We're going in for interesting titles these days now. Today, our speaker is Doctor George Rousseau. He studied at Princeton University and taught at Harvard University. He has been Professor at UCLA, Regis Professor at King's College, Aberdeen, and he is currently a member of the Faculty of Modern History and Co Director of the Center for the History of Childhood at Oxford University. Dr. Rousseau is a cultural historian who works at the interface of literature and medicine, and he emphasizes the role of imaginative materials, literature, especially Diaries and biography, art and architecture, Music for the public, Understanding of Medicine, past and Present. His academic career has been built on interdisciplinary scholarship, and he has participated in many national and international debates about his triumphs and failures. He is the author of many books including Perilous Enlightenment, Pre and Postmodern Discourses, Sexual Historical, Enlightenment, Crossings, Pre and Postmodern Discourses, Anthropological Enlightenment Borders, Pre and Postmodern Discourses, Medical, Scientific, Medical and Scientific Hysteria. Beyond Freud, which was written with Selene Sherwalter, Sandra Gilman, and Helen King, then Gout, the Petition, Patrician Melody, Culture and Medicine, which was written with Roy Porter, Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History and Nervous Acts. His Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility and Children and Sexuality. The Greeks to the Great War. His topic for today is Nostalgia's Modernity, Modernity's Nostalgics. Great title. And please help me welcome Doctor Rousseau. Thank you very much. [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] Ludwig Boltzmann 18441906. Brilliant Viennese physicist, brilliant theorist of chemical gases, one of the founders of thermodynamics, a pillar of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna, colleague of Ernst Mach and Hermann von Helmholtz, was no Ulysses. He killed himself on September 5th, 19 O six, while on a summer holiday in Duino near Trieste, Italy, at a spot very close to the one where Rilke, the great poet, experienced the emotions captured in his own duino elegies. And I've been trying to identify the spot on the rock where Boltzmann jumped. Boltzmann had reflected on his life a year earlier in his memoir and remembered how his lectures in Vienna had been so packed with students streaming down the staircases into the humming university courtyards. And he recalled the far-flung places he had visited, the El Dorados, calibrating their culinary resonances to nostalgia for his childhood. I quote no. One who has traveled a lot will be surprised if I Boltzmann, talk about food and drink. This is not only an important factor but a central point. The essential aspect, Boltzmann, when traveling is to maintain the body's health so it can confront. [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] Thank you, I'm still in Boltzmann. The essential aspect when traveling is to maintain the body's health so it can confront a multitude of foreign influences and especially preserve the stomach, the fastidious Viennese stomach. Do not tell me this is still all in the Boltzmann paragraph. Do not tell me I think this way because my age has returned me to my childhood. I believe this even as a child. No Viennese man can eat his goulash MIT that is, goulash with everything else on it, including knocker noodles, without contemplating the way nostalgia is aroused in the Swiss, the forever Austrian Swiss antimony, by the memory of Kureihen, that wonderful German word for songs of nostalgia and bells in parallel steel bolts. When the Viennese think of their Ghislach mid noodles, food with noodles, end of Boltzmann. Now Boltzmann's analogy of bells and food is unoriginal. Poets across Europe had invoked it, as had Dante, centuries earlier, when wittily commenting how salty another's bread always tastes while in exile. More recently, Thomas Hardy, the great poet and writer across the English Channel, having turned poet at the end of the 20th century, immersed himself in Kuraichen, that is, in Songs of Nostalgia, which formed a basis for Hardy's own nostalgics. Boltzmann's passage, his food passage, is noteworthy for what it suppresses. The death of his father as an adolescent boy, his upset in the ongoing rivalry with his colleague, the prominent physicist Ernst Mach, destined to become the voice of scientific positivism by the end of the century, most pointedly for Boltzmann's inability to understand how he, Boltzmann fell behind his crippling sense of outsiderdom in incessant academic migrations from pillar to post. Now biographically, Boltzmann had emigrated from his native Vienna to Heidelberg, from Heidelberg to Berlin, from Berlin to Leipzig, Leipzig to Munich, and many, many other universities, Even in state burglars. Gratz, where he met his future wife, married her, raised their children, and remained the longest he ever did. In one place, this corrosive sense of exile, Ous Ousenzita, tortured him. Boltzmann claimed that Mock's disgust of him viscerally poisoned him. He made him sick, he said in the stomach, and caused Boltzmann to vomit as assiduously as the Viennese goulash and canoodles he remembered at the end of his life. So Boltzmann abandoned Vienna yet again, and in 1900, leaving the place he had most called home, the place he identified with and loved the most in the world, while Mach remained in post. But when Mach, then by then a world famous man, retired in 19 O2 owing to poor health, Boltzmann returned to his students in Vienna in the hope. At long last the deity has given me what I want, to be free to lecture and research in my native university laboratory. But he soon discovered he could not rival Mach. Even the absent Mach and the old wounds hounded him even at home in Vienna. So unable to contain his trauma, he shot himself in the right temple at the age of 62, too close to his troubles to recognize he was not alone. Exile had, as all the literary historians know, his exile had become the condition of the modern. I don't have to begin with Joyce and list all the Exiles of modernity. The point makes itself now. Boltzmann never used the word traumatish or its nervous verbal correlatives to describe his condition. But his Middle European culture was imbued with the concept trauma based on memory, as its epistemological pillar had arrived in Middle Europe during the 1880s, two decades before Boltzmann's death. It replaced Boltzmann's sense of depression that is psychologically his in his language, his Nita gedroch, his low spirits, and obliterated his