Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2013, 58, 34–51

Nostalgia and lost identity

Elena Pourtova, Moscow

[Translated from the Russian by Juri Sklyanyn]

Abstract: Nostalgia for the Soviet Union is a major social phenomenon in Russia today
due to the irrevocable losses of the recent past in which Soviet citizens involuntarily
became immigrants in their own country. With reference to discussions of nostalgia in
philosophical and psychoanalytic literature, I suggest that nostalgia may represent
either a defensive regression to the past or a progressive striving for wholeness through
re-connecting with what has been lost in the service of a greater integration. I compare
this with the processes of adaptation seen in immigrants and provide a clinical illustra-
tion of a young man coming to terms with loss and change in the post-Soviet era. When
nostalgia is recognized as a legitimate emotional experience it may facilitate mourning
and enable the integration of the past with the present and the development of a
new identity.

Key words: identity, immigration, loss, Lot’s wife, Perestroika, post-Soviet era, Russia

Introduction
When I gave an earlier version of this paper in 2009, several of my Western
European colleagues asked whether I thought the changes taking place in Russia
might yet be reversed. In the time that has passed since then I have become more
convinced of the view that I express in this paper, namely that the prevalence of
nostalgia in Russia today is a sign of a newly emerging stability. This was con-
firmed for me by recent political events, namely the 2011 State Duma and the
2012 Presidential elections. Quite a lot of falsifications are believed to have been
registered during the State Duma elections that have effectively resulted in the
recreation of the single party system of government that existed in the Soviet
Union. The same is thought to have happened at the Presidential elections. After
serving two terms as President and a further term as Prime Minister, Vladimir
Putin has now become President again, leaving the post of Prime Minister to
Dmitry Medvedev. Putin’s Presidential campaign was arranged in such a
way that he had no serious opponents and he was re-elected to a new term of
six years instead of the previous four. Thus, he is set to remain in power for
about 20 years. This looks like a literal acting out of nostalgia and throwing
the country backward in the process of democratization.

0021-8774/2013/5801/34 © 2013, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5922.2013.02016.x
Nostalgia and lost identity 35

However, the same events also brought about an unprecedented wave of

political protest. After the first elections a great number of rallies took place
in the country. It is worth noting that such events took place not only in large
cities but also in the provinces, which is extraordinary for Russia. Several dozen
protest meetings accompanied the elections between December 2011 and May
2012.1 Such a surge of civil activity had not taken place since 1991 when the
attempted reactionary coup d’état made the people storm the White House
and then take down the statues of Soviet leaders. I think this shows that the last
20 years have made the process of change irreversible. I believe that the country
may feel nostalgic for the past just because it has become the real past and is im-
possible to restore in the present.

Nostalgia for the Soviet Union

For several years now, social networking sites designed for locating old school-
mates, former colleagues, neighbours, and the like, have become extremely pop-
ular in Moscow. People are passionately searching to restore lost connections,
to share the feelings they once experienced long ago and to have love affairs.
From time to time, one may see groups of former schoolmates getting together
in the cafés recollecting their school days. It seems that all these people are filled
with longing for the past.
For people now in their 40s, their school days were also their childhood in the
Soviet Union and they feel that both were lost when the Soviet Union ceased to
exist. Today there is a proliferation of specially designed internet sites which re-
evoke the objects, images or symbols of their Soviet or pioneer childhoods,
things that belonged to that time and are now lost forever.2 Similarly, a number
of cafés, clubs and restaurants with Soviet names (The USSR, Propaganda, etc.)
or imitating the style and interiors of the Soviet times are now becoming popu-
lar in Moscow and on radio and TV channels dedicated to broadcasting films
and music of the Soviet period are being created. This situation is well described
in the words of David Lowenthal, a British historian: ‘Today the past is a foreign
country flooded by a stream of tourists’ (Lowenthal 1985, p. 14).
In my view, the concept of nostalgia offers the best way of understanding
these phenomena. We, the children of the Soviet Union, have lost our home
country. When, some time ago, we exchanged our old Soviet passports for the
new Russian ones, we also lost our old identities which were formed in the lost
world of the former Soviet state. In addition, that strange nationality, a new his-
torical community formed by a great number of inter-ethnic marriages in the

1
For instance, on December 2011 protest actions took place in 99 cities of the country and 42 cities
abroad. About 150,000 people participated in the rally on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow. It became
the biggest rally since the beginning of the 1990s (according to Wikipedia).
2
For instance, the site www.davno.ru (meaning ‘long ago’) is visited 120,000 times daily.
36 Elena Pourtova

Soviet Union and declared as the Soviet people has disappeared as well. For
many people in Russia, the former Soviet republics represent not only the lost
territory of an enormous empire but lost personal, professional and relational
connections, as well as the ties with the past. After Perestroika, we all became
involuntary emigrants. We became citizens of a different country without
leaving it.
At the end of the 1980s, the concentrated public tension and the necessity of
changes were reflected in the song, We are Waiting for Changes, by Victor Tsoy,
a well-known rock musician of the time. Welcoming the Perestroika and chant-
ing this song as a hymn, we failed even to guess the scale of the subsequent
revolutionary changes in our society. The 1990s turned out to be a catastrophe.
The loss of the country caused the loss of the former culture. The criminal wars
brought down the public values. The two Chechen wars of the 1990s and other
inter-ethnic conflicts in the Caucasus at that time revealed processes of complete
social disintegration to the public consciousness.
In his book, Glowing Fragments of Empires, Igor Rotar, a well-known mili-
tary journalist, writes the following about the Caucasian conflicts,

