Sigmund Freud Kant And Nostalgia Analysis

Freud, Kant and Nostalgia

Sigmund Freud never directly tackled the concept of collecting in his psychology but just before he was forced to leave Vienna for London, the photographer ‘Edmund Engelmann’ photographed his 2,000 objects that Freud had kept over the previous 40 years after his father had passed away. These photographs provided a record that served as a replicate to the desk full of specimens that had always dominated Freud’s room in England.

He proposed a more pragmatic account for his notion towards collecting while he did reveal occasional hints for his passion towards objects. “The psychoanalyst, like the archeologist, must uncover layer after layer of the patient's psyche, before coming to the deepest most valuable treasures.”

These are often marked by innocence, play and pleasure within a safe communal and curated context. Freud’s proposals in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ are often seen as anti nostalgic. However, Freud’s essay is a clarification of a mindset that acts as a framework for marking an individual reclamation of the past. This is referring to the different levels of our individual consciousness. The ‘conscious’ is holding thoughts and emotions that we are aware of in the present and can be expressed in fairly logical terms while the ‘pre-conscious’ mind holds memories that can be brought back to the conscious mind only by being thought of or triggered by objects or other stimuli. The unconscious is somewhat repressed while still having the power to influence our actions and emotions we have towards the past and

While the atemporal postmodern version of nostalgia, free from wistfulness, is just a celebration of images, styles, behaviours, dreams and ultimately objects of the past. Meaning the post-modern nostalgia is actually a pre-defined experience exploited through the media and objects and is not solely a subjective fantasy. When this wistfulness and emotional longing from the modern nostalgia and the origins in the romanticism era is lost, the postmodern experience of nostalgia can become very flat but productive in processing emotions and memory. One is no longer trying to recover the irrecoverable, we become one with the attainable nostalgic object, which was never lost. This availability of the past makes it atemporal, free from the limits of time. Nostalgia is no longer about the lost, but about the found. The tension between the times, the past and the present and sets of sentimental values seem to have faded, it is no longer a matter of the heart. The tension is now found more in the art of collecting and ‘re-creating’ the past. The past is not directly inhabited but is available all around the nostalgic