old lingering, annoying nostalgia. His Heimvey that medical condition of longing of Zane Zucht with which he was so intimate by dint of unrelenting transplantations. Academically. [no speech detected] An obscure Alsatian physician, Johannes Hoffer was the first, the very first to spot the afflictive Hindvey in his patients, and he christened it nostalgia, a new word, when he wrote it first for the very first time in 1688. And there are many wonderful copies of this book in this great library if you ever want to see them. Hoffer yoked its chief symptom, longing for the home, for the Nostos, the Greek word for home, as conceptual home, rather than oikos, which is the literal home. And in Greek, that's a very important distinction between Nostos and Oikos. Hoffer linked it to its pathology, in other words, Algeria the Greek for illness, and noticed the symptoms of the Nostos, the longing for the home, and the symptoms it produced eating disorder, sleeplessness, low spirits, withdrawal and even suicide. But Hoffer endowed little attention on home itself. In his new military condition, he assumed home to be a stable category wherever the soldier came from, without pondering subtle differences between literal and symbolic homes and the differences between their biogeographies and psychological atmospheres. From Hoffer onward, nostalgia developed a medical profile that was culturally assimilated to denote all forms of yearning, all chronic longings, with or without pathological symptoms. But Hoffer's medicalization and his successes in Europe were insufficiently detailed to configure nostalgia's versions of memory and its traumatic components. It was a military condition for Hoffer and read this book if you have some time, Very short. He doesn't know what the condition is, but he knows that many of his soldiers are dying of it. The only cure is to send them home but the late 19th century. All this has been accomplished by the post 819-1880 medical theory. All the simplistic notions of defective memory on which so much of earlier nostalgia had been scripted and grafted are gone. So you have a century of developmental theory, from 1680 to about 1780, and then another 1 from 1780 to 1880. Nostalgia conditions like later Boltzmann's could still evoke the old medical diagnosis, claiming that it arose from defective anatomical organs and overworked digestive systems. That is a purely physical etiology for the condition. But in Middle Europe, especially in medical centers at the forefront of the new psychology, such as Berlin and Vienna, the depression diagnosis, which included Heimve nostalgia, wasn't viewed as inherently traumatic, traumatic, paradoxically and specifically because trauma implicated non organic memory. And this is the paradigm shift. It's all in the memory for Boltzmann, The recollection of places for which he neurotically craved by Vienna, and the relationships from which he viscerally recoiled. His horrible academic fuge with his colleague Mark, proved to be the main clues. They were primal wounds in the new 1890s developing Freudian scene. [no speech detected] The old Enlightenment nostalgia built on Huffer's diagnosis was an illness of spatial mobility, devoid of memory. This was its oddity. The nostalgic patient glowingly remembered. The old country, of course. Its sounds, its smells, its foods, as Boltzmann had quipped, as the Swiss said, the particular milk in my valley, which is so different from other kinds of milk. But the malady itself was grounded in anatomic pathology, said to be lodged in the patient's body, his organs and Physiology, as when Leopold Algenburger, for example. I'm sorry this isn't clearer. It's a title page. The Austrian physician, famous for tapping lightly on the chest to discover the heart's underlying function in tissues and nearby organs, invented percussion as a diagnostic technique After Algenburger I said to have been, you know, one of the founders of modern medicine after Algonbroker documented his nostalgic patients, especially those who had killed themselves from its ravages as having suffered blood lesions. And in this work on diseases of the chest, Algonbroker has a whole section on the cardial area and the Nostalgic's lesions of the heart. So there's no question by the end of the 18th century that we're talking about a very physical disease in nostalgia. Furthermore, the old nostalgia diagnosis was based on undivided subjectivity in an undivided society, little Swiss villages which seem organically whole, still perceived as more or less integral and unsplintered transplantations. Depression was specifically nostalgic for the ways that both punctured self and punctured society in Boltzmann case, owing to a tortured childhood. I mean, we could perform a psychoanalysis upon him, which hasn't been done as far as I know, which would be a very interesting case for it, followed by unrelenting academic migrations and lingering feuds. The first spatial the movements, the other psychological yet combining The two combining to confound his sense of space and time. But in Middle European scientific centers, the old nostalgia, diagnosis as a monolithic malady of diseased bodies in disturbed minds, practically disappeared by the 1880s. Equally crucial, the old nostalgia had been a condition rife in the military amongst sailors and soldiers. Scientists like Boltzmann could suffer from it, but their memories were rarely implicated, that is, in diagnosis anyway. The new late 19th century nostalgia instead centered on the absence of memory, at least on separation from the old pre romantic notion of memory as neurophysiological, conveyed through neural pathways subjected to anatomical differentiation, and existing wholly in linear rather than psychological time. Now, if they could have debated nostalgia, I think the proponents of both versions would have agreed. It was rampant in modern 19th century society, in the sense that historians of medicine speak about diseases of civilization. But they would have fundamentally disagreed about its causes. The old nostalgia replacing everything in defective neuroanatomy. Hoffer to Algonbrugger, the new nostalgia on wounded memory that was anything but anatomical. And in this post, Conte In view of memory, it is absolutely crucial to recognize, especially for those you know. If we have doctors in the audience have patients with memory problems, It is crucial in that post Conte in world to recognize that this is a transcendental form of memory. Now trauma did not exist in the vocabulary of the old nostalgia which invoked other words for its physical effects, such words as