become dilated, circulation improves, all the
juices are gently put in motion. We need not laugh at this: having
proposed a physical explanation, Scheuchzer had no other language
at his disposal than that of the barometrics and of the hydrostatics
of his age. The bio-physical explanation was nothing other than
the application of the &dquo;patterns&dquo; and theories acquired through
physical experimentation to the internal workings of living beings.
Certain commentators, such as abbe Du Bosl° and Albert von
Haller,11 found no objection to Scheuchzer’s theories. But things
changed; iatromechanics lost its hold. The vitalism of Montpellier,
the theories of the Edinburgh School&dquo; concerning nervous activity
gave new life to those explanations which put the blame on the
idee fixe, on sorrow. In the unified whole which the network of
nerves binds to the brain, there is no idee fixe, no lasting sorrow
which will not, in the long run, give rise to organic lesions.
*
Nostalgia is an emotional upheaval which is related to the work-
10
J.B. Du Bos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture, revised
edition, Utrecht, 1732, pp. 137-39.
11
A. von Haller, Relation d’un voyage de Albert de Haller dans l’Oberland
Bernois, ed. H. Pettrier (1906). Quoted by Ernst.
12
W. Cullen, First Lines ofthe Practice ofPhysic, London, 1791. This work
contains a broad definition of neurosis.
90
ings of memory. It is not surprising that these men applied the
associationist theory of memory to nostalgia, especially as certain
facts relative to the circumstances which cause an attack of
nostalgia could pass as particularly eloquent examples of the law
of the association of ideas.
In 1710, in a Latin dissertation, Theodor Zwinger,13 of Basel,
mentioned the appearance of a curious and intense nostalgic condition
whenever the Swiss soldiers serving in France and Belgium
heard a &dquo;certain rustic cantilena, to which the Swiss drive their
herds to pasture in the Alps.&dquo; This Kiihe-Reyhen, this ranz-desvaches
had the power to revive sad recollections of their native
land. And this was especially detrimental to those whose blood
had already been altered by the change of air, or for those
naturally inclined to sadness. This is why, Zwinger asserts, when
faced with the disastrous effects of these tunes, the officers
considered themselves forced to prohibit them and to punish those
who persisted in playing, singing or even whistling them, with
the utmost severity. Burning fevers presented little difficulty: it
was desertion which formed the most serious problem. For the
captains who themselves equipped their men, sometimes at great
expense, a desertion represented the loss of part of the capital
invested. It was necessary to do everything possible to reduce the
influence of this idee fixe which incited one either to return home
or to die. The legend was firmly established: if the nostalgic
individual is not saved by obtaining leave, or does not manage
to escape, he will commit suicide, he will seek out death at the
first opportunity. In 1700, in a chapter devoted to military medicine,
Ramazzin¡I4 cited a splendid and forceful dictum which was
in circulation throughout the armies: Qui patriam quaerit, mortem
invenit. All this as a result of a popular tune, of a little phrase
which had the unusual power to provoke an attack of emotional
hypermnesia: the illusion of a sort of presence of the past, all
the more pervasive owing to the sadness caused by departing.
Here was something which definitely confirmed and illustrated
the assertion of Malebranche that &dquo; the imprints of the brain are
13
"De Pothopatridalgia," in Fasciculus dissertationum medicarum selectiorum,
Basel, 1710. Extracts given by Ernst.
14
B. Ramazzini, De morbis artificum diatriba, Mantua, 1700.
91
so well interconnected that they can never be reawakened without
awakening all those which were impressed at the same time.&dquo; One
might also turn to Locke15 and Hutcheson: 16 they demonstrated
how the association of ideas gives rise to phobias and to
preconceptions by tying an idea and an accidental occurrence so
closely together that every repetition of that occurrence necessarily
revives the idea related to it. It is this deterministic consequence
of association which prevents reason from imposing a
stabilizing control. Hartley proposed a theory of complex ideas;
it is only necessary that one element of this complex be evoked
in order to reactivate those which are associated with it.