It is very interesting that many ardent adherents of the Soviet system are . . . also insur-
gents protecting with weapons ideas that are very far from Communist ideology. Thus,
many ordinary Tajik Islamic fighters told the author that they were fighting ‘for the
Soviet Union and the Islamic republic’. Even the Chechen fighters accused Gorbachev
of having ‘broken up’ the Soviet Union and recollected with nostalgia the times before
Perestroika when any Chechen independence was out of the question.
(Rotar 2001, p. 87)

The events that took place in the country in the 1980-1990s were similar to
the 1917 Revolution. They began as liberation from the Brezhnev Stagnation
Period but the required scale of changes unleashed powerful, uncontrolled
destructive forces. We experienced again those processes from the early 20th
century that were left out of the Soviet text books. That was a catastrophic time.
One could not remain just a witness. That time penetrated everybody causing
shattering effects both outside and inside.

To live through a revolution

Perhaps all revolutions follow the same scenario, but the dynamics of the 1917
Russian Revolution is best described by Boris Pasternak in his book Doctor
Zhivago. At the beginning of the story, Lara thinks of the ‘revolutionary
soldiers’ as ‘good honest boys’. Similarly, Osip Mandelstam wrote, ‘The boys
of 1905 participated in the Revolution with the same feeling with which
Nikolenka Rostov joined the hussars: that was a question of falling in love
and honour’ (Mandelstam 2012, p. 126).
Doctor Zhivago accepts the revolution enthusiastically as an unprecedented
once-in-eternity event in which ‘the roof over the whole of Russia has been torn
Nostalgia and lost identity 37

off and we and all the people find ourselves under the open sky, bringing freedom
beyond expectation’ (Pasternak 2011, p. 170). In this description, the revolution
looks like a burst of psychosis.
Zhivago’s reaction to the first Soviet Decrees is still enthusiastic: ‘What magnifi-
cent surgery! To take and at one stroke artistically cut out the old stinking sores!
Simply, without beating about the bush, to sentence age-old injustice, which was
used to having people bow and scrape and curtsey before it’ (Pasternak 2011, p.
228). But soon after this, there appears a different tone with the coming of a winter
that was ‘dark, hungry and cold, all a breaking up of the habitual and a rebuilding
of the foundations of existence, all an inhuman effort to hold on to life as it slipped
away’ (Pasternak 2011, p. 228). For Osip Mandelstam, this was a period in which
‘the sky of large wholesale deaths’ hung over Russia (Mandelstam 1990, p. 241).
By the end the novel, when about 30 years have passed since the Revolution, one
of the characters says, ‘It has already been so several times in history. What was
conceived as ideal and lofty became coarse and material. So Greece turned
into Rome, so the Russian Enlightenment turned into the Russian Revolution’
(Pasternak 2011, p. 612).
The novel Doctor Zhivago was denied publication in 1956 on the basis that
he regarded the October revolution as ‘an irreparable misfortune and every-
thing that happened after it was evil’ (K. Fedin, K. Simonov & other editors
of New World, September 1956, cited according to Sukhikh 2001). Pasternak
himself recognized the complexity of reflecting the change of the collective con-
sciousness, saying, ‘The people who lived through the revolution tend to be-
come the first historians and archaeologists of the sunken Atlántida’ (from a
letter to Gorky, cited according to Sukhikh 2001).
The generations who lived through the Perestroika are turning now into the
first historians and archaeologists of the Soviet Union. We have acquired a great
deal as well as greater civil freedoms but there is a list of losses as well. These
losses are highlighted in the growing nostalgia for the Soviet Union experienced
throughout Russian society. According to a survey conducted by the Russian
Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM) in 2011,3 every fifth Russian would
like to live in a newly created Soviet Union, a rise of 4% on a survey conducted
the previous year.4
The Soviet Union and the Russian Federation are two completely different
worlds, two different realities. The trauma of the 1990s broke up the collective

3
http://www.rbc.ru/rbcfreenews/20110729132859.shtml
4
Wikipedia considers nostalgia for the Soviet Union as due to the change in prevailing mood and
social conditions. The Soviet Union promoted ideals of kindness, justice and humanism and the
spirit of collectivism reined in wide sections of its population in sharp contrast to the tough, immoral
and cynical reality of the present with the prevalent spirit of consumption and its total devaluation
of moral values. For the majority of the population living standards sharply deteriorated in the early
years following the breakup of the Soviet Union together with the loss of free medical services and
living accommodation. Prices for accommodation are now significantly higher than the purchasing
power of the majority of the population (http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia for the USSR).
38 Elena Pourtova

psyche in Russia into two parts, before and after as expressed in this fragment
from a poem of Dmitry Bykov:

The Baltic States had not yet parted with the Empire.
Power had not been disputed by two powers.
The Caucasus had not become the fire.
Free wine and bread were ours.

Moscow had not become a shooting ground.