agony, blow, collapse, derangement, disturbance, and concepts of shock, upheaval and wound to describe the all important psychological realm. In the old model, all nostalgic types manifested a memory that functioned. Through lucky an association, this object that place or this thought producing by association those disturbed passions or those emotions by an association in the sympathetic nervous system, The new nostalgia diagnosis retain the somatic symptoms, operating as an inexplicit, applicable, uncanny sympathy. I mean, Freud will call it an Unheimlich sympathy between bodily organs, but now lorded over by a non associationist, the Postconti anonisationist, non physicalist memory. Also, the new version was somatically coordinated, but existed in psychological rather than linear time. The delayed reaction, as Freud would later demonstrate, was crucial. Deranged memory, especially its losses and gaps, was a response to prior trauma. Not merely spatial trauma. You know, transplantation, migration, the soldiers, loss of homeland, but a severe disturbance of any type without the geographical imperative, especially interpersonal, emotional, sexual or aesthetic. Hence Boltzmann and Mach, who don't fulfill the spatial imperative. The aesthetic variety afflicted artists, of course, as well as those who profoundly appreciated the arts in the 19th century. Paris immersion in a painting, in a musical composition, in sculpture or novels, could as acutely prompt traumatic response as geographical transplantation. [no speech detected] Now all three of the primary theorists of the new traumatic nostalgia were Europeans. Let us be very clear, this is a European condition. Wherever else it may go, it begins in middle Europe. Pierre Jeanet, Sigmund Freud, and Carly Ospers, the three main, if you will, archivists and architects of the condition in modernity. The British will not even use the word trauma in the psychological sense until the 1880s, when they import it from the American Harvard professor William James, who writes that certain reminiscences of the shock fall into the subliminal consciousness, where they can only be discovered in hypenoid states, and if left there, they act as permanent psychic trauma to thorns within the spirit. End Quote. That's the first use, the very first use of the word trauma in our psychological sense in the English language. But notice how very late it is. In the 1880s, the French Jeanet expounded his version in The Mental State of Hystericals 1894, whose disturbance he believed originated in a specific set of traumatic events. His cure existed in dislodgement of the E Day fix that the event had actually occurred. You must uproot that E Day Fix notion. This was much more crucial for Jeanet than the memory of the distant event itself. It's the uprooting. The E Day fix must be eradicated rather than merely brought to consciousness. But the E Day fix requires memory. Remove memory, memory of the distant event, even if the event had not occurred, or remove the state of the unconscious, which also depended on memory. And Janae thought his system would unravel. So 1880s. Already memory is the crucial category in this construction of trauma. Janae aimed to cure his traumatics by telling them a so-called lie of which he was perfectly conscious, and persuading them to take false memory as if it were truth, a kind of transplantation. Now turning to the second to Freud, memory and trauma were prevalent throughout his early system and function centrally, of course, as you know, in his development of hysteria and psychoanalysis. Suffice it to say, without labouring it, that even in the early Freud, who has not yet launched his psychoanalysis, trauma is paramount. But ladies and gentlemen, and this may be the interesting point for the history of medicine. It was Carl Yaspers riding in 19 O 4, just as Boltzmann was being driven to suicide, who must give us pause. And I will take that opportunity to just take a pause for a sip of water. [no speech detected] We think of Carl Yaspers as a prominent 20th century German philosopher of existentialism, as an exponent of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, who had famous correspondences stretching over many decades with Heidegger and Hannah Arndt. Like Freud before him, Yaspers also wrote famous psychoanalytical lives. He wrote Lives of Leonardo, Lives of Descartes, Lives of Max Weber, Lives of Goethe of Strindberg and Van Gogh, even though they aren't as well known as the Freudian ones. He Jaspers began life as a law student in Heidelberg in the 1890s and transferred to medicine, specifically to the vital new psychiatry. Upon becoming disenchanted with law, he would have become a prominent alienist or doctor, specializing in mental conditions like Jeanet and Freud if his nostalgics had not failed. This isn't so well documented in the history of medicine. Yasper entered medical school in 19 O2 at the age of 20 and wrote his rather brilliant dissertation on the nostalgia diagnosis in relation to crime in the next three years, publishing it in 1909 when he sent a copy to Sigmund Freud Gazemal Trifton, the specific title of the dissertation Heinve unvebrahen Nostalgia and Crime, a scarce work never translated into English. Don't bother looking for it in the catalog here in English, because it doesn't exist in English anywhere, and I think it would be very useful of some translator would translate it into an English into English because it's a rather interesting work. In any case. Yaspers was a rising star in Heidelberg, where he studied and worked at the hospital under the influential psychiatrist Emil Graplin, and here he wrote his well received medical dissertation on nostalgia and crime in Servant Girls. Before Yaspers analysis, no thorough psychological explanation existed for the high incidence of crime amongst the servant girls or what Yaspers called pathological nostalgia. He translated his nanny murderers into a dual trauma. The girls remember their deprived childhoods, and then, in recollection of their separation from their families, such injury obtained and such stress to the trauma that they were prepared to kill for it. So this is the sequence. At a much later, distant time, and in a new and strange house far away from their own houses, the girls throttled the infants in their care no differently than our nanny killers, Say the recent celebration case you remember of the British girl in New Jersey, which springs to my mind in just the same way, in just this act of violence. They constitute Freud's delayed reaction, the Abra reaction, the abreaction in another key for for Yaspers occurring amongst these