![]() ![]() ![]() In their 2006 article, they also point out that, for much of the 20th century, some psychologists viewed nostalgia as an “immigrant psychosis,” a “mentally repressive compulsive disorder,” or “a regressive manifestation closely related to the issue of loss, grief, incomplete mourning, and, finally, depression.”Īccording to Profs Wildschut, Sedikides, and their colleagues, in the late 20th century, doctors and researchers started to differentiate between nostalgia and homesickness. Soon thereafter, nostalgia was downgraded to a variant of depression, marked by loss and grief, though still equated with homesickness.” By the mid-20th century, psychodynamic approaches considered nostalgia a subconscious desire to return to an earlier life stage, and it was labeled as a repressive compulsive disorder. Symptoms included anxiety, sadness, and insomnia. “By the beginning of the 20th century, nostalgia was regarded as a psychiatric disorder. ![]() In their 2008 article, Profs Wildschut, Sedikides, and their colleagues explain: Throughout the 20th century, doctors kept changing their minds about the nature of nostalgia, though they mostly associated it with homesickness, an unhelpful psychological mechanism experienced by students and migrants unable to adapt to a new life away from home. In the early 19th century, however, physicians had begun to acknowledge it as a widespread condition that they saw as a form of melancholy or depression. Svetlana Boym writes that, at this time, cures for nostalgia included “leeches, warm hypnotic emulsions, opium” and returning home, to the Alps. In a paper from 2008, Profs Wildschut, Sedikides, and their colleagues note that, throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, doctors thought nostalgia only affected the Swiss, since they mostly observed it in the Swiss mercenary soldiers that lent their services to foreign armies. However, views around its mechanisms and typology, as well as around which demographics it affected, kept shifting over the years. Nostalgia and homesickness as ‘disorders’įor many centuries, doctors persisted in understanding nostalgia as a state of ill health that required treatment. However, he argued that it was not a result of an internal imbalance of the mind, but a condition influenced by external factors.Īccording to him, nostalgia was caused by “a sharp differential in atmospheric pressure causing excessive body pressurization, which in turn drove blood from the heart to the brain, thereby producing the observed affliction of sentiment.” Scheuchzer, who lived and worked around the same time as Hofer, had a similar view of nostalgia. Some of the symptoms that accompanied this “affliction” included “persistent thinking of home, bouts of weeping, anxiety, irregular heartbeat, anorexia, insomnia, and even smothering sensations.” This is according to a paper published in 2006 by Profs Tim Wildschut and Constantine Sedikides, from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, and their colleagues. Hence, from the living spirits entirely by its own momentum along uncommon routes through the untouched courses of the channels of the brain to the body, and by revisiting the oval tubes of the center brain, it is originated by arousing especially the uncommon and ever-present idea of the recalled native land in the mind.” “Nostalgia is sympathic of an afflicted imagination. Hofer identified nostalgia as a disease of the mind, and he described its mechanism as below: The first time “nostalgia” came into use was in 17th-century Switzerland, when physician Johannes Hofer identified it as a condition specific to Swiss mercenary soldiers. Essentially, it refers to the pain of being far away from home. ![]()
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