The Future of Nostalgia – Spyros D. Orfanos

 

The late Svetlana Boym, a brilliant Russian and Slavic scholar, wrote a remarkable history of “hypochondria of the heart” her poetic term for nostalgia (which seemed to me to possess enough poetry as a word itself). She traced the etymology of the word nostalgia to the Greek nostos-return home, an algia-longing. Boym (2001) defines nostalgia as a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is feeling of loss and displacement. In some ways nostalgia contains two contradictory elements. That is, a changeable, constructed reality and an immediate, factual reality. Nostalgia is also a romance with one’s own fantasy, a yearning for the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. Boym believes that the mourning of displacement and temporal irreversibility, is at the very core of the modern condition. Nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory (Orfanos, 2018).

We used to live in a late capitalism 24/7 world except in our private offices. But these days we are not in our offices. And I miss my office routines and most of all being with others in a room that I did not have to manage my attentiveness.   The sheer speed of changes brought on by the COVID 19 epidemic and what it has meant for the practice of whatever form of psychoanalysis one is persuaded by has changed. With apologies to Fareed Zakaria (2020), our post-pandemic world brings more than ten lessons. It will be quite a while before we have comprehended what happened in 2020 and what the reverberations have been. This winter’s Postdoc blog offers up some ideas about what lessons we will be struggling in our brave new world with the move to the “new normal,” the pivot from an analog screen to a digital screen, and the lost “reliable frame.”  At least for me, nostalgia is just not what it used to be.

 

Boym, S. (2001). The future of nostalgia. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Orfanos, S. D. (2018). Untranslatables. In L. Hillman & T. Rosenblatt (Eds). The voice of the analyst: narratives on developing a psychoanalytic identity. NY: Routledge.

Zakaria, F. (2020). Ten lessons for a post-pandemic world. NY: W.W. Norton & Company.

Spyros Orfanos, PhD, ABPP – Director, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Senior Research Fellow, Center for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Queens College, CUNY; Fellow, American Psychological Association; Past president of the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP), the Society of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (39) of the American Psychological Association, and the Academy of Psychoanalysis of the American Board of Professional Psychology. He maintains an independent practice in NYC.

 

Photo credit: V.Ceccoli, PhD