Introduction

The word ‘nostalgia’ was first coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer (1688/1934). For Hofer, nostalgia was synonymous with homesickness, and he equated the two in the title of his dissertation, ‘Nostalgia, oder Heimwehe’ (‘Nostalgia, or Homesickness’). For centuries, nostalgia denoted homesickness. As recently as 1943, Willis McCann conducted what, in his words, was the first ‘systematic and controlled investigation’ of nostalgia by comparing ‘one hundred college students who were or who recently had been homesick … with 100 college students who never had been homesick while away from home’ (McCann 1943: 97). Yet, current dictionary definitions reveal that nostalgia and homesickness have acquired distinct meanings. Before we can embark on a journey through the psychological literature, then, we have to identify when nostalgia and homesickness went their separate ways. It appears that their path forked during the post-war years, as by 1954 nostalgia had become a subject of psychological theorizing in its own right, with its now familiar positive connotations. The psychoanalyst Alexander Martin (1954) proposed that nostalgia plays an essential role during recuperation and consolidation phases of development:

By conceptualizing nostalgia as a springboard for growth, Martin foreshadowed recent evidence, to be reviewed later in this chapter, that the emotion is a source of approach-oriented processes, including creativity, inspiration, risk taking and goal pursuit (Sedikides and Wildschut 2016, 2020). In the same year, the social and personality psychologist Gordon Allport (1954) published his influential The Nature of Prejudice. He proposed that nostalgia could play a role in reducing prejudice and forming bonds between individuals from different social groups: