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1. 00:02 One of the most incisive apherisms I ever heard goes like this. Nostalgia is not what it used to be. I fully concur. Today we're going to discuss the role nostalgia plays in our lives and in the relationship between victims and their abusers. My name is San Vaknin. I am the
2. 00:26 nostalgic author of malignant self-love, narcissism revisited and a professor of psychology. So I started by saying that nostalgia binds victims to their abusers and abusers to their victims. To understand how, please go to the description and
3. 00:49 click on the link. It's a video titled how narcissist remembers you dark then rosy retrospection nostalgic recall so I'll not go into it in this video today I want to discuss nostalgia in general nostalgia is when we are fixated on the past somehow the fixation could last a few
4. 01:16 minutes a few seconds a few days few weeks or longer when it becomes rumination. This obsession with the past, this wistful longing, this sentimental yearning for the past is the core of nostalgia. Indeed, the word nostalgia includes a portion which means pain. It's a painful
5. 01:43 feeling. It's a form of attenuated mourning or grief. Nostalgic people are emotionally intense and they are other directed. Nostalgia is mostly about by gun relationships with other people. When we imagine a nostalgic scene, when we travel back in
6. 02:08 time to the past, it's usually populated with other people. their discourse, interactions with them, emotions they evoked in us and the general character of the relationship, the effective hues of the relationship. Nostalgia was was coined, it's a word
7. 02:29 that was coined in in 1680 by what else? A Swiss medical student. Nostalgia was once considered a physical disease, a form of pathological homesickness that affected the body adversely and caused illness and even death. To this very day, um we can still find in museums and
8. 02:56 archives death certificates listing nostalgia as the cause of death. Actually, nostalgia was the leading cause of death on death certificates during the 18th and 19th century among certain types of people, certain groups of people, people in extreme duress or
9. 03:17 distress. For example, the young soldiers, slaves, domestic servants, and so on. Well into the 20th century, nostalgia was still considered a disease, albeit not physical, mental, a mental health condition. Nowadays, contemporary nostalgia is, as
10. 03:39 I started by saying, not what it used to be. Nostalgia is 30 times more prevalent among older people and among the affluent. But it can also be spotted in children. Even children go through nostalgic periods and nostalgic effects. Some personality traits, maybe even some
11. 04:03 genes, predispose people to nostalgia.
12. 04:09 Strangely, even people with extreme advanced dementia, Alzheimer disease for example, experience nostalgia. Actually there's something called nostalgia therapy. Uh people with dementia uh are subjected to nostalgia therapy where meaningful personal memories and feelings are
13. 04:32 triggered by the therapy so as to restore a sense of self a sense of personal continuity. We should not confuse nostalgia therapy with reminiscence therapy which is something something completely different. So what is nostalgia? I think nostalgia is a way to remind
14. 04:55 yourself who you are to cement your core identity to dial back any confusions with regards to your essence your quidity to s kind of mitigate or amilarate moments of identity diffusion to maintain a sense of continuity. And I think therefore that nostalgia is a
15. 05:19 maintenance chore of the self. As the self tries to make sense of past experiences, nostalgia becomes an organizing principle and a hermeneutic principle, an explan with explanatory power. Nostalgia kind of rearranges the mental furniture when it comes to the past and
16. 05:40 imbuss everything with a fuzzy warm glow of experience. Nostalgia therefore involves selective memory. Nostalgia is not about factual historioggraphy or actual autobiography or episodic uncontested memory. No, that's not nostalgia. Nostalgia is definitely selective.
17. 06:06 It engages mechanisms such as reframing. It is intimately linked with defense mechan other psychological defense mechanisms and it rewrites the narrative, creates a piece of fiction. Nostalgia creates a piece of fiction, a storyline, a movie about one's past.
18. 06:25 Nostalgia is triggered mainly by sensor sensory inputs such as smell or sights. But it can also be triggered by internal psychological processes and constructs such as memories. Sights, sounds, smells trigger internal dynamics, psychological dynamics, which in turn latch onto
19. 06:53 memories and trigger what you might call the identity function. I think that in the absence of nostalgia, maintaining a sense of identity would be extremely difficult. Indeed, we will discuss nostalgia in people with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders a bit later.