When a variety of ideas are associated together, the visible idea,
being more glaring and distinct than the rest, performs the office
of symbol to all the rest, suggests them, and connects them together.
In this, it somewhat resembles the first letter of a word, or the first
word of a sentence, which are often made use of to bring all the
rest to mind.
When words have acquired any considerable power of exciting
pleasant or painful vibrations in the nervous system, by being often
associated with such things as do this, they may transfer a part of
these pleasures and pains upon indifferent things, by being at other
times often associated with such. This is one of the principal sources
of the several factitious pleasures and pains of human life.&dquo;
These associated recollections can attain a degree of intensity
comparable to that of actual feeling. This is no longer a &dquo;miniature
vibration&dquo; which takes place in our &dquo;medullary sub-
stance,&dquo;
&dquo;
&dquo;but vivid ones, equal to those excited by objects impressed
on the senses.&dquo; (1.11.14).
Later, John Gregory put forth an explanation of the phenomena
of affective and of involuntary memory. In a work published in
1765, he stated:
The different passions naturally express themselves by different
15
J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690.
16
F. Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct ofthe Passions and
Affections, London, 1728, IV. 93.
17
D. Hartley, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty and his Expectations,
London, 1749, 1.11.12 (cor. 7), III.I.80 (cor. 5).
92
sounds; but this expression seems capable of a considerable latitude...
When particular sounds and a certain strain of melody are impressed
upon young minds, in a uniform connection with certain passions
expressed in a song, this regular association raises these sounds, in
progress of time, into a kind of natural and expressive language of
the passions. Melody therefore is to be considered, in a certain degree,
as a relative thing, founded in the particular associations and habits
of different people; and, by custom, like language, annexed to their
sentiments and passions. We generally hear with pleasure the music
we have been accustomed to in our youth, because it awakens the
memory of our guiltless and happy days. We are even sometimes
wonderfully affected with airs, that neither appears, to ourselves nor
to others, to have any particular expression. The reason is, we have
first heard these airs at a time when our minds were so deeply
affected by some passion, as to give a tincture to every object that
presented itself at the same time; and though the passion and the
cause of it are entirely forgot, yet an object that has once been
connected with them, will often awake the emotion, though it cannot
recall to remembrance the original cause of it.
Similar associations are formed, by the appropriations, in a great
measure accidental, which different notions have given to particular
musical instruments, as bells, drums, trumpets, and organs; in consequence
of which they excite ideas and passions in some which they do
not in others.&dquo;
In his Dictionary o f Music, Rousseau made use of a similar
theory in order to account for the effects of the ranz-des-vaches:
We shall seek in vain to find in this air any energic accents capable
of producing such astonishing effects. These effects, which are void
in regard to strangers, come alone from custom, reflections, and a
thousand circumstances, which, retraced by those who hear them, and
recalling the idea of their country, their former pleasures, their youth,
and all their joys of life, excite in them a bitter sorrow for the loss
of them. The music does not in this case act precisely as music, but as
a memorative sign.&dquo;
The tune, a fragment of the past, strikes our senses, but it also
18
J. Gregory, A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with
those of the Animal World, London, 1777 (7th ed.), pp. 164-66.
19
J.-J. Rousseau, Dictionary ofMusic, trans. W. Waring and J. French,
London, n.d. (c. 1778), p. 267.
