Within popular culture, literature, television, and film, nostalgia is often (if not invariably) associated with childhood. From Proust to Tarkovsky up to modern outputs such as the Duffer Brothers’ Stranger Things and J. J. Abrams’s Super 8, childhood is presented as the site of boundless adventure and infinite pleasure. But what does it mean to be nostalgic for one’s childhood?
Generally, we tend to respond to this question with recourse to memory and remembering. Yet while nostalgia is often thought of as a variant of remembering, identifying exactly what role memory plays in nostalgia is far from obvious for a number of reasons. In the first case, the past that presents itself in nostalgia is seldom—if indeed ever—the past as it was actually experienced. When I remember something from the past, then, generally speaking, this past is presented as a discrete event that has its basis in a veridical reality.
Nostalgia, by contrast, is not motivated by the cognitive recollection of a past that is grounded in a supposedly actual reality. Rather, nostalgia tends to involve a synthesis of memory, imagination, and fantasy, as well as acts of forgetting and reorganizing the past. Such a past is less concerned with a fidelity to the past as it was supposedly experienced and more oriented toward a fundamental aim, namely, to restore the past back to the present, or rather, to render the present a variation of the past.
Furthermore, the distinction between nostalgia and episodic memory is not only conceptual but also borne out in first-person experience. Thus, just as I can remember my childhood home and the formative events that took place within my life, so these events and scenes can appear for me devoid of any nostalgic tonality. While these scenes can appear for me as being marked by a sentiment of affection, this sense of affection need not morph into nostalgic longing itself. What this means is that nostalgia cannot be reduced to simply an act of episodic recollection nor can it be tied down to a set of calendric events. Rather, nostalgia’s past is best grasped as a specific kind of feeling.
The idea of the past as involving a kind of feeling is especially applicable to childhood. But what is childhood? Usually, we take the term “childhood” to refer to a specific biological period within the course of human life, roughly from infancy to the onset of puberty. Childhood is also mediated by a wide range of social, cultural, and affective factors. What underpins these dimensions is the notion of childhood as a specific kind of world. In phenomenology, the term “world” refers to a relational structure that encompasses the embodied self, other, and environment in an inseparable whole. How does this shape the understanding of childhood? As a specific kind of world, childhood is marked with a series of perceptual, embodied, social, spatial, temporal, and affective aspects that tend to define the experience of childhood as a whole.
If childhood is a singular world rather than simply being a collection of a discrete set of activities, then how does childhood lend itself to nostalgic longing? There are at least two responses to this. First, because childhood is a world that is characterized as being fundamentally distinct from adulthood as well as being seemingly immobile, it tends to lend itself toward nostalgic longing in an exemplary fashion. According to this view, the experience of nostalgia is an experience of returning to or reviving a past that we have been temporally displaced from.
Another school of thought argues that, instead of being a world we return to, childhood is instead an eternal structure of consciousness, which, while dormant at times, nevertheless forms an undercurrent to perceptual life. One philosopher who holds this view is Gaston Bachelard. For him, childhood lasts throughout life, animating adulthood, and, in doing so, it provides a sense of wonder and well-being. How do we gain access to this eternal childhood? The answer cannot be memory alone, since that would situate childhood in a temporality behind us. Nor is imagination the answer, since nostalgia is more than an act of fiction. What is required instead is a synthesis of memory and imagination, which revives the very manner in which children perceive the world. Bachelard terms this unique state “reverie,” meaning an elevated consciousness, which is no longer bound by rationality but instead is marked by a heightened sensitivity and creativity toward the world.
These two views offer contrasting perspectives on our relationship to childhood, yet both underscore the significance of childhood as a formative site of meaning. This leaves open the question of what it means to nostalgically long for one’s childhood. The answer to this question is often predicated on a conviction that childhood is a time in one’s life marked by hopes and promises that never quite came to fruition but which the nostalgic subject is nevertheless unable to relinquish. In this respect, the return undertaken in childhood nostalgia is analogous to a return to one’s origins.
On the surface, this formulation of childhood nostalgia as a return to one’s origins suggests a concept of pastness that is stable, constitutive of a sense of self-continuity, and always familiar. But is this view tenable? Thinkers such as Bachelard are surely right that childhood is an elemental structure of perception, which is always already there either in some implicit or explicit level. If it is a trite truism to say that, at some point in time, all of us were once children, then it is nevertheless a truism that is overlooked. My childhood is not a wholly alien region of my life, which I have an indifferent attitude toward. Even if it is remote, then its remoteness is captured in an affectively significant fashion. This relationship to one’s own childhood raises the question: how do I encounter and experience this past within the present?
In the accounts offered by phenomenology as well as in contemporary empirical psychology, the answer to this question often consists of framing nostalgia as an integration between past and present such that there is a harmonious relationship between different versions of myself. Let us consider this idea. During nostalgic reverie, it is not as though I am absent to myself as a perceptual subject. If that were the case, then we would lack the distinction between past and present central to nostalgic longing. It is, of course, true that in nostalgic reverie, we can find ourselves seemingly “lost” in the past or even “dwelling” there at the expense of being alienated from the present. Yet, throughout, there remains the germ of a self-consciousness being tacitly aware of its own situatedness in the present. What is critical—and often overlooked—is that this act of being aware of the present as a surrounding force is neither homogenous nor devoid of affective value. Rather, being aware of one’s own placement in the present shapes how we relate to (and equally fail to relate to) the past. The present in which I find myself is not a neutral point of departure from which I embark on a nostalgic reverie but is instead the ground on which nostalgic longing itself gains both its thematic meaning and affective richness.
This tension between past and present can help us account for the seductive quality of nostalgia as well as its capacity to provoke suffering. In nostalgia—especially childhood nostalgia—we are stranded from a past world that is fundamental to who we are. The “homecoming” (nostos) of nostalgia consists of harboring a belief that reverie will restore back to us that which has been lost in time. In part, this explains the appeal of nostalgic objects and souvenirs. When we encounter an object from our past nostalgically, then we not only perceive an object located in a dateable history, we also perceive an entire milieu, which transcends the object itself. But equally, such objects serve as mere traces that can never replace or recreate the past. As such, the pain (algos) of nostalgia is marked by a recognition that we remain separated from that which is closest to us, namely, our childhood. Given this tension, nostalgia is often described as a “bittersweet” emotion, and this ambiguity can be understood as a moment of bringing together disparate and disunited elements of a life—those that are marked by plenitude and joy but also those marked by loss and suffering—into a singular experience.
Where does this leave childhood nostalgia as an encounter with one’s own past? If returning to the past remains an impossibility, then something nevertheless returns in childhood nostalgia. But what is this something? If it is not my childhood itself, then it is instead the subject who once lived that life, who was once there and yet continues to exist now. In this respect, we might say that nostalgia is the articulation of one’s childhood as a stranger within, the stranger that haunts my presence through still residing in me as the index of a joint sense of absence and presence.
Dylan Trigg
Dylan Trigg is FWF Senior Researcher at Department of Philosophy, Central European University, Vienna. He is the author of several books including Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety (2017), The Thing: a Phenomenology of Horror (2014), and The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny (2012). With Tobias Becker, he is coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia (2024). His current research concerns the phenomenology of parenthood.
