Phantoms in the Mirror: Nostalgia Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis

What can phenomenology and psychoanalysis say about nostalgia? In contradistinction to anxiety, which has become the philosophical and psychoanalytical mood par excellence, nostalgia has by contrast fallen by the wayside. Even in the corpus of Freud, with the accent on the archaeology of sedimented meanings, the term “nostalgia” itself only appears a handful of time. For its own part, phenomenology has registered the mood of nostalgia only fleetingly, with a handful of papers appearing over the last two decades or so. In this paper, I’d like to consider one subdivision of nostalgia’s structure through bringing together phenomenology and psychoanalysis into the same lens. In particular, I would like to consider nostalgia’s relation to time and embodiment as it figures in both phenomenology and psychoanalysis. The plan for this study is threefold. First, I will frame nostalgia’s relation to time in terms of an intolerance of ambiguity; second, I will phrase the object of nostalgia as involving the lure of temporal identification; finally, I will end by considering how this temporal identification is played out through the body, and, more narrowly, through the body image.