Malignant Nostalgia

Course overview

Presentation: For psychoanalysis, all wishing is grounded in longing, in trying to find, or refind, lost objects. We nostalgically long for what we cannot have. This nostalgia can be used generatively, driving us toward possibility, toward "maybe if". This "maybe if' resembles faith, a dogged movement toward a future that, in the moment, can only be imagined. In benign nostalgia, we search for what we know we cannot find and we endure the slight melancholy attached to this knowledge. Nostalgia turns malignant, however, when we abandon that knowledge. We refuse melancholy; we refuse loss. We will find what we are looking for. We must find it. No replacements, no approximations. The thing lost will again be found. Nostalgia stripped of loss becomes malignant. These notions will be illustrated by the presentation of personal, social and clinical examples. Presenter: Donald Moss, MD, has been in full-time psychoanalytic practice in New York City for 40 years. Winner of the Haskell Norman Prize for excellence in psychoanalysis, member of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis, and author of five books (most recently Psychoanalysis in a Plague Year) and 60+ articles (most recently "Traumatizing Disorders of Everyday Life"). Dr. Moss serves on the faculty of New York Psychoanalytic Institute.