desperately homesick servants. Now, Yaspers theory was predictably stillborn, for reasons not difficult to fathom. In 19 O 6. Hysteria was the buzzword he had ignored, especially the sexuality implicit in hysteria. Yaspers also seemed to resurrect nostalgia's forgotten pathology. You know that old nostalgia, devoid of its new sexual components. By nineteen O 6 the new hysteria of Charcot, who had only died recently, and whose disciples were exalting him far beyond Paris as the great apostle of hysteria. You know the Napoleon, if you will, of of the neuroses. It was Charcot who had said this old nostalgia must be wiped away forever. So when Yaspers reintroduces Heimvey, psalms hysteria without hysteria, the gesture appears itself rather nostalgic, a kind of throwback to an earlier epoch whose medical science by nineteen O 6 is outdated. So you might say in summary, in contrast to Janae's nostalgics and Freud's nostalgics, which were thoroughly submerged into hysteria, Yaspers rarely invokes the word Hindvay, although he is talking about it throughout his diagnosis. In two dozen brilliant cases and the book works, the thesis worked by interviewing the girls themselves, mostly in prison, and performing case studies of every case of the harm that they try to do to the to the children in their case. The most brilliant one being of Apollonia who kills, goes to jail for life and and speaks to Yaspers from the heart. Yaspers theory, I think, is more productively located if you step back from these cases by looking at its formation within late 19th century notions of the family romance, particularly when memories rage out of control. But more than violent memory, memory is at stake. For while the hysterics suffers from painful memories whose conflicted affect she would like to shed, but cannot shed because a proper Freudian in Freud's psychoanalysis, proper Freudian abreaction has not occurred in Yaspers. The nostalgic suffers from pleasurable memories she would like to re enact of the home, but which she cannot because she has been displaced from the one site promising such a satisfying fulfillment. Now this is very very interesting. So while the nostalgic remembers in pain like the girl in New Jersey, the hysteric remembers in the state of pleasure. Or to look to our man, to Boltzmann, to Boltzmann always recollecting his prior home in conditions of agony and who also will do some self harm to himself. Of course, there's another possibility, and that is that the nanny girl kills to prevent the child from suffering the very same pain that she has suffered. So you have yet a third possibility here. And when Boltzmann goes to court for one of the girls in one of the cases, he actually testifies. The judge doesn't say that this can fly, that she did it to prevent the child from ever knowing the misery of nostalgic separation from the home that the girl has faced. All three versions, Jeanet, Freud, and Jaspers, amplify what I might call memory trouble, but the uses to which the memories are put up very different and they diverge. For the hysteric, the fantasy following the original traumatic event is capable of repairing it. The fantasy heals it well, for the nostalgic was already tantalized by pleasing memories of the lost home. It converts her trauma, as it did for Apollonia, to crime and violence, which is the Nostalgic's only solution. If you yearn so much, you can only take this pain away by committing crime, Yasper says at the very end of the thesis. Even so, how did Apollonius sweet memories turn to murderous actions, and how can such a discrepancy between psychological reparation and criminal action exist? Memory recollected in both the state of pleasure and pain had originated in the Lost Home, the formerly intact home once imagined as perfectly integral. Jasper's killer. Nannies are traumatized by their fantasies of the recollected Home. They have left, You know, flawless, loving, happy, warm, the hearth. While Freud's hysterics remember only incest, sacrifice, abuse, and violence. Historically, in biography, the past homes of both had in fact been unhappy. Jaspers presents home as uniformly integral, unblemished in the way those pretty thatched rose clad cottages in England are intact among sentimental, you might say romantic landscape painters. So you have two totally different versions of home here. Enter Freud, of course, with his famous essay The Family Romance, Defamil in Homand, and Artica, the Family Romance of Neurotics, embedding his Freud's notion from a decade earlier that dysfunctional homes, violent and sexually transgressive, were limited to the seriously neurotic. But now, a decade later, in 19 O 9, just at the time Freud was organizing the very first International Congress in Psychoanalysis in Salzburg, he broadened the idea to include all families. That's a very important point for Freudian scholars, that Freud changed the notion of the original home and what what was remembered about that home now. Freud made that change without any knowledge of the young Yaspers. He never read the faces and danced around hind vase on Nostalgia's new profile, never invoking the word. At the end of the First World War, Freud published a very famous essay called The Uncanny, whose German translation is, of course, Unheimless, unhomely, literally the unhomely. The translation is not quite satisfactory. Much is lost in that translation, as it often is in translation. And Freud himself noted the links between the uncanny as a frightening place and the unhomely as a terrifying precinct necessary lying outside the familiar, friendly home. So Freud does have a sort of sense of the the Heimlich and the on Heimlich, but it's a very different one from Yaspers. Geographical displace displacement required a new theory of experience, Freud thought, capable of accounting for the nostalgics fail symbolism in retrieving the past, IE the ability to view new experience flexibly in light of its former contexts and symbols. But Jaspers did not see it this way, and chemist physicist Boltzmann, the poor victim of of Dueno, probably knew nothing. At least I can find nothing biographically of these new theories. Boltzmann suffered and told himself a very different story about how happy he could be in his real home in Vienna if only certain conditions could obtain, if he could go back to his professorship in Vienna, and if somehow Mach would either disappear or evaporate. Now, despite Jasper's precious insights, well, you could actually say precocious insights. He's only 21 when he makes them. He had not elaborated the complex symbolism of memory in his killer servant girls, nor nor grasp, I