You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
“Nostalgia” as a popular term refers to warm feelings about the past, a past that is imbued with happy memories, pleasures, and joys. Nostalgia describes an experience that is infused with some kind of glowing feeling. When we listen to music with a nostalgic appeal we know that the experience is more about nonmusical history than about enduring musical values. It is the musical accompaniment of gratifying aspects of adolescence that brings back the aura of happy past days, old neighborhoods, former love relationships, school experiences, and sporting events. In moderation, these nostalgic phenomena are normal and give rise to an expansive state of mind. There is no one who at one time or another has not experienced nostalgia.
Nostalgia is a universal affect that results in a heightened mental state, an enhancing, uplifting mood related to particular memories of the past. Nostalgia also entails the recognition and acceptance that this past can never return. There is an irrevocability, components of which can be characterized as sad or bittersweet. However, the mood is basically one of joyousness, producing an air of infatuation and a feeling of elation.
In pathological nostalgia, there is a longing for the past without the acceptance that it is over. Thus, the mood does not contain a depressive component. Rather, the mood serves denial and the feeling tone is only one of elation. In this sense, it becomes a screen function in which the objects of nostalgic attachment are condensations of childhood values, derivatives of early fantasies that are used to idealize the past, preventing movement toward the future.
In pathological nostalgia there is a compulsive absorption in