93
revives in the imagination all our former life and all the &dquo;associated&dquo;
images with which it is connected. This &dquo;memorative
sign&dquo; is related to a partial presence which causes one to experience,
with pleasure and pain, the imminence and the impossibility
of complete restoration of this universe which emerges
fleetingly from oblivion. Roused by the &dquo;memorative sign,&dquo; the
conscience comes to be haunted by an image of the past which
is at once definite and unattainable. The image of childhood
reappears through a melody, only to slip away, leaving us a prey
to this &dquo;passion du souvenir&dquo; which Mme de Stael saw as
&dquo;the most disquieting sorrow that can take possession of the
soul. &dquo;
For the theorists of the time, the key to this associationist magic
was the sense of hearing. This is not simply a question of music;
the bubbling of springs and the murmuring of streams are endowed
with a similar power. And Albert von Haller, in an article
rejecting his early mechanistic hypotheses,2° cited the role of
certain inflections of the voice. The presence of paramnesia and of
faulty auditory correlations constitutes the first sign of illness: ’
&dquo;One of the earliest symptoms is the sensation of hearing the
voice of a person that one loves in the voice of another with whom
one is conversing, or to see one’s family again in dreams.&dquo;&dquo;
Exile, alpine music, sad, tender recollections, golden visions of
childhood: this conjunction of themes leads not only to an &dquo;acoustical&dquo;
theory of nostalgia; it also leads to the formation of the
romantic theory of music and even to the definition of romanticism.
I shall not at this time inventory the great amount of poetry
(great mainly in quantity) to which nostalgia and the ranz-desvaches
gave rise. We should, however, recall at least several lines
of the Pleasures o f Memory ( 1792), by Samuel Rogers:
The intrepid Swiss, who guards a foreign shore,
If chance he hears the song so sweet, so wild,
His heart would spring to hear it when a child,
Melts at the long-lost scenes that round him rise,
And sinks a martyr to repentant sighs.21
2°
Article on Nostalgia in the Supplément to the Encyclopedie
21
S. Rogers, "The Pleasures of Memory," 1792. Also, several lines from
94
It fell to Senancour to contradict Rousseau by denying that the
effect of the ranz-des-vaches is the result of accidental association:
he found that this music was not at all insignificant in itself; it
was rather the most accurate way to give expression to the
sublimity of the mountains. What the shepherds discovered in the
Alps was the voice of nature.
It is in sounds that nature has put the strongest expression of the
romantic character; it is especially through the sense of hearing that
extraordinary places and things become easily yet emphatically perceptible...
The voice of one’s beloved is more lovely than her features;
the sounds emanating from a sublime place make a deeper, more
lasting impression than its forms. I have never seen a picture of the
Alps which could make them as real as an alpine melody can... The
ranz-des-vaches not only recalls memories, it paints... If its expression
is more true than sophisticated, the very first sounds put us in the
high valleys, near the naked, reddish-gray rocks, beneath the cold sky
and the burning sun... One is impressed with the slowness of things
and with the grandeur of the placed
One can find echoes of these pages in the work of Liszt.
For the Romantics, nostalgia was a disease which could neither
be cured nor assuaged. In the eighteenth century, doctors stated
plainly that it would be cured by returning to one’s native land.
This was too simple. The nostalgic did not stop eating his heart
out; the wound did not heal. In his Anthropologie, Kant has
given a subtle interpretation to this irrational desire: what a
person wishes to recover is not so much the actual place where
he passed his childhood but his youth itself. He is not straining
toward someting which he can repossess, but toward an age
which is forever beyond his reach.23 Back in his native land, he
is still unhappy, for he finds that people and things no longer
"L’imagination" (1788) of Abbe Delille (Chant IV, "L’imagination des lieux").
Ainsi les souvenirs, les regrets et l’amour,
Et la mélancolique et douce rêverie,
Reviennent vers les lieux chersà l’âme attendrie,
Où nous fûmes enfans, amans, aimés, heureux.
22
Senancour, Obermann, Letter XXXVIII, Third Fragment.
23
Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, 1798, I. XXXII.
95
conform to his idea of what they used to be. His childhood is not
given back to him. Before Rimbaud said, &dquo;One does not leave,&dquo;
&dquo;
Kant had warned that there is no returning.
The literature of nostalgia has furnished the ready-made formulae,
the grandiose commonplaces with which the alienated
members of the romantic middle-class were preoccupied; at the
same time, intermingled with the themes which we have just
mentioned, the Platonic themes concerning the celestial home and
the terrestrial exile reappear. This painful experience, provoked by
the uprooting of the conscience from its familiar surroundings,
became the metaphorical expression of a much more profound
rupture, the separation of man from the ideal. But here we must
listen to the lesson of Goethe: the figure of Mignon, which he
presented in Wilhelm Meister, is the best-conceived, the most
musical of all representations of nostalgia. The hero comes to
know its power of seduction and of destruction; in his full
development, he gains from painful experience. He learns what
natural love and deep attachments are worth and lives in accordance
with this knowledge.
