A Psychoanalytical analysis of Italian nostalgia

Written By ALESSANDRO CARUANA
 

Link to the project: L’Ennesimo Nuovo, Analisi e Proposte Per una Cultura del Futuro- UIS Research Centre

Link to the UIS and all projects 2024: UIS Research Centre

 

I have been asked to prepare a report on the “L’Ennesimo Nuovo, Analisi e Proposte Per una Cultura del Futuro” (Breaking the Chains of Nostalgia: Italy’s Path to a Forward-Looking Future) project, providing a psychoanalytical analysis. The project's original aims and investigations — including the entire team members and supervisor detail — can be found in full at the links at the top of the page.

 

Methodology


This analysis aims to psychoanalytically probe the inner world of the Italian individual, who is claimed to be immersed in a nostalgic cultural production arising from and shaped by an identitarian trauma. This trauma is believed to constitute the matrix of a repetitive cultural expression confined in a continuous cycle of simultaneous consumption and creation with minimal variation, thereby precluding any possible, true, new cultural future. Therefore, under the lens of this project are the perceived myth-making phenomena that, through mediated culture, made Italy’s sense of glory. While a post-phenomenological approach to media might risk overemphasising the role of technological mediation in shaping individual experience, psychoanalytic insights keep the analysis of Human–Media–World relations grounded in the social, cultural, and psychological influences that shape an individual's worldview beyond media technology. The mediation of nostalgia through media is sustained to support and devise a hyperreality, ultimately described as a cage that isolates the individual in a cultural ever-present past.



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Analysis


1. The common understanding of myths is that history creates them: always situated in an ancient past, as faint echoes, yet resonating vividly enough to influence the present and its future. Nevertheless, history does not create myths; trauma forges them. Myths are stories, fictitious narratives constructed to make sense of the world when we are confronted with the traumatic and unfathomable interruption caused by an encounter with what lies outside the symbolic and imaginary structures in which we are subjects. Therefore, myths are symbols or, more accurately, fabricated additions — like substitutive rings — to a chain of signification, linked anew to keep the narrative flowing and hold meaning together.


2. A process analogous to the psychoanalytic clinic, where the patient can remember their past but remains unable to access its traumatic events, which evade symbolization, thus language itself. The analyst leads the analysand in revisiting trauma in search of a meaning, a fitting narrative, that can be attached to it and, as such, restore the chain.


3. The talking cure seeks to construct a narrative around the blank gaps left by trauma, with a portray emerging from a negative space akin to a photographic negative, though it does not necessarily render a truthful image. What is developed instead is a picture, truthful enough to re-establish stability to the disrupted individual’s symbolic structure.


4. De facto, trauma is the expression of the Lacanian Real; it is the fragmentation of the Symbolic order — the chain of signification that, in falling apart, risks unveiling the pure nothingness that inhabits outside the imaginary structures. That is precisely the encounter from which myths and narratives which myths and narratives ward the individual off.


5. Constructing a narrative to shield from trauma takes on an intriguing dimension when the dynamics are analysed within the broader context of a community, such as Italy — an emblem of traditionalism and conservatism. I would dare to claim that the most traumatic event for the Italians is losing their identity, deeply rooted in the pride of ancient glories when Italy was a maker of history.


6. Undoubtedly Italy, as a nation, has experienced a turbulent history marked by rises and falls, and so its people — becoming a myth maker. Interestingly, after any period of traumatic hardship, incredible myths and stories around food emerged portraying Italians as ingenious heroes born out of necessity. It should not surprise then that most of the Italian essence resides in food, which is deeply woven in the country’s cultural heritage as an expression of tradition and civilisation.


7. Therefore, it should not shock either that most of the recounts on the origin of the Italian's big classic — from Pizza to Carbonara — are just ‘folktales’, as Alberto Grandi brutally reveals. In unfolding the true origins of the most famous dishes the world attributes to the Tricolore geniality, we learn how food can become a symbolic signifier: “It's all about identity ... When a community finds itself deprived of its sense of identity, because of whatever historical shock or fracture with its past, it invents traditions to act as founding myths.” (Giusti, 2023).


8. We must not dismiss these myths’ construction as mere innocent fantasies. In their radicalisation, political weaponisation, and distortions they are responsible for a misleading Identitarian Autarchy, which alienates the other who does not comply with the grand narrative, or does not fit in it. The ‘other’ is any subject that lies outside the pre-established structures representing a potential threat of traumatic encounter that will disrupt the established chain once again. Grandi is quick to point out how far rights parties exploit the identity trauma and the narratives surrounding food culture to get consensus. Thus, the far right in Italy is perceived not merely as an ideology but as a guardian of cultural significance (Manca, 2023).


9. Identitarian Autarchy operates on subtle and dangerous level as a stabilising agent that traps individuals in a ‘feedback loop,’ confining them within an identity cage of isolation. An enclosure within the present which hinders the possibility of new futures by perpetuating its ontology on a constant past.


10. The Romans said: “… memoria praeteritorum bonorum …” The Italians seem the perfect subjects to experience the so-called ‘rosy retrospection’ — a faulty pattern that erroneously leads to observing the past with ‘rose-tinted glasses.’ “Back in the day it was better…” “In my youth things were easier …” “I remember how amazing it was ...” No matter what, the past is always experienced as better, hiding the fact that it has ‘always been better.’ Therefore, the past becomes a shelter, with nostalgia serving as a cozy nest, basking in long gone memories.


11. This is particularly evident in the nostalgic media production that cyclically re-proposes old (by now ancient) TV programmes that work almost like a dummy for a child, soothing the anxieties of the uncertain future. Media is a myth itself in the Italian culture, perhaps the only other instance as important, if no more, than food; defined by Vittorio H. Beonio-Brocchieri as the “demiurge of Italian modernity,” it has played a role similar to Garibaldi’s expedition but linguistically unifying Italy (Egidio , 2024).