A crowd had not yet rushed from rags to riches.
The shell had not been cracked around
Our land, our country and its poor creatures. . .
(Bykov 2000, p. 5)

This traumatic rupture in time experienced by the generation of those who grew
up in the Soviet Union requires a long period of comprehension, elaboration
and integration of the past with the present.
I think that now, after 20–25 years, we have begun to get out of this dark
period of our history but the process is obviously not finished. In my opinion, this
is shown by the fact that the oligarchs, who rose at the time of Boris Yeltsin and
determined the economic situation in Russia, are now isolated from the state. Just
to name a few: Boris Berezovsky, a media magnate, found political asylum in Great
Britain, and the former owner of an oil company, Michael Khodorkovsky, who
challenged the government over its involvement in corruption, is now himself in
prison on corruption charges. In addition, Yuri Luzhkov, Mayor of Moscow from
1992 to 2010, has recently joined the list of the exiled. In other words, the impor-
tant figures of the Perestroika era and the events tied up with them are still far from
being integrated into the modern state and public consciousness. There are still few
films5 and books studying the break-up of the 1990s and it is next to impossible to
speak about the cultural comprehension of this period.
How then might we understand the current wave of nostalgia in our society? Is it
merely an expression of being stuck in the past or is it also, as I believe, a sign of
coming out of the crisis? Sociologists, researching the phenomenon of nostalgia
empirically, state that public opinion in Russia is strongly affected by nostalgia,
but its nature is mainly symbolical. In other words, it expresses a critical attitude
toward the policy of authorities rather than a desire to bring back the Soviet past.

Nostalgia is the comprehension of one’s own past in order to understand the present
and to become clear regarding the future. . . The existence of a nostalgic myth in
Russian culture indicates, on the one hand, its transitional state, and on the other,
its process of social recovery.
(Chikisheva 2009, p. 277)
5
I can mention only Limita (by Denis Evstigneev, 1992), Brother and Brother 2 (by Alexey Balabanov,
1997 and 2000), Sisters (by Sergey Bodrov, 2001), Oligarch (by Pavel Lungin, 2002), Bumer
(by Petr Buslaev, 2003), Blind-Man’s-Buff (by Alexey Balabanov, 2005).
Nostalgia and lost identity 39

In order to find its place in the global space, Russia needs ‘to become mature
and let itself have the past. Then, perhaps, the future will become more discernible’
(Shaburova 1998, p. 38).
In order to examine the phenomenon of nostalgia in more detail, I will now
turn to a historical review of how it has been understood in medical, philosophical
and psychological literature over the past few hundred years.

Images of nostalgia in different sciences

The scientific comprehension of nostalgia began in 1688 when Johann Hofer,
a Swiss doctor, introduced the term nostalgia (nostos in Greek means return-
ing home and algos—suffering). He used this word to define the disease of
Swiss soldiers serving as mercenaries far from their country who recovered
soon after coming back home. Hofer saw the cause of the illness as ‘constant
vibrations of animal spirits through the fibres of the midbrain where the
footprints of ideas about Motherland are kept’. The treatment suggested
the use of medical leeches, purgatives, emetic and bloodletting. For illnesses
at later stages, Hofer recommended ‘soporific emulsions’, ‘balms for a head’
and opium (cited in Novikov 2009). This view resulted in treating nostalgia
as a medical disease associated with an inability to accept new conditions
of existence. ‘Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be
driven away’, Jean Paul, a German writer, once said (cited according to
Novikov 2009).
By the end of the eighteenth century, however, nostalgia had become a matter of
concern for poets and philosophers rather than a medical disease. Separately,
Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau came to the similar conclusion that
the sources of nostalgia should be looked for not in space but in time, namely in
childhood. Nostalgia is a feeling of sadness for the childhood past. Novalis, an
author and philosopher of early German Romanticism, believed that poesy and
philosophy were based on nostalgia, meaning, however, nostalgia for the
childhood of mankind rather than nostalgia for the childhood of a particular
individual (Novalis 1980).
In the nineteenth century nostalgia became an existential metaphor. A
feeling of sadness for a collective home, the language of childhood, and for
the popular folklore that had been lost and recreated, was typical of the nineteenth
century romantics. At the beginning of the twentieth century, German philosopher
Max Scheler wrote,

The yearning inherent in the romantic soul for any epoch of the historical past
(Helladic, the Middle Ages etc.) is based, in the first place, on the subject’s aspiration
to escape from his own epoch rather than on the attractiveness of the past original
values. Therefore, his praises to the past tend to belittle the present, the reality
surrounding him.
(Scheler 1913, p. 48)
40 Elena Pourtova

However, many authors do not interpret this phenomenon so critically.

Kierkegaard once said that only robbers and gypsies believed that one should
never return to where one had once been. Almost all other people, however,
are subject to the wish to return to where they have once been, which gives a
normal quality to nostalgia. More recently, Svetlana Boym, a writer, artist
and Russian émigrée, has emphasized the positive role of nostalgia in affirming
the identity of a person’s ego, strengthening ties with early periods of life, sup-
porting the continuity of traditions, and creating moral ideals that guide norms
of required behaviour (Boym 1999).
Other thinkers link nostalgia with the search for wholeness. For example,
Heidegger writes:

nostalgia is a pull to be at home everywhere. . .philosophy may be such a pull only

when we, the philosophers, are at home everywhere. To be at home everywhere means
always and, mainly, to feel wholeness as a whole. This feeling wholeness as a whole we
call peace of mind.
(Heidegger 1989)

Anna Fenko, a Russian psychologist, also relates nostalgia to the search for
wholeness. In her view, the goal of nostalgia is a striving for wholeness by trying
to restore the broken harmony of man and the world. The significant feature of
nostalgia is its global, universal quality. The feeling of loss is related not to
something concrete, to a point on the map or a moment in time but to the world
as a whole with which a person no longer feels connected. She regards nostalgia
as a kind of moral reflection, noting that the reflective nature of nostalgia is indi-
rectly shown by the etymology of the term ‘reflection’, meaning ‘turning back on
itself’ (Fenko 1993).
Thus, in philosophy and psychology, nostalgia is understood as the attempt to
restore a lost sense of connectedness and a quest for wholeness in the relationship
between the world and oneself. It is important to note that nostalgia may thus be
regarded as an intentional inner activity aimed at restoring integrity.