*
By the end of the eighteenth century, throughout all the
countries of Europe, all doctors recognized nostalgia as a
frequently fatal disease; they were agreed that all peoples and all
social classes were vulnerable to it, from Lapps in Greenland to
Negroes serving in slavery. And the great national armies which
called recruits to arms from the most remote provinces were often
confronted by this dreadful disease, &dquo;homesickness.&dquo; One
example among others (reported by the historian Marcel Reinhard)
is sufficient to show how very seriously nostalgia was taken and
how much it was feared.
The eighteenth of November, 1793, under alarming political and
military circumstances, the adjutant to the Minister of War, Jourdeuil,
informed the general at the head of the Northern Army of decisions
which were intended to galvanize the forces and to keep them up to
total strength. The suppression of leaves for convalescence was included
among the harsh measures, with one exception, which provides matter
96
for thought: leave will be granted exceptionally if the sick person
is attacked by &dquo;nostalgia or homesickness.&dquo; The disease must have
been considered a serious complaint if, in this situation, it justified
such an exception.24
An army doctor, Boisseau, gave the reason: &dquo;Any soldier who
is deeply affected must be given leave before one of his organs
is irremediably damaged. In taking this just action, one saves
for the nation a citizen who would not have made a good
fighter.,,25 Other doctors were, of course, less radical: for them,
it was sufficient to lure him with bright prospects of returning
home in order to cure him, and, in this way, to make the granting
of leave unnecessary. Others thought that they could obtain excellent
results by multiplying the number of bands, entertainers,
story-tellers, the professional lustig. Only a minority reccommended
hospitalization and bleeding (but with the filth and disorder
of the hospitals of the time, this only accelerated the fatal
outcome). Finally, a few recommended strong-arm tactics, methods
which doctors before Pinel used in the treatment of
mental illness. In a book entitled T he Health o f Mars, which
appeared in 1790, Dr. Jourdan Le Cointe proposed Draconian
measures: nostalgia can be defeated by inciting pain or terror.
One should tell the nostalgic soldier that a &dquo;red-hot iron applied
to his abdomen&dquo; will cure him immediately. A Russian general
did precisely this, in 1733, at a time when, having ventured into
Germany, his army had fallen a prey to nostalgia: &dquo;he had it
announced that the first to be sick would be buried alive. This
punishment was carried out the day after on two or three, with
the result that there was no longer a single case in the entire
army. &dquo;
The great problem was to distinguish the truly homesick from
the malingerer. For the individual who did not succeed in acclimatizing
himself to military life and its dangers, it was hard not
to think of contracting an illness which was the only legal way
to escape from an intolerable situation. In the case of the real
nostalgic, the disease, stimulated by fear and the example of
24
Marcel Reinhard, "Nostalgie et service militaire pendant la Révolution,"
Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 1958, No. I.
25
Encyclopédie Méthodique, article on Nostalgie (by Boisseau and Pinel).
97
others, already represented a given behavior, a search for refuge.
How, then, could one distinguish voluntary nostalgia from that
which is not? The problem is similar to that which confronted
doctors at the end of the nineteenth century who attempted to
distinguish cases of paralysis which were clearly feigned from
those which normally accompanied hysteria-a pathological behavior,
a form of expression which does not, however, originate
at the level of the will. For the doctors of the Grande Armée)
there were a certain number of clear signs which made it possible
to ferret out the cheats: they did not have alterations of the
pulse, a glassy look in the eye, the disastrous loss of weight
which figured among the symptoms of the disease.