think, the degree to which neurosis was the displacement of the original event. Now, lodging in a traumatized memory, Jaspers presents these girls as having memories of loving warm homes, but omits the mechanisms by which their traumas were replaced by a new defectively recollecting affect. This is why Yaspers intuitively suggests that they uncannily they own Heimlesscher commit infanticide to save themselves and to Save the Children. So there it is. Yaspers actually puts the phrase into the text. They have not just done it for themselves, they have, I translate the German They have performed a double salvation by the killing of the ward. By murdering the children of their care. They save them. So goes his rationale, from a repetition of the horrendous dramatic separation from home they themselves endured. And when I've given this talk in Britain to various psychoanalytic institutes for whom someone like Bollbee is God, they love it and say, why didn't we know about Jasper's earlier theory in the history of medicine before Bollbee, Separation theory and all the anxiety over separation. Now Jaspers recognized that his local German girls, and most of them were from the Bob Vordenberg area while he was writing up his PhD in Heidelberg, that they would be permanent exiles. But he omitted linkage of their transplantation to German statesman Bismarck's real politique and its implicit war culture during the heyday of the German Empire, that is to say, Boltzmann. He's a doctor, he's a scientist working in a scientific laboratory. He has no sense at the beginning of the 20th century that if you're going to perform this kind of work, you have to construct an adequate context. All the things that we would say about a socio, economical, socio political context. He has no notion that Bismarck's politics, for example, could have anything to do with his agenda. There were what he knows is they were exiles from their families, exiles from their homes, exiles from themselves, but also exiles from society. A generation later, Freud will gaze deeply into the ways, and much more culturally. Also, that recent European conflagration, IE the First World War, had traumatized an entire civilization. Yet even before 1915, Freud intuits how the intact bourgeois family had been punctured by militarism. Soldiers called up local surges of protests, fires, looting, families uprooted in the dark of the night. In Germany, waves of traumatic migration crossing oceans in desperate attempts to avoid being blown to bits. His famous passage about war trauma at the beginning of Beyond the Pleasure Principle aims to assess this sweep. His conclusion was that the production of war neuroses in which memory loses its ability to process experience symbolically, instead of compulsively experiences the horror as repetition again and again. If Jaspers could have read Freud's essay in 19 O 6 just a decade earlier, he might have understood why his servant girls mutilate out of compulsive repetition. They cannot comprehend that their separation from home was not a destructive scene tantamount to their own infanticide, but a moment of chaotic intimacy. So there's the other possibility. Freud would say this murder is a yearning for the intimacy that they didn't have. The girls have lost the subtle ability to interpret old home. All they can do is displace the traumatic effect on to their memory. Now, if you work historically, as I tried to do, and view the Epic before this period, say 1820 to 1870, it amounts to a huge transition in nostalgia's theoretical and representational development. In the later period, from 1870, say to the beginning of the First World War, marks the inspiration of a new nostalgics, never codified as such except in the work, the medical historical work of Yaspers and based specifically on memory and trauma. Even before the First World War ended, Freud prophetically claimed that the shock effects of the last decade have necessitated a new theory of trauma. His explanation applied proleptically, you might say, to Jasper's pre war servant girls who were just as murderous as the soldiers in the trenches. Modernity's paradoxes though, here are noteworthy. The old nostalgia thrives on physical geographical distance, spatial distance. No spatial distance, no nostalgia. And even Yaspers, nanny killers were physically separated from their homes. Yet the New Post 1870 theories of trauma in Janae and Freud and company do not require this same memory. These are two almost contradictory notions of home then. And you could, you could, you could almost say that no physical home for the one, no nostalgia, and no psychological home. No nostalgia for the other. The word trauma itself and its cognates had been medical terms throughout the 17th and 18th century, but delimited to very concrete uses in medical texts. A gash, for example, was traumatic, A laceration was traumatic. A wound was traumatic. As late as 18-70, cognates are still being spun out, applied to traumatic eye cataracts, traumatic brain wounds and the injury of body parts, and it will continue into the very early 20th century. Concurrently, memory had not been traumatic. I would be very grateful if anyone can show me a usage in the English language of a of severely compromised memory before 1870 or 1880 as traumatic. So, paradoxically, it is only when memory becomes organically tied to the body's larger functioning at the end of the 19th century that its capital rises. William James, [no speech detected] the already mentioned Harvard professor and brother of the great novelist Henry James, made the point in a Seminole passage linking trauma and memory. I won't read the whole thing to you, but the point is that memory and trauma are are intrinsically connected. So here then, for the first time in the English language, you have the Sharko and psychic trauma to bring being brought together. And James did it, wrote about this in his newly launched Psychological Review in America, whose editors had commissioned him to epitomize his system of mnemonic memory classification, which he published famously, of course, in The Principles of Psychology in 1890. And James concludes that very famous essay with the words the existence of traumatic psychosis. It's one of the earliest uses. The existence of traumatic psychosis adds still more to the gravity of the prognosis. So in 1895, if you turn the dials in this Jaspers Freud story, in 1895, just at the moment that Oscar Wilde is defending himself in court in London, the various threads are being tied memory, the bow of memory, trauma, psychosis, hysteria, and the new nostalgics woven together. Even