Nostalgia in psychoanalysis
Most psychoanalytic thinking has tended to stress the regressive and defensive
aspects of nostalgia (Fodor 1950; Sohn 1983; Kaplan 1987; Olinick 1992;
Akhtar 1996), although many writers distinguish between ‘normal’ and ‘patho-
logical’ mourning, describing a continuum between them (Martin 1954; Sohn
1983; Kaplan 1987). All authors have noted the universality and comprehensive
character of this phenomenon.
For example, Fodor draws attention to a utopian component of nostalgia,
considering it as a universal phenomenon. Behind the ‘simple’ answer that
‘the victim of nostalgia is a mentally regressive compulsive neurotic’, he writes,
‘I discern signs of a deeper enchantment, the spell of immemorial utopian
Nostalgia and lost identity 41

fantasies’ (Fodor 1950, р. 25). Furthermore, he considers that nostalgia is based

on the universal experience of pre-natal life:

Probably no single explanation is sufficient to account for all such experiences.

My own view is that pre-natal emotions, which the unconscious mind often
clothes in scenic pictures of a fairy land, might play an important part in the gen-
esis of such sensations. A beautiful landscape in dreams may represent a beautiful
feeling.
(Fodor 1950, р. 27)

Placing the source of nostalgia in the earliest child experience leads many
psychoanalysts to regard nostalgia as a form of defence. A very good survey
of these defensive functions is given by Werman who describes

nostalgia as a substitute for mourning, as an attempted mastery through idealization

and displacement of a painful past, as a resistance in analysis, and as a counterphobic
mechanism. Nostalgia not only serves as a screen memory, but may also be said to
operate as a screen affect.
(1977, р. 398)

Similarly, Kaplan describes patients who

enlisted their nostalgic pursuits as a way of remaining close to the past. These pursuits
served both a defensive function, as a way of avoiding the humiliation of oedipal and
later defeats, as well as offering them instinctual gratification through fantasy.
(1987, р. 485)

However, Kaplan also distinguishes between normal and pathological forms of

nostalgia in terms of its relation to mourning and depression:

For nostalgia to be normal, it must contain a depressive component that is related to

the recognition that the past is irrevocable. In its pathological form, the mood
contains only the elated aspects without the acceptance of loss, or what could be
described as bittersweet sentiment. The pathological form serves mainly denial and
functions like a screen affect.
(ibid.)

This distinction echoes that made by Leslie Sohn between ‘true’ and ‘false’
nostalgia. Sohn distinguishes between a false nostalgia which consists in a pleas-
ant sentimental indulgence that falsifies the reality of the past, attacking mem-
ory and true experience and a ‘true nostalgia’ which is an acute and very painful
experience of a past that has been lost and cannot be regained. He argues that it
is necessary to accept and mourn the painful loss in order to come to terms with
the current reality (Sohn 1983, p. 203).
In the Jungian literature, this distinction is also made by Roderick Peters:

I am not referring to nostalgia in the way that one often hears the term used on radio
or television as an enjoyable bitter-sweet experience to be indulged for an hour or an
42 Elena Pourtova

evening (although that is an attenuated version of the same thing); rather I am refer-
ring to the nostalgia that people do not want to feel, as when homesick in a foreign
country. . . The intensity varies greatly from a fleeting sadness and yearning to an over-
whelming craving that persists and profoundly interferes with the individual’s
attempts to cope with his present circumstances.
(Peters 1985, p. 135)

Thus, a normal or true nostalgia is one that restores the ties with the past by
means of grieving, albeit this can be evaded by a more sentimental form of in-
dulgence in the material trappings of the past as may be partially the case in
the cafés, clubs and restaurants of Moscow that self-consciously hark back to
Soviet times.
Peters also considers the universal nature of nostalgia to have archetypal roots:

The fact that nostalgia is a universal human experience, that the experience has a
specific quality, and that the feeling that all parts of one’s self are involved, makes it
both possible and useful to regard nostalgia as an archetypal experience.
(Peters 1985, p. 137)

This view makes it easier to hold on to the bipolar nature of nostalgia and to
recognize its teleological aspect, a function I wish to emphasize in this article. Thus
Peters sees nostalgia as having the potential to promote individuation through
Jung’s view of regression as reculer pour mieux sauter (going back in order to go
forward). For example, he writes,

just as someone far from home and homesick is more likely to go home, and often
finds new resources (I think too of going to the sea, or rather the seashore where the
land emerges from the sea, for holidays and restoration) which enable a going forward
again, just so can it be with persons suffering with nostalgia who are not in a distant
land or culture – a movement toward primary union is activated.
(ibid., p. 138)

