Anxious times can find us reaching back to our pasts to find experiential solutions that may help to calm uncertainty and foreboding. In this roundtable, we