What is the use of nostalgia, this yearning over the vanished past, this clinging to what is gone and will not come again? On Mother’s Day, I stood over my mother’s grave asking myself this question. After all, isn’t this, from a Freudian standpoint, a clinging to the figurative mother, a refusal to break the apron strings, a neurotic regression? Would an evolutionary psychologist say that it serves some kind of neo-Darwinian purpose, and, if so, what? From a rational point of view, surely we would be better without it: surely we would cope with life’s demands better if we lived simply in the present, as the animals are alleged to do, although I have my doubts about that allegation.
May 13, 2022
May 13, 2022
May 13, 2022
What is the use of nostalgia, this yearning over the vanished past, this clinging to what is gone and will not come again? On Mother’s Day, I stood over my mother’s grave asking myself this question. After all, isn’t this, from a Freudian standpoint, a clinging to the figurative mother, a refusal to break the apron strings, a neurotic regression? Would an evolutionary psychologist say that it serves some kind of neo-Darwinian purpose, and, if so, what? From a rational point of view, surely we would be better without it: surely we would cope with life’s demands better if we lived simply in the present, as the animals are alleged to do, although I have my doubts about that allegation.