This suggests that the regressive aspect of nostalgia may also have a positive
function similar to that described by those authors quoted earlier, such as
Heidegger and Boym who link nostalgia with the quest for wholeness which,
in Jungian terms, is equivalent to individuation. When the links with the past
have become broken and fragmented, there may be a need to return to a time
before the loss in order to recover what can be saved and mourn what
cannot be. Only then is it possible to move on with a new integration. This
may be the case either for individuals or an entire culture, as is the case in
Russia today.
The importance of true nostalgia in linking past and present is emphasized by
Volkan who associates nostalgia with the mourning process and asserts that
nostalgia as an affect is ‘attached to linking objects and phenomena or may
itself function as a linking phenomenon’ (Volkan 1981, p. 176), an aspect also
mentioned by Kaplan (1987) and Daniels (1985) who describes the aspect of
nostalgia that aims to restore a feeling of commonality with human society:
Nostalgia and lost identity 43

Nostalgia is . . . the yearning to return to an experience of community we imagine

hidden in home. . . all the homes, where. . . we think we will find our lost home: the
home of our everyday-life world, our world-as-community, and the community of
our world-as-home.
(Daniels 1985, р. 382)

Nostalgia in the experience of emigration

The bipolar approach taken by those authors who distinguish between ‘normal’
or ‘true’ nostalgia and ‘pathological’ or ‘false’ nostalgia enables us to simulta-
neously hold on to both a retrospective position and a prospective position
regarding nostalgia. This bipolar approach is often apparent in psychoanalytical
studies of immigrants which describe nostalgia as both a defensive function and
a connecting one. In accordance with the prospective point of view, nostalgia is
looked at as an integrative emotion, connecting up the lost past with the new
identity of the acquired culture.
In studies about immigrants, the land that has been left behind is often under-
stood as a symbol of mother. Paris notices that the use of such words as ‘moth-
erland and ‘fatherland’ suggests that the sense of nation can be considered a
psychological extension of the sense of family (Paris 1978). Thus, emigration
robs an individual of feelings of safety and connectedness to others provided
by the ‘holding function’ of the primary object, the ‘mother country’ (Lijtmaer
2001). It is worth noting that a new country can also be described in motherly
terms. Akhtar (1995) suggests that both countries may be referred to as
mothers: ‘the mother of symbiosis’ and ‘the mother of separation’.
Referring to the works of Margaret Mahler, Akhtar puts forward the concept
of a ‘third identification’ (following the first identification at the Oedipus stage
and its second version in adolescence) as a necessary inner transformation and a
condition of the successful adaptation of immigrants. In his extremely interest-
ing work, he discusses the process of integration into a new culture in terms of
the stages of separation-individuation:

the immigrant finds himself ‘too far’ from his country of origin, a distance that he, like
the practicing phase toddler, might greatly enjoy for some time. Sooner or later,
however, the anxiety of having exceeded the symbiotic orbit surfaces. The immigrant’s
ego loses the support it had drawn from the familiar environment, climate, and
landscape—all unconsciously perceived as extensions of the mother (Krystal & Petty,
1963) . . . A fantasy of return to the home country also emerges. The wish, like the
rapprochement sub-phase child’s regressive search for symbiosis, is, however, not
free of ambivalence. In myriad rationalized ways, acting on it is postponed. Conditions
(e.g., saving money, earning a diploma) are set for one’s return but their fulfilment
eludes the immigrant like a mirage.
(Akhtar 1995, pp. 1061–62)

Akhtar suggests that this process ‘reminds one of a toddler crisscrossing the
space between himself and his mother’ (ibid., p. 1062) whose world is gradually
44 Elena Pourtova

expanded by cycles of exploration of the new and return to the old. In addition,
he writes,

The distance between two lands (two mothers, the ‘mother of symbiosis’ and the
‘mother of separation’) is also bridged by homo-ethnic ties in the new country, inter-
national phone calls, and listening to one’s native music. These serve as transitional
objects and help bring what has become externally ‘too far’ a bit nearer.
(ibid., p. 1062)

Thus, nostalgia may be seen as a return to the mother of symbiosis at the stage
of reunion leading to the integration of the past and the present in a movement
towards a more secure (and individuated) future. The ideal solution to the
difficulties of emigration is therefore a situation in which it is possible to move
to and fro between two ego-identities instead of allowing one condition to
colonize the other.
These descriptions of the dynamics of inner processes contain an interesting
notion about how the time of nostalgia’s appearance in the process of
acculturation determines its meaning. If nostalgia appears at the early stages
of emigration, then it may make a person fix on the feeling of loss and prevent
him from assimilating into a new culture. But there is another kind of immi-
grant who is more oriented towards integrating into the new environment
and is more active in overcoming the various difficulties of adaptation. They also
experience nostalgia, but later. Its appearance may be considered as a reflection
of inner integrative processes concerned with connecting up the old and new
identities in a way that would have been impossible at the earlier stages of assimi-
lation (Stepukhovich 2011).
I think that the internal situation of emigration is well illustrated in the story
about Lot and his family when they fled from the doomed city of Sodom
(Boulanger 2004). The story of Lot’s wife represents the early stage of nostalgia.
She looked back before having reached a safe distance and turned into a salt pillar
of nostalgia. However, the images of Lot and his daughters that survived represent
the second kind of emigration experience in which the immigrant becomes more in-
tegrated. Lot’s daughters believed that all men had been destroyed together with
the city of Sodom and in order to continue the family they made their father drunk
and each had father-daughter incest. They gave birth to children who became fore-
fathers of the ancient Arabs. They reflect an image of the desperation of loss and a
lack of faith in the future. They attempt to give birth to the future by force. The
third character is Lot. Having found out what had happened, he was horrified
and fled from his daughters. In an attempt to atone for his sins, he watered three
young plants every day bringing the water from the River Jordan, thus walking
about 15 kilometres in the desert. They grew up into a single tree and later its
wood was used to make a cross to crucify Christ. Watering provides an image
of faith and patience in carrying out simple everyday tasks, being prepared to wait
until the great efforts of creating a new identity bear fruit that can grow up in a
Promised Land.
Nostalgia and lost identity 45