But, here, it is necessary to present a rough sketch of clinical
nostalgia, that is, of all the manifestations of the disease which,
around 1800, led doctors to the diagnosis of nostalgia. I borrow
the following from Philippe Pinel’s description:
The principal symptoms lie in a sad, melancholy appearance, a
bemused look, eyes at times haggard, countenance at times lifeless, a
general disgust, an indifference toward everything; the pulse is slow
and weak; at other times, rapid, but scarcely perceptible: a rather
constant torpor; while asleep, several phrases are released with sobs
and tears; the near impossibility of getting out of bed, a obstinate
silence, the rejection of food and drink; emaciation, marasmus and
death. The disease is not carried to the last degree in all cases; but
if it is not directly mortal, it becomes so indirectly. A few have
sufficient strength to overcome it; for a few others, the disease lasts
longer and thus extends their stay in the hospital; but this extended
stay is almost always mortal, for sooner or later they are stricken by
the diseases which permeate, in a frightful way, the military hospitals,
such as dysentery, remittent fevers and fevers accompanied with loss
of strength and ataxia.’
As one can see, in its simple form, nostalgia is a mental disease
which can by itself lead to death; in its complicated form, intercurrent
diseases accelerate the unhappy patient’s end. In point of
fact, at the end of the eighteenth century, doctors gave an importance
to psychological causes at least equal to that which our most
26
Ibid.
98
radical psychosomaticians give it. For Pinel, for Baron Larry, for
Percy and their numerous followers, the obsession provoked
lesions or cerebral irritations, and these, in turn (by virtue of the
&dquo;solidist&dquo; theories which state that the nervous system is master
of all the phenomenon of life) immediately caused the most varied
organic lesions. As of Percy and Laurent,&dquo; &dquo;the brain and the
epigastrium are affected simultaneously. The first concentrates all
its forces on a single order of ideas, on a single thought; the
second becomes the seat of noxious pressures, of spasmodic
constrictions.&dquo; But, according to Bégin/8 this &dquo;persevering
encephalic excitation&dquo; has the capacity to &dquo;react not only upon
the epigastrium, but upon all the principal viscera, &dquo;which are
affected sympathetically.&dquo;
&dquo;
According to these medical theoriesdoctors
still had no knowledge of infectious agents-all the
inflammatory states of meningitis, all the lesions of gastro-enteritis
and of pleurisy discovered during autopsy of victims of nostalgia
were interpreted as nostalgia.
Auenbrugger, the inventor of sounding by percussion, has
described the effects of nostalgia in the following noteworthy
terms:
The body wastes, while all ideas are concentrated on a useless aspiration,
and while an area of the lungs responds to percussion with a
dull sound. I have opened numerous cadavers of patients who had
died of this disease, and I have discovered in all cases that the lungs
adhered tightly to the pleura of the thorax, that the tissue of the
lobe corresponding to the dullness presented a callous thickening, and
a purulence more or less evident.-9
In reading these lines, one is given the impression that, in the
imagination of the doctor, everything happened as if there was
a secret and binding affinity between the dull state of mind, the
spiritual gloominess of the patient, and the unresponsiveness of
the thorax. The very same darkening comes to obfuscate the
27
Article on Nostalgie, in Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, Paris, 1819,
Vol. XXXVI.
28
Article on Nostalgie, in Dictionnaire de médicine et de chirurgie pratique,
1834, Vol. XII.
29
Leopold Auenbrugger, Inventum Novum, 1761. Quoted by Ernst.
99
thoughts and the lungs of the nostalgic person; dullness of the
lungs is the concrete representation of the destruction of the mind.
For us, this is clearly a case of tuberculosis, and we should be
tempted to say that the changes of character and of humor are, in
reality, the consequences of tuberculosis, and not its cause. At
any rate, this is what doctors thought at the end of the nineteenth
century. As a result of progress made in pathological anatomy and
in bacteriology, little by little nostalgia lost the important status
which doctors of the Romantic era had given it; and simultaneously,
as a military regime was established which was less harsh, as
sailors received better treatment, as pay became more substantial,
as bodily punishment was applied less frequently, the statistics of
the English and French military hospitals revealed a progressive
diminution in the number of cases of nostalgia. With a few
exceptions: the soldiers of the expeditionary corps, the first European
colonials in Algeria...