if the vernacular usage of trauma as denoting any distressing or disturbing psychological event, does not enter the colloquial language either in German or English until later in the 20th century, we can ask was there an equivalent spiritual fracture in human beings in the transplantations of the early modern world, beginning with the 18th century transatlantic migrations from Africa? There probably was, and contemporary historians have sought to retrieve the narrative encodings of these effects, but the new psychology has not yet been able to produce it or produce explanations for the event. I cannot emphasize, ladies and gentlemen, strongly enough, the paradoxes of the new nobility, mobility, and its diverse forms of exile, especially the riddles of displacement when the dislodgement is perceived internally. The expiring Boltzmann. There he is. I think the face says it all. The expiring Boltzmann found himself miserable amidst these developing theories and aesthetic movements. By nineteen O 5, he was steeped in disappointment, not merely nostalgically, we might say nostalgically depressed, but also bitter over some scientific failure. Some of his research did not go as well as he had hoped. Then in 19 O Six, while Ricard Strauss is presenting his wildly avant-garde opera Salome in Vienna, with its dissonant tones, outlandish costumes and dances, and freakishly rewriting the account of Saint John the Baptist. And while the first waves of modernism are bursting forth in the new century's opening decade, Boltzmann our friend Ludwig was literally at the end of his tether. He had no artistic outlets to channel his alienation, nor the Ulysses see an impulse any longer to adventure across new seas. His nostalgia was for Vienna, Haus Wien, the convenient container of his whole past, and it was all consuming. Gayorki Lukash, the great literary critic of Central Europe at the same moment, is a student studying in Berlin, and a decade later he will submit, I mean this talk could have been called submitted PhD theses that made people famous. A decade later he will submit his PhD thesis in not so far away, Budapest, which will decree. It's a thesis about the movement from epic as you know, to novel, which will decree that the novel as a literary form is, I translate, transcendentally homeless. If only Boltzmann could have read that thesis and taken solace from it. Or likewise if the psychiatrist could have read it and say you see, it's not just mental things but even literature seems to be transcendentally homeless. But Boltzmann, like Jasper Servant Girls, can only court crime. Neither Symbolist nor Impressionist, not surrealist or avant-garde, Boltzmann was a world class chemist who had become isolated in professional life and traumatically estranged from himself, a nightmare from which he wished to scream no less than Edvar Munch's lost soul, overwhelmed by existential angst in The Scream 1893, not so long before Boltzmann, like the Screamer, was hell. He was homeless. Homelessness was hell. If only poor Boltzmann had consulted Freud in 19 O Six, as composer Gustav Molerson would, perhaps he would have been able to save himself. But he did not. He'd just sang deeper and deeper and deeper into the quicksand of nostalgic depression. Did he scream at Do we know before he shot himself? Perhaps not, but he might have moaned, as Vasily Vasilic does to Nikki Douchia in Chekhov's famous story. Also nineteen O 6. What a topic for someone 19 O 6IN Deshwana Ghazang, glancing back at the tradition of departures from home in the Great Song cycle of Franz Schubert, which everyone in Vienna seems to have been reading that summer. In 19 O 6, the Chekhov's story de Shvana Gazan, at the moment that Boltzmann, not so far away on the shores of Lake Duino, shot himself. When Vasily screams, he says. And this is of course in the Chekhov's story. I have no home to go to. No home. No home. No home. Thank you very much. Thank [no speech detected] you for a very fascinating presentation. We have time for some questions and comment. [no speech detected] Please push the red button on your microphone so that we can see that you'd like a little airtime and then you can lean into the mic so that everyone can hear your question. Yes, I was just wondering, you talked a little bit about the opposite of nostalgia, but the idea that people leave home because they hate it so much and the memories are just terrible memories. You know, to the point you have people who are expats or people returning from sometimes war just can't go home because home is too painful. Have, did any of these psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors talk about that phenomenon? It's an excellent question. I ask all my medical friends in Oxford. They say nostalgia diagnosis. We don't call it that. But that's all we do. All day long, displanted Iraqis displanted, Afghanis displanted. They're suffering from terrible conditions. Psychological, mental, physical. You mean this was a medical condition from the 17th century? Nothing new about it to them. That's what they do in their practice all day long. What happened is the death of a diagnosis. The death of a conditioner. I mean, during the American Civil War, If you read the historical medical literature, tons of nostalgia. The America. You could write doctoral dissertations on the nostalgia diagnosis during the American Civil War. They're in this building. Read some of them. But today, in the late 20th century, early 21st century nostalgia everywhere around us because of the condition of the migrant, the condition of the exiled. It's called in universities, migration studies and the perils. You know, the illnesses, the maladies of migration studies. How do you integrate? How do you do this thing? And they get sick, and they are sick. And what makes many of these people sick is that separation, which is a very different kind of nostalgia. Then, when I was at Harvard, I asked Lewis Mumford a question from which he's never forgiven me in public at a talk, I said, Lewis, you hate the 20th century. You hate the 19th century. You hate the 18th century. He's dead now I can say this. When would you have liked to live? And he replied, not even 5th century Athens. So you see, that's another kind of longing. If you're really longing to live in 5th century Athens, that's another kind of hind vey than the condition of these people who are really suffering. Look, when I came through immigration 48 hours ago, I was told when I produced my American past, but I always use the American one because it's easier than I now have a British one as well. Welcome home. And she doesn't