Clinical illustration
I would like to illustrate this thought with a short fragment of analytical work.
My client is a man of 38. He is the only child in the family. During the Soviet
times, his father was a high-ranking official at some ministry. His mother
was a musician. His parents belonged to the intellectuals of the 1960s.6
Almost all his parents’ friends emigrated. His parents, however, remained in
Russia, preserving the ideals of the 1960s and their love for the songs of
Vysotsky and Okudjava.7
The relations in the family are described as very warm. His parents did a lot
to encourage their son’s development. He went to an art school and was
involved in sports for many years. Moreover, his parents cultivated a feeling
of a fairytale in his life. Until the age of 10, he sincerely believed in the existence
of Santa Claus who wonderfully fulfilled all his desires for the New Year. In his
childhood, he was sure that when he grew up he would be a high-ranking offi-
cial like his father with the same attributes of Soviet success, including a good
car, a Bulgarian sheepskin coat and a leather diplomat briefcase.
His last school year coincided with the Perestroika. In order to enter a college
that would give him access to the career of a high-ranking state official, huge
bribes or good connections were needed and his father had none. He entered
the Institute for Physical Culture instead but soon quit it as non-prestigious.
He joined a criminal gang and was a gangster for a number of years, engaging
in racketeering and fraud. He left his parents and lived in rented apartments.
In the mid-nineties, when the state began to suppress organized crime, com-
petitive wars between criminal groups intensified. My client found himself in
a very dangerous situation. He had a conflict with his fellow criminals and at
the same time was under pressure from the institutions of the state. In order
to survive, he left all his money and got away from the criminal structures. As
a result, he had been in a depression for some years, experiencing fears of pros-
ecution and disintegration. At this time, he was out of work, moved from one
apartment to another and took to the bottle. He received several offers from
his fellow gangsters to organize new businesses with them but he refused
because he wanted to start an entirely new life.
He resumed his studies at the sports institute, began to train yoga groups and
applied for psychotherapeutic help, saying that he had come ‘to surrender’. This
meant that he was aware of his weak position and ready to give himself up to
the mercy of something greater than his ego control. He gave the impression
that he was in search of new ways of life not connected with the past. However,

6
Intellectuals of the 1960s—a subculture of the Soviet intelligentsia who were creatively active in
the period of the Khrushchev thaw. At the time of the Brezhnev Stagnation they were the opponents
of the regime, the dissidents.
7
Vladimir Vysotsky and Bulat Okudjava—poets and singers, reflecting in their texts the liberal
ideas of the 1960s intellectuals.
46 Elena Pourtova

I discerned his desire to connect the two parts of his life. On the one hand, there
were his feelings before the Perestroika and the fantasies about his future he had
at that time. On the other, there was his present life defined neither by the Soviet
past nor by the gangster one. This new life was not the result of that past but
rather a new identity being created on its ruins.
For the first two years of the analysis, his disappointment with the images
of his parents and his childhood attachment to them were consistently
denigrated. He recollected the fantastic childhood arranged by his parents
only with irony. He accused his parents of being incapable of adapting
themselves to the situation of the country’s breakdown because of their fine
freedom-loving ideals. His mother lost her job because her profession
was out of demand. The ministry in which his father worked ceased to
exist. He refused to participate in semi-legal business and got a job at a
commercial bank. My client considered his father’s work only as a loss of
his former status and ambitions.
But in his fierce attacks on his parents I heard something else, namely his nos-
talgia for a past in which he felt a connection with the world and a sense of his
own wholeness. I introduced this topic and his unconscious echoed the theme
with a wonderful dream in which he found himself in the land of his childhood.
He moved beyond the limits of the place known to him and came across half-
destroyed remains of huge statues. These were the images of some male deities
destroyed by time but still majestic. It was a part of his childhood world belong-
ing only to him and he could play there at the foot of huge columns.
In this dream, the majestic past is destroyed but continues to exist as a time-
less irremovable value, a numinous experience always accessible to him and
connecting him with the Self. He was shaken by this dream but consciously it
was difficult for him to relate this experience, not only to his past, but also to
his present condition. He associated the dream with the fall of the Tibetan State.
In a week, a detachment of colonizers destroyed what, it seemed, should have
been protected by the mystical forces of the sacred knowledge embodied in
the Tibetan State. No all-powerful protection had saved the monks from the
weapons of a brute force. It was the story of his own personal crash and deeply
felt disappointment. He agreed that his attacks on his parents defended him
from both the feeling of being attached to them and his disappointed expecta-
tions of their all-powerful protection of his fairytale child’s existence.
Both the dream about the destroyed statues and the story about the destroyed
Tibet became a turning point that allowed him to move beyond the pain
from the loss of the past and triggered a period of conscious grieving. At that
time, his nostalgia developed into a wish to revisit the past as an inner explora-
tion of the protected territory of his life that he had set aside for a long time. In
this inner exploration, the images of the different periods of his life began to
change: his childhood as the experience of wholeness, carefully preserved
by his parents, the social conflicts of the Soviet times successfully mediated,
his gangster period as an attempt to keep up his inflationary state and his
Nostalgia and lost identity 47