However, in 1873, the Academy of Medicine awarded a prize
to a military doctor, August Haspel,30 for his very unusual dissertation
on nostalgia. One can perhaps regard this as a rearguard
action in defence of the psychosomatic tendency of the old
school. But one can also discover here a language which, in many
respects, heralds the psychosomatic school of the twentieth century.
Haspel urges us to regard the disease as a whole; he wants
us to start with an understanding of the mind of the patient and
to search for its true etiology at the level of the emotions because
of the fact that this etiology is capable of producing manifold and
profond organic repercussions:
Nostalgia is a vicious manifestation of a disturbed existence, which
is under the influence of an attack by the emotional and ethical part
of the individual, that is, of his character... These disturbances, these
organic changes have not come about all alone, they have not occurred
by themselves in ~the state in which we ordinarily see them; they have
had a beginning; there is, therefore, something which has preceded
them, which has introduced them, and this something is definitely the
sad thought, the unhappy state of the soul which has determined
these organic modifications-which do not, of themselves, make up the
cause of the disease, but only one of its anatomical expressions. It
30
Mémoires de l’Académie de Médecine, XXX, 1871-73.
100
is in nostalgia that we find the earliest initial and essential factor,
what we might call the pathological backbone; that is to say, that
nothing began before it and that it is, at the very beginning, all the
disease.
But, at that date, Haspel was fighting for a lost cause. Scientific
discoveries were leading elsewhere. With bacteriology and pathological
anatomy well established, Haspel’s ideas, had they been
heard, would only have had a retarding effect. At this time, they
had a reactionary significance. For the medicine of 1873, there
was more to be gained from the methods (so sharply criticized by
Haspel) of morcellation of the whole human being, of an analysis,
of an examination of isolated organs. Even if Haspel was correct
in stating that one was not recapturing the psychological primum
movens of the disease, it was better not to listen to him. In
chasing after bacilli, there was less risk of being taken in by mere
words, even if one lost sight of the unity of the sick peerson, the
&dquo;historical,&dquo; individual character of the disease (with which
modern medicine is more concerned).
In the meantime, clinical methods have taught us to recognize
a variety of factors more easily: the importance of constitutional
factors, the transmission of psychological upheavals, relayed
by the neurovegetative or hormonal system, and the role of the
microbic and toxic agents which are added.
*
Though banished from the manuals of clinical medicine, nostalgia
did not cease to be of interest to science. Certainly, around 1900,
no one took the theory of its organic repercussions very seriously,
but there is a domain in which the concept of nostalgia has been
maintained: psychiatry. When a young montagnard wastes away
in Paris, we should hardly consider the psychological causes of
his condition; we should examine his lungs and discover a tubercular
condition. But if he sets fire to the shop where he works,
or if he attempts suicide, we should look for a psychological
explanation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Swiss
and the Germans made a variety of studies, analyzing the reaction
of adolescents whose appearance frequently corresponded to that
101
of a &dquo;raptus&dquo; or of a reaction in short-circuit; they tried to isolate
the importance of the various factors: the severity of environmental
repression, the psychological defects of the patient (mental
deficiency, epilepsy), the specific characteristics of the original
milieu from which the patient had been isolated. To give one
example of this kind of research, I shall mention the thesis of Dr.
Karl Jaspers: Heimzveh und Verbrechen (Nostalgia and Criminality).
The work dates from 1909.
The word reappeared, sporadically, in the psychiatric literature
which, after 1945, was consecrated to the mental disturbances
caused by life in prison- and refugee-camps, but, today, the
technical use of nostalgia is extremely rare. We can be sure that it
will soon disappear. In current usage, its acquired poetic meaning
has little by little taken on a pejorative connotation: the word
implies the useless yearning for a world or for a way of life
from which one has been irrevocably severed.