12. The broadcasting repetition has a psychoanalytic motive which uncovers another distinctive feature of trauma: repetition. In the Freudian framework, reiteration is an attempt to master the trauma, to exert control over the uncontrollable. Freud observed this behaviour in his grandson, who, when left alone by his parents, played with a cotton reel repeatedly throwing it away while exclaiming 'Fort!' (Gone!) and then having it retrieved by the parent while asserting 'Da!' (There!). The cotton reel was a metaphor for the parents, and the game an attempt to having ‘control’ over the parents or, more specifically, over the distressing situation caused by their absence (Freud, 1922, pp. 14–15).


13. A Lacanian reading of what became known as ‘Fort/Da’ game, unveils an interplay between language and trauma by focusing on the semantic aspect of the words ‘Fort’ and ‘Da’ mirroring the actions. Repetition, in itself, is the attempt to donate language, hence symbolisation, to trauma.


14. Media is language, more precisely, it works like language becoming a signifier; a system through which meaning is conveyed, understanding is shaped and reality within its culture influenced. (Iversen, 2007, pp. 8–13)


15. A mediated culture is a tool for symbolisation is a tool for symbolisation — a broadcaster of symbolisation. The past can only be an abstraction; its idealisation renders it both inaccessible and longed for a return. Only an exceptional event outside human power can re-establish this lost time: Italian media strives to act as a Deus Ex Machina. However, there will never be a repossession of ‘as it was’ but a repetitive re-encounter with the past as an impossibility in the present.


16. We are witnessing a post-phenomenology of nostalgia, an evident mediative phenomenon in Italian cultural production. The synchronised mediation of nostalgia within the technological media dictates individual-world relations .


17. The media production unfolds and, at the same time, creates a definite psychological space; the meta-creation that is parallel to an illusion. In its images, the cultural product becomes a simulacrum, ultimately replacing reality with its representation. The Italian Culture — what media creates and mediates through nostalgia — devises what Baudrillard calls Hyperreality in which the delineation that marks the division between myth and reality blurs and collapses into a distorted, truthful, deleterious socio-cultural reality. Therefore, it is correct to insist that the future is lost; it will never come until the ‘feedback loop’ is interrupted.


18. The continuous loop can be described as a media production aiming to reflect the country’s idiosyncrasies. Nevertheless, what is presented does not mirror reality as it is; what is actualised is a distorted interpretation of the reality it seeks to depict (Baudrillard, 1981, pp. 10–11).


19. Its representation aspires to veil the emptiness hiding behind Italy’s myths, promoting nostalgic pictures to feed the illusion. The empowered vitality of these faded images forges a reality made of symbols that refer only to themselves. Consequently, cultural production itself no longer portrays any semblance of reality. Instead, it becomes a self-contained appearance: a representation without real reflection, as the shadow of itself. It subsists within a closed circle of signification as a self-referential and isolated object in its own reference.


20. I argue that media are the demiurge of this this Hyperreality described. In crafting a metaphor reflecting gnostic beliefs: the demiurge as a demented deity that created a distorted reality in which we are trapped; constructions from which we cannot escape.



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Conclusion: Anonimo = Body Without Organs


21. The body is like a machine composed of different parts — organs, habits, routines, desires, thoughts — structures that work together in determined ways, outputting determined products. The Body Without Organs is the opposite because outside fixed structures resist the structured body.

22. The Body Without Organs escapes the standard structure to find new ways of living, thinking, and experiencing the world. Anonimo = Body Without Organs because anonimo is a metaphor for breaking away from the structure of identities and allows for more open, experimental possibilities.

23. Therefore, the Anonimo is the necessary Body Without Organs that disrupts the stagnant loop of cultural production, which is overly fixated on the past, a body structured. The Body Without Organs disrupts the identity autarchy. It transforms the past into a stratum within a plateau — always accessible, never forgotten, and always relevant — but no longer the core of cultural construction within its self-referentiality.

24. Instead of being a rigid layer in a linear or vertical trajectory toward a climax or end, every strata of this plateau becomes part of a self-sustaining equilibrium. This meta-loop is a feedback loop that inevitably creates the past too. Therefore, the eternal return of the Body Without Organs is demanded to deconstruct the identity that anonimato inevitably establishes, creating a paradoxical cycle that continually projects movement toward the future.



References

 

  • Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacra and Simulation. The University of Michigan Press.


  • Egidio, E. (Ed.). (2024, January 3). La televisione demiurgo della modernità italiana. Panorama; Panorama. https://www.panorama.it/lifestyle/televisione/tv-italiana-e-cambiata


  • Freud, S. (1922). Beyond the Pleasure Principle (pp. 14–15). International Psycho-Analytical Press.


  • Giusti , M. (2023, March 23). Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/6ac009d5-dbfd-4a86-839e-28bb44b2b64c


  • Iversen, M. (2007). Beyond pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes. Pennsylvania State University Press.


  • Lemmens, P. (2017). Thinking Through Media: Stieglerian Remarks on a Possible Postphenomenology of Media. In Y. Van Den Eede, S. O’Neal Irwin, & G. Wellner (Eds.), Postphenomenology and Media: Essays on Human–Media–World Relations (pp. 185–205). Lexington Books.


  • Manca, E. (Ed.). (2023, February 28). “Gastronazionalismo”: la visione del governo Meloni. Lanterna. https://www.lanternaweb.it/gastronazionalismo-la-visione-del-governo-meloni/


ALESSANDRO CARUANA