Nostalgia and Transference

Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.
D. DeLillo, White Noise

AREADER'S INITIAL REACTION MAY be to reject this quotation as pop psychology, a misreading of a state of mind dominated by a painful, brooding, often bittersweet mood, a yearning for Eden. On the contrary, there is here an intuitively derived veracity. We may ask why these components of nostalgia are so readily overlooked.

The word derives from the Greek ("return home" and "pain") and this enduring, complex feeling tone is one that pervades many lives and motivates behavior. A notable literary exemplar is Proust's writings (1981), where the rage and grievances are carefully masked behind social satire, mockery, and the effects on the reader of the frustrations of the central characters. Clinical instances are often obscured in the workings of transference. Transference is often driven by nostalgia, not omitting the pressures of conflictual and developmental anxieties. It contains the distorted, symbolized and metaphorized strivings of the individual to live through a past that has been unsatisfying and anxiety-provoking and to nullify a subjective present that does not measure up to the real or imagined past. The patient is drawn repeatedly to bring closure to the unfulfilled; the settling of grievances is a part of these processes. It is illusionary to regard nostalgia solely as unconflicted desire for Paradise.

A distraught young woman tells me in her analytic session of the loss of her pocketbook, and it is at first unclear whether the purse was robbed from her or was inadvertently left behind at some unremembered place. In accord with her view of her childhood, she thinks it both, it becoming clear that her story goes beyond her lost purse and beyond the