know. She's saying it to a scholar who works on home all the time. Welcome home. And I feel like saying it's not quite home anymore. You see, that definition of home must be problematized. It must be wholly unpacked now. We have a discipline for that, a subject migration studies. I don't know about it in America, but it's a huge field in Europe. Huge. And we need it because the world, as we become more and more global, everybody is the girl who served me breakfast this morning. She's going back to Ethiopia in two weeks. You're from Ethiopia. She lives in Washington. What is home anymore? The whole thing needs to be unpacked. [no speech detected] [no speech detected] 2 part question The girl who served you breakfast this morning and both of us yesterday morning. I think we had some discussion that you knew where Addis Ababa was, but many people around don't in this country. What do you think that says about how people feel about migration in this country versus Europe? The second part of the question is, earlier in the talk you mentioned trauma. And what do you think about the notions of trauma you talked about today compared to what we now call post traumatic stress disorder? What would this dialogue you mentioned say to that current diagnosis? I will try to address the question by putting them together because I think there is a bridge. There is a couple of yoke, an architectural couple of that is the huge fundamental shift in trauma theory was from the physicalist 1 to the, you might say, psychological one. This is the break, and if you will, in the Foucauldian sense, that's the break. This doesn't mean they're mutually exclusive. They overlap, they come together. But the earlier view really is physicalist, and the old of You incorporates the physicalist but is predominantly psychological. Now philosophers know this is the old mind body problem. This is the dualism monism Riddle that no one can get very far with, and modern medicine hasn't gotten far with it. Pharmacology doesn't have answers for it. It's very, very complex. So when a patient walks into a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst or psychotherapist or office and suffering from some kind of trauma, the dualistic approach isn't going to get anywhere. The monastic approach is also going to be flawed because you've got to label certain things to get the vectors of progress. In the particular diagnosis, I don't know how you would, how you would separate them, how you would possibly untangle this trauma thing. And we probably are as well as we can be with with pharmacology. We don't really have. I'm no friend of pharmacology, but if I was severely depressed, I can tell you that I would take their medicines, because we don't. We don't have others, so many other choices. I would of course go into psychotherapy as well, but I would also take their pharmacological the the great thing about Yaspers is that he should have killed himself rather than Boltzmann. I mean the the irony of this. I almost would like to write a novel about the thing. Why didn't Yaspers kill himself? He writes this brilliant dissertation. He sends it to Freud. Freud either wipes it out of his desk or won't read it. It has no sex in it. I mean, that's the bottom line. It's not jazzy, it's not cool. It's of no interest. Yet Freud at the same time is writing that family romance, and it's that's very important for Freudian theory, neurotic in relation to the family. I think that earlier question was trying to get at that. So having gotten nowhere, changes, instead of being Jaspers, the next Jeanet, the next Charcot, the next Freud. He becomes a philosopher, he performs another nostalgic act. He is very successful, it's true, but he should have killed himself rather than poor Boltzmann. You know that in Vienna you cannot give this talk. In Vienna it hits too many nerves, even a century later, because of Mach. And that business is terrible. Everyone who's in the Academy knows about this hatred. And of course, I tell them well, in America we have some of our own academic rivalries that might come close to this difficulty between Mach and Boltzmann [no speech detected] towards the back. Yes, just a footnote observation. I wonder whether the story of Apollonia was sort of reflected in Edgar Wright's great trilogy, The Highmont series that was broadcast on German television over a series of years. It's now available in English, so that's a good, accessible study of how from 1919 to 2002, the whole German psyche has wrestled in a very large scale with those issues that you're raising about the the definition of nostalgia, Heimve and all that. I didn't know. It's available in English now. Yes, it's a it's not a very good DVD rendering, but it's a DVD with subtitles that maybe I can get the reference from you. Yes, it's it's on Amazon. I found it there some time ago, but thank you, Doctor. I just wanted to ask, would it be your personal opinion that if Boltzmann had never left being and never met Mach, he would have lived a contented, tranquil life? Yeah, isn't that the $64,000 question? If he had never met Mach, he would have produced a Mach somehow or somewhere. I think that Boltzmann's envy, I would almost call it megalomaniacal envy, almost a kind of paranoid envy, was so great that whoever was there would have satisfied that condition for him. That's my sense. There's no biography, by the way, of Boltzmann that deals with this. It's just Boltzmann, It's chemist Boltzmann. Thermodynamics. Boltzmann, you know, in the German wiser Schafliker sense of history, of science, they don't want to tell these stories about their scientists. You know, when certain historians of medicine dig deep into the lives of these people and find out what their lives were really like, also the other side of the story, what did Mach think of Boltzmann? Well, if you look in the the Austrian archives, it's a wonderful man. He's a model colleague. What did he privately think? He knew what Boltzmann thought, of course, and after the death. So he's ailing. But he also has a good sense of why Boltzmann jumped off the cliffs. And do we know? Sorry to ask you a second question, but the talk kind of had two issues that I was wondering about with the study on the girls who killed the the nannies who killed the children in their charge. Just today in Great Britain there was a conviction for a man, a Saudi gentleman who had a servant who he killed. I was just wondering, is there any discussion on abuse by the new family that, you know, the host family, the employers? Was there any discussion in his book about whether that might have caused a rift, you know, this