abandonment of the criminal circles that crushed him as the inevitable defla-
tion, restoring a more realistic self-perception.
Reading became another way in which his nostalgia was developing. My
client had always read a lot. In the first years of the therapy, he was interested
in reading socio-political publications and listening to the extremely liberal radio,
The Echo of Moscow. When he told me about it, I had a feeling that he chose
materials that caused him a lot of pain and paralysed him. It was similar to Lot’s
wife turned into a salt pillar: it was impossible to break away and to move
forward. Later he changed his reading material to historical, Russian classical
and social and political literature of the nineteenth century.8 He was interested
in studies of the social and political reasons that allowed the Revolution to
succeed. He tried to comprehend why his ‘personal Tibet’ broke up and whether
there was any reason to preserve it. He was convinced again and again that neither
the pre-revolutionary Russia, nor Tibet, nor his child’s ideals of the Soviet times
could possibly be preserved.
At the same time, his nostalgic forays began to produce a paradoxical result. He
began to have a feeling of greater connection and stability as if he had a steady
shore inside allowing him to look safely into the past without being afraid of losing
touch with the present. From this new internal position, he could realize what losses
had been suffered and live through the process of lamentation. As a result, some
things may well have to be abandoned while others may be regarded as divine
parts, not destroyed by external changes but requiring new forms of representation.

Conclusion
Some fairytales and myths like Beauty and the Beast9 and Cupid and Psyche
have a popular turn of the plot about the inevitability of nostalgia and its
function in transforming identity. In such stories, a hero or a heroine finds them-
selves in a beautiful land and develops a close relationship with the ruler of this
land, as if they intended to stay there for good. However, at some point, they
become filled with nostalgia for their native place and wish to return home to
see their relatives. As a rule, returning home and the stories about the happy life
in a foreign land stir up envy in the relatives and they try to destroy the hero’s
new relationships. But, by living through the inevitable ordeals, the hero even-
tually succeeds in breaking with his native home and undergoes transformation,
thus becoming a co-owner of the wonderful new land. I think this is an impor-
tant description of the dynamic transformations of a personality getting into
relationship with a new outer or inner space. In spite of the appeal of the new, a

8
e.g., Classical Russian literature (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky) and the social novels of Belinsky and
Chernyshevsky.
9
In Russia, Beauty and the Beast is known mainly via its adaptation in the 1850s by Sergey
Aksakov as The Scarlet Flower.
48 Elena Pourtova

pang of nostalgia, i.e., a desire to return to the past, is bound to arise at a certain
moment. Despite the danger connected with nostalgia, it is necessary to yield to
it so that the past and the present can be taken into the personality and form an
integrated vector for the future.
Nostalgia, an excellent film of the Russian director, Andrey Tarkovsky,
vividly shows us how this conjunction is established within the psyche. Tarkovsky
said that he had tried

to render the state of a person who came into a deep conflict with the world and himself,
who is not able to strike a balance between reality and a desired harmony, who, therefore,
experiences nostalgia not only because of the geographical remoteness from the Mother-
land, but because of his global sadness in respect of the wholeness of existence.
(Abbot 1989)

The protagonist of this film, a homesick Russian writer living in Italy, tries to
carry a burning candle several times from one wall of a destroyed temple to
the other. The hero gives no explanation of such an incomprehensible action.
But taking into account the tension of his three attempts to carry the candle
and to keep alight the flame, its highly significant personal meaning for the hero
becomes understandable. With a great deal of effort, the hero finally manages to
carry the burning candle successfully to the other wall. After that, a picture of
his native home appears on the screen. At first, this looks like a successful
ending. However, as the camera pans upwards, we see that the Russian land-
scape with the hero’s relatives is placed within the walls of the destroyed Italian
temple. The situation is resolved not by the choice of either this or that but by
the conjunction of this and that.
In this paper, I have described the phenomenon of nostalgia for the Soviet
Union in modern Russia and have examined a number of analytic studies of
nostalgia as a means of placing this phenomenon in a broader context. I would
particularly like to emphasize an understanding of nostalgia that sees it as an
intentional work of the soul, a way of attaining wholeness. I have also discussed
the function of nostalgia in restoring the identity of immigrants and, in particular,
the distinction between early and late onset of nostalgia. In my opinion, the
phenomenon of nostalgia is a reflection of changes taking place in the psyche when
the foundations of one’s own life need to be reviewed and revised. The loss of
important parts of the soul determines the comprehension or incomprehension of
one’s identity, the answer or non-answer to the question of who I am.
In the clinical vignette, I tried to show how the legitimization of nostalgia in
psychotherapy and its recognition as a significant work of the soul can trigger
the processes of grieving and integrating the past with the present.
In my opinion, the phenomenon of nostalgia does not so much accompany the
process of living through losses as gives a signal that a new identity is emerging.
In other words, late onset nostalgia arises when the losses have already been lived
through and a new internal position is appearing, indicating a new identity that can
allow personal history and corresponding aspects of the soul to be acknowledged
Nostalgia and lost identity 49

as ‘the past’ but in a way that does not have to be concretely actualized and which is
no longer definitive of the self.

