Mind Moves Marie MurrayNostalgia is a much-maligned emotion. It implies a pathological desire to return to the past. It implies that the person who is nostalgic suffers from psychological inability to cope with the present, lack of imagination with regard to the future and a regressive desire to look back rather than look ahead. Not so.
While there may indeed be elements of melancholy when one considers the passage of time and the people, places and events it has erased, nostalgia is much more than degenerative desire for what is no more.
It is not mere regressive reminiscence. It is finely tuned remembrance of the particular historical time in which a person lived out seminal years of life, time worth recording, events worth remembering, an era within an epoch etched into the annals of memory, the personal narrative rather than the archival records in the local museum.
Visiting a place in which one was happy, remembering the details of an earlier time, retracing steps, noting differences wrought by time, imagining one's former self and that of others, yet recognising that this time is over, shows the courage to connect the past and the present and to value them both. It may be nostalgic but it can also be therapeutic.
That is why those thinkers who suggest that one must study the past in order to divine the future recognise that sometimes one should look back to where one has come from to know where one is now and how to move on. There can be a loss of identity if people lose sight of where they began.
But if nostalgia does have any downside, if it clings to the past in a way that inhibits progress, surely that is much less an error than that of people who are ashamed of their genesis, abandon their past, dismiss their heritage and seek to erase their origins.
The psychological reasons for doing so are many. It is entirely comprehensible that some people who had deeply unhappy home situations, reason to be angry, hurt and ashamed, are anxious to leave the past behind and enter a new life.
From the psychological perspective, leaving and letting go can be far more therapeutic than trying to either resolve or revenge it. This is because neither attempt can give the person what they secretly want, which is to change the past, turn it into something it never was, to become what they were never able to become before, for relationships to change into idealised versions and for a second chance to live that section of life happily. That is not possible. Sometimes it is better not to go back.
But there is a different kind of dismissal of the past - people who seek to deny the simplicity and poverty of their ancestry and who enter into a fictive existence as if the luxuries and wealth they enjoy now are a continuation of the lifestyle in which they grew up.
This is a psychological trap. This is pretence. This is not necessary. This is denial. This is feeling inferior and, because of that, it may need to cloak itself in superiority, in superficiality, in acquisition.
People who deny the past frequently purchase the symbols of prosperity and the signs of opulence, as they constantly redesign their homes, their lives, their relationships and their persona.
Pretence is psychologically exhausting and exceptionally difficult to maintain and it denies the children of pretenders their right to their own authentic origins.
Those who forget where they came from in this way are identified by that extraordinarily apt Irish expression, "tis far from this they were reared".
They must avoid those people who will remind them that they are "getting above themselves", for there are always those who will remember them and their true story. Those who pretend often have to sever connections with so many people that after a time they have exiled themselves from everyone including themselves.
If any of us trace our family back more than a few generations, most of us will find people without the educational advantages and the financial prosperity that we enjoy today.
Surely that is reason to be proud? Surely those who made the prosperous Ireland from a poor one, the educated Ireland from a deprived one with progeny that travel the world when the limit of their ancestors' world could be measured in miles, surely they are people to be proud of?
Rather than deny this ancestry, the debt to it deserves recognition.
Home is important. Going home at intervals whether literally, metaphorically or imaginatively is a journey worth undertaking. It is okay to take out pictures of the past and look at them, to examine memento, to remember, to recognise or rediscover the past.
Reminiscence is not negative. It can be a positive appreciation of how lucky one is to be where one is today.
Home draws us. Didn't Odysseus, despite his voyages, his expeditions, the temptations of immortality, the possibility of having a life of luxury with the Phaeacians, despite peril and portents and the Sirens' call, want to go home. And home he went.
mmurray@irish-times.ie
Marie Murray is a clinical psychologist and director of the student counselling services in UCD.