20. 07:15 So, nostalgia is actually a trait, a dispositional variable, and we distinguish between trait nostalgia and state nostalgia. State nostalgia is when nostalgia is triggered by specific circumstances or environments or stimuli or inputs or cues from the surroundings.
21. 07:39 Nostalgia is a perception. I wouldn't say a misperception, more like a perception of losses. The losses are perceived as irretrievable, irreversible. No way to compensate for these losses. No way to as the Germans would put it vidmahu. No way to make it good. Again,
22. 08:04 these losses are mostly imaginary. Uh when we analyze the actual factual historical content or autobiographical content of the nostalgia, we discover that there's a lot of falsifying going around a a lot of rewriting history, a lot of totally uh fictitious narrative.
23. 08:28 So many of the losses, a lot of the mourning and the grief that takes place within nostalgia are totally imaginary. Nostalgia is about dissolved relational fantasies. There is a fantasy of a relationship. The relationship could be with another person, a group of people, an
24. 08:49 environment, a job, a belief system, value system, u personal standing and status, whatever. There's a relationship there. And these relationships are fantastic. In the mind of the beholder, there's a fantasy of the relationship, a relational fantasy. And as this fantasy
25. 09:10 dissolves under the pressure of reality or pressures of reality, as this fantasy cracks, falls apart, is fragmented. Nostalgia is a reaction to this inevitable, inexurable process. Nostalgia is about the imaginaries of freedom and well-being. Again,
26. 09:34 the explicit and implicit content of nostalgia is we used to have it better. We used to feel better. Our well-being was much higher. We were much more free than we are today. It's about freedom. It's about emotional well-being, not about by gun factual reality. And
27. 09:55 emotional well-being is intimately linked with relationships which are nurturing, relationships which are containing and holding and accepting and compassionate and empathic and loving and caring. So relationships and a sense of well-being go together within the
28. 10:14 nostalgic fantastic imaginary space. Similarly, the sense of freedom is intimately linked with what we call in child psychology secure base. The feeling of stability, of safety, of certainty, of determinacy, the knowledge that nothing bad is going to happen to
29. 10:34 you or the anticipation that nothing bad is going to happen to you. This goes hand in hand with parental figures. It is not therefore surprising that nostalgia in a majority of cases focuses on childhood either early childhood, late childhood or even to some extent
30. 10:54 early adolescence. When we are nostalgic, we are mostly nostalgic about the time that we were younger, much the times that we were younger, much younger. As younger people, we've had much more freedom. We didn't have a mortgage. We didn't have
31. 11:10 to pay taxes. We didn't have children. We were not attached or committed or married. We there was a lot more freedom. Nostalgia is therefore the mourning or grief of lost freedoms.
32. 11:25 What about people who have difficulties with memory, identity, um reality? What about such people? For example, people with narcissistic or borderline personality disorders or other people with dissociation, can they be nostalgic if you can't
33. 11:46 remember the past accurately? If most of your personal autobiography and episodic memory are mere confabulations, if you're afraid of your own emotions, if your identity is in flux, you have identity diffusion, identity disturbance, can you actually experience
34. 12:03 nostalgia? The answer is yes, even more so than healthy people. Because in narcissism and borderline, the comp the number one compensatory mechanism is fantasy. Both narcissism and borderline pathological narcissism and borderline personality organization can be
35. 12:24 described as virtual reality as the substitution of fantasy for a rejected and decrieded reality. The stronger, the more all pervasive and ubiquitous the fantasy, the more there's place for nostalgia. Because remember, nostalgia is not about facts. It's not
36. 12:46 about history. is not even about the past. It's about the imaginary fantasy of the past and the losses associated with the inevitable dissolution of that fantasy. And this is the core dynamic in narcissism and borderline. The difference between narcissist and
37. 13:06 borderline is whereas border lines embrace nostalgia, they wallow in nostalgia. They immerse themselves in nostalgia. nostalgia, this sense of all pervading sadness, this melancholy uh lethargy if you wish, this um perception of diffuse diffusion into a
38. 13:31 distant free pass. These are um nurtured by border lines. These are cultivated by border lines. They they cherish and adore this sensation. They bring it on intentionally. It's not the case with narcissists. Narcissists defend against nostalgia by
39. 13:50 repressing it and numbing themselves. So when the narcissist is in threat of experiencing nostalgia, the narcissist is likely to go emotionally numb and reduce affect display. In many ways, when the narcissist encounters comes across nostalgia with
40. 14:10 it with its attendant grief and mourning and emotions, the narcissist becomes some kind of primary psychopath. Border lines and narcissists also have bouts of anticipatory nostalgia, mourning, mourning or grieving for anticipated but ineluctable loss. That means you
41. 14:35 anticipate some loss and then you mourn and grieve in advance for this loss even though it hasn't happened. It's a kind of future orientation rather than past orientation. Anticipatory nostalgia is very common among narcissists and um border lines.