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

La nostalgie de l’Union Soviétique est aujourd’hui un phénomène social majeur en Russie

en raison des pertes irrévocables du passé récent pendant lequel les citoyens soviétiques
devinrent involontairement des immigrants dans leur propre pays. En référence aux débats
sur la nostalgie dans la littérature philosophique et psychanalytique, je pense que la
nostalgie peut représenter soit une régression défensive vers le passé, soit un effort de
progression vers une totalité en se reconnectant avec ce qui a été perdu au service d’une plus
grande intégration. Je compare ceci au processus d’adaptation observé chez les immigrants
et l’illustre avec le cas clinique d’un jeune homme se confrontant avec la perte et le
changement dans l’ère post-soviétique. Quand la nostalgie est reconnue comme expérience
émotionnelle légitime, cela peut faciliter le deuil et aider à l’intégration du passé avec le
présent, ainsi qu’au développement d’une identité nouvelle.

Die Sehnsucht nach der Sowjetunion stellt im heutigen Rußland eines der größten
sozialen Phänomene dar welches aus den unwiderruflichen Verlusten der jüngeren
Vergangenheit resultiert, durch die sowjetische Bürger unfreiwillig zu Immigranten
in ihrem eigenen Lande wurden. Unter Bezugnahme auf Diskussionen zum Thema
Sehnsucht in philosophischer und psychoanalytischer Literatur hypostasiere ich, das
Sehnsucht entweder eine abwehrhafte Regression in die Vergangenheit, oder ein
progressives Streben nach Ganzheit durch Wiederverbinden mit etwas bedeutet, was im
Dienste einer größeren Integration verloren wurde. Ich vergleiche dies mit dem Prozeß der
Adaption, wie er bei Immigranten beobachtbar ist und füge das klinische Beispiel eines
jungen Mannes an, der sich mit Verlust und Wandel in der post-sowjetischen Ära
auseinander setzt. Wenn Sehnsucht als legitime emotionale Erfahrung gesehen wird, kann
sie Trauerarbeit unterstützen und es ermöglichen, die Vergangenheit in die Gegenwart zu
integrieren und so eine neue Identität zu entwickeln.

Uno dei maggiori fenomeni in Russia oggi è la nostalgia per l’Unione Sovietica dovuta
alle irrimediabili perdite del recente passato durante il quale cittadini Sovietici divennero
involontariamente immigrati nel loro stesso paese. Riferendomi alle discussioni sulla
nostalgia nella letteratura filosofica e psicoanalitica penso che la nostalgia possa rappre-
sentare sia una regressione difensiva verso il passato che uno sforzo per progredire verso
la totalità attraverso il riconnettersi con ciò che è stato perso perché ciò serva a una mag-
giore integrazione. Confronto ciò con i processi di adattamento visti negli immigranti e
presenterò con un esempio clinico di un giovane uomo che è venuto a patti con la perdita
e con il cambiamento nell’era post-Sovietica. Quando la nostalgia viene riconosciuta
come esperienza emotiva legittima, ciò può facilitare il lutto e rendere possibile l’integra-
zione del passato con il presente e lo sviluppo di una nuova identità.
50 Elena Pourtova

Ностальгия по Советскому Союзу – значительный социальный феномен в

сегодняшней России, возникший вследствие неизбежных потерь, связанных
с недавним прошлым, в котором советские граждане невольно превратились
в иммигрантов в своей собственной стране. Ссылаясь на обсуждение темы
ностальгии в философской и психоаналитической литературе, я предполагаю,
что ностальгия может являть собой или защитную регрессию к прошлому,
или прогрессивное стремление к целостности через воссоединение с тем, что
было утрачено, во имя большей интегрированности. Я сравниваю это с
процессами адаптации, наблюдаемыми у иммигрантов, и привожу кли-
ническую иллюстрацию – случай молодого человека, справлявшегося с утра-
той и изменениями в пост-советскую эпоху. Когда ностальгия признается как
допустимое неподдельное эмоциональное переживание, она может помочь
гореванию и обеспечить интеграцию прошлого с настоящим, служа формиро-
ванию новой идентичности.

La Nostalgia por la Unión Soviética es un fenómeno social d envergadura en la Rusia ac-

tual debido a las pérdidas irrevocables que han sufrido los antiguos ciudadanos soviéti-
cos en el pasado reciente los cuales involuntariamente se convirtieron en inmigrantes en
su propio país. El relación a la discusión sobre la nostalgia en la literatura filosófica y psi-
coanalítica, sugiero que la nostalgia puede representar una defensa regresiva hacia el
pasado o bien una actitud progresiva que busca la totalidad por medio de una reconex-
ión con lo perdido al servicio de una mayor integración. Comparo esto con los procesos
de adaptación estudiados en inmigrantes y traigo a colación un caso clínico ilustrativo de
un joven que se reconcilia con la pérdida y el cambio que sufre en la era post-soviética.
Cuando la nostalgia es reconocida como una experiencia emocional legítima puede facil-
itar el duelo y permitir la integración del pasado con el presente así como el desarrollo de
una nueva identidad.

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[MS first received February 2010; final version September 2012]