*
In psychiatry, several concepts have taken the place of nostalgia.
They correspond, on the one hand, to a determined effort to
analyze the behavior of nostalgic people. On the other hand, they
have radically modified the very idea of the disease. The emphasis
has changed. We no longer speak of disease but of reaction; we
no longer underline the desire to return but, on the contrary, the
failure of adaptation. When we speak of &dquo;depressive reactions of
social maladjustment,&dquo; the name given to the phenomenon has
ceased to designate a place and a history, as in the case of nostalgia
; we no longer follow the hypothesis that repatriation will
result in a cure. We emphasize, rather, the lack of adaptation to
the new society which the individual must live in. The theory
of nostalgia put the accent on the original environment (on the
Heim); the theory of inadaptation accentuates the paramount
necessity of reintegration into an existing milieu. In many respects,
this transformation of concept and terminology is indicative of
the change which has taken places as a result of the process of
urbanization. The theory of nostalgia was developed in Europe at
the time of the rise of the great cities when greatly improved
means of transportation made movements of the population much
102
easier. But, at the same time, the social unit of the village, the
particularities of the province, the local customs, the local dialects
continued to exert all their influence. Between the village environment
and the conditions encountered by an individual in the city
or in the army, there was a great difference. The village environment,
highly structured, constituted an important influence. The
desire to return had a literal meaning; it was oriented toward a
given geographical area, it concentrated on a given localized
reality. It is evident that the decline of the theory of nostalgia
coincided with the decline of particularism in the provinces, for
the local rituals, the backward social structure have almost completely
disappeared in Western Europe. Looking back toward the
home is no longer a torment; returning no longer has any beneficial
effect.
In many respects, the family unit, being closed and protective,
has taken over the educational and &dquo;particularizing&dquo; function
which the village community used to have. Already in the eighteenth
century, the nosologist Boissier de Sauvages3’ noticed that
nostalgia appeared in children, and that, in the case of children
of gypsies, the disease was not caused by losing contact with a
particular place but by being separated from their parents. Similar
observations were to be made in the twentieth century. But, in
the studies of Rene Spitz or of Bowlby, the term nostalgia, which
formerly underlined the role of a particular native place, is
replaced by more up-to-date terminology: anaclitic depression,
hospitalism, maternal deprivation, and so on...32
As we have seen, Kant had previously stated that the nostalgic
desired less to recover the scene of his birthplace than to recover
the feelings of his own childhood. The action of returning was
centered upon his own personal past. In developing the theories
of fixation and regression into technical terminology, Freud simply
made the explanation suggested by Kant explicit and precise. The
31
F. Boissier de Sauvage, Nosologia methodica, Amsterdam, 1768, 2 Vols.
32
The terms hospitalism and anaclitic depression are to be found in René A.
Spitz, "Hospitalism. An Inquiry into the Genesis of Phychiatric Conditions in
Early Childhood," in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Vol. I, New York,
1945. René A. Spitz and Katherine M. Wolf, "Anaclitic Depression. An Inquiry
into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood," Ibid., Vol. II,
1946. J. Bowlby, Soins maternels et santé mentale, Geneva, OMS, 1951.
103
word regression, in its own way, takes up the idea of return.
But the neurotic regresses within his own history. The village is
interiorized.
What was at first defined in relation to the place of birth is
thus redefined in relation to parental figures and to early stages
of personal development. While the term nostalgia points to a
given place, a concrete landscape, modern theories designate individuals
or their likenesses, and symbolic substitutes which
dominate childhood. Today, we are under the sway of the
theory of social adaptation; nostalgia no longer designates the
loss of one’s native land, but the return toward the stages in
which desire did not have to take account of external obstacles
and was not condemned to defer its realization. In the case of
civilized man, who is no longer rooted in a particular place, it is
not the uprooting which causes trouble; it is rather the conflict
between the exigencies of integration into the adult world and
the temptation to conserve the unique status of the child. The
literature of exile, more abundant than ever, is, for the most
part, a literature concerned with the loss of childhood.