Nostalgia and Hidden Meaning*

Since Johannes Hoffer first used the term “nostalgia,” in 1688 (Martin, 1954), it has been studied from a variety of perspectives, including the psychoanalytic, biological, and archetypal. Despite the “drift of the word's contemporary connotations from the pathological and occupationally specialized meaning with which it was originally invested,” noted by the sociologist, Davis (, p. 5), it is still useful to look back at nostalgia's origins. It is derived from two Greek roots: first, nostos, “to return home.” has studied the etymology of nostos and its origins in the Greek noun, noos, or “mind”—the same root that underlies Husserl's consideration of the noematic-noetic unity of consciousness. Secondly, the root algos, or “pain,” completes the word, referring to nostalgia's original connotation of the pain or suffering connected with the return home—a connotation now confined mostly to its more mundane appearance in native language, such as the English, “homesickness,” or the German, “Heimweh”.

A major area of Freud's problematic is the context within which interpretation takes place—viz., the transference. Many phenomena of everyday-life also manifest themselves in various perspectives within the transference