42. 14:56 Now nostalgia could become rumination as I've said earlier if it is carried for too long. It's a it's a form of prolonged grief disorder. It could lead to wallowing, resentment and grievances and that's why we have nostalgia politics. It is a past orientation
43. 15:16 rather than a mindful presence. Nostalgia is bittersweet. Nostalgia is dissonant. It's ambivalent because nostalgia has conccommittent positive effects. warmth, fuzziness, a sense of safety, a sense of freedom. These are all positive, but they go hand
44. 15:38 inhand with negative emotions. For example, sadness. Nostalgia tugs at your heartstrings both ways. And this is perhaps the only effective state where we have two simultaneous mutually exclusive sets of emotions or feelings. Some of them highly positive
45. 16:02 and correlated with an elevated level of well-being and happiness and some of them highly negative and usually associated with depression. Nostalgia is therefore anxiogenic on the one hand because you say to yourself things have been better as a child I
46. 16:22 used to be much freer. So you're mourning, you're grieving. This creates anxiety and at the same time it's anxolytic. It reduces anxiety. It's like saying I'm so lucky and I'm so happy that I've had that I have these memories. I'm so I'm so um blessed to have had
47. 16:46 these experiences and there is hope because I've had them once. I may have them again. So at the same time nostalgia elevates anxiety and then immediately reduces it. It is arousing. It creates arousal. Nostalgia is actionable. It steers people to action.
48. 17:06 It moves them on to act. Nostalgia could even contribute to emotional dysregulation in susceptible people such as the aforementioned border lines. Nostalgia is not only an individual artifact or individual phenomenon because it encourages social and
49. 17:26 romantic bonding and cohesion. Nostalgia mobilizes in many ways and in other ways cements or augments already existing effects. So if you're romantically attracted to someone or romantically attached to someone, nostalgia will help you to enhance this emotion. Similarly,
50. 17:48 if you hate someone, it will have the same impact. It is a social emotion. Nostalgia can be vicarious and historical rather than personal. You could be nostalgic for a certain period in history. When nostalgia is shared in groups, it is therefore
51. 18:07 experienced positively. It makes us feel better because of because it enhances affiliation. It could be a form of shared fantasy. I think nostalgia is a form of shared fantasy. And today we see a rise in nostalgia politics all around the world
52. 18:27 because as other forms of belonging, for example, social institutions such as marriage, family, even committed relationships, as these forms of belonging crumble, as we are more and more lonely and atomized, we seek to belong. We want to be accepted among
53. 18:47 like-minded people, people who share our values and outlook on life. And nostalgia is the glue that holds us or holds all of us together within a highly specific inroup. Of course, at the same time, shared nostalgia excludes people who are incapable of sharing the same
54. 19:11 memories, incapable of sharing the same experiences, incapable, in other words, of going through the nostalgic process. Nostalgia is therefore both inclusionary and exclusionary. And in this sense, it's perfectly suited for populist politics. In populist politics, there's
55. 19:32 always an in-group and an out group. Nostalgia is the great great great grandmother of authoritarianism.