nostalgia, because they were being abused or because something had happened to them while they were in that house and that they were really saving them? Because if they're under abuse and they really are saving the child from what they perceive as that abuse. If only it was so simple. If only Gospers actually asks them in the interviews how they have been treated, at least the ones that he can interview. You know, they're not all available, and most of them say in the case histories that they were treated rather well. There's very little sense of, you know what we might say? Abuse, emotional abuse, attack, harassment, bodily abuse. There's very little of that. So the conclusion of the Ospers is that the memory of of their home is so ingrained and painful to them that they commit this crime. You can have a play with Freud watching the diagnosis and the interviews and Freud will say no, no, no, it's wrong. You see, this is what I meant about in answer to this gentleman's question about Mach, It's wrong. It's all wrong because he doesn't see the sexual underlying elements and you can see how Freud would would unpack those. Jaspers doesn't see it in his nostalgics. It's memory. Jaspers is our medical philosopher of memory. Boyd is our philosopher of sexuality. There's a huge difference. Hi, I liked your comment about the problem of home. Could you talk to the problem of nostalgia as something that has gone toward being seen as more normal rather than a disease, So that the Doctor's assumption that that's all we do, as you'd said in Britain, becomes surprising? That Once Upon a time nostalgia could be seen as a disease, although it's being encountered in patients every day as something to today that we don't look at. So maybe explicitly, but as a very normal activity of people who get older. So what I'm questioning or asking you is how problematic is nostalgia As normal, nostalgia as pathology, and nostalgia as something that one does is, yes, excellent question. The normal and the pathological. Well, on the normal creative side, Joyce is in Trieste too. Joyce is in Zurich. He's being very creative, beautifully nostalgic. He's not killing anyone. What's the problem? What's the difference? Is there good exile and bad exile? Is there good nostalgia and bad nostalgia? Good Heimvey and Badheim Vey. You see you put your finger on something very, very important about the spatial versus temporal. When Jaspers goes to the girls, he has no sense that time is involved. It isn't the time so much of home as the spatial removal and even 1688 Hoffer in the treatise, the medical historical treatise, is saying the soldiers tell them I won't eat. Why won't you eat? Because the milk from these cows is different from the cows in my village. But you only live half a mile away in that Canton From the no, the cows are different. So I I want to answer your question by suggesting that nostalgia can also be extremely creative and energizing and activating, and it's very hard to generalize. In Yasper's case, they're all commit the crimes, but they're working class girls. They're servant girls. They're not James Joyce's. Joyce is an exile. Why doesn't he go home? He can go home. Many other literary exhaust. Why doesn't Joyce go home? Nostalgia can be very good for you. And take the Russian tradition, Russian movies. Well, in the Russian tradition, much of it. It can be good, but a lot of it is very bad. Look what it does to Rachmaninoff's music. Look, I mean Russian Brodsky's films, it's all over the place. Excellent question. I think, [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] Michael, I've never known you about that. Oh well, I guess I and I have. This is obligatory, I'm thinking, following up on what was just said about nostalgia as kind of condition of modernity, as as you suggested, and about the performance of modernity in a moment in which, yes, there are these, of course, talismanic figures, James Joyce or this spatial displacement of people in exile and Marcel Proust we could think of, as well as kind of the internalized exile, even exile at home, that this is a moment in which there are people performing modernity as well as performing nostalgia. And modernity involves, in some sense always a rejection of what went before, a deliberate displacement for many people and as well as the churning of peoples. I mean, there's a there's, you know, a hundred 1000 diasporas all of a sudden happening everywhere that have been churning up for centuries. But it's a first time in in European history where more people live in the city than in the countryside, and these people a generation or two removed from the countryside. And in which case nostalgia becomes a marketable commodity, a sort of a the something that's again, it's sort of bubbling up from 19th century popular culture. And then there are people like Joyce who are playing on the on the kind of the deep time nostalgia, you know, nostalgia becomes my Irish home, the ancient Greece, some other kind of thing going on. I know that's not coherent but that's a sort of a comment on on what I've just heard. Well yes I thoroughly I thoroughly agree. I mean exile becomes the the condition of the modern and many books have been written to document exactly how that process occurs and why it arose and the way in which it plays itself out. I mean, I mentioned choice, but you could have 2020 others as well. Yet isn't it very interesting that the hot disease at the time that all our protagonists are working away and this man's killing himself. The hot condition is hysteria, conversion syndrome and no one is talking about Yas, nostalgia and poor Yaspers is working all alone and gets nowhere. In fact, changes his career, becomes a philosopher because he's failed. Whereas a century later now how many doctors? I mean practicing doctors have hysterics walking into their office every day and saying I'm suffering from conversion syndrome. Please hospitalize me. I'm a hysteric versus all these displaced exiles who really are suffering. I mean, the nostalgia is something to be enjoyed. I mean it's it's but many of whom, and this is what I took to be your question but many of whom cannot enjoy. I mean, we all just read the other day, Did Angela Merkel not in Germany claim that multiculturalism has been a huge failure in Germany? It's utterly failed. I read in the Wall Street Journal yesterday or the day before. At this point, I'll ask those who would like to ask more questions talk to Doctor Riso to come to the front and thank him again. [no speech detected] No, no, it's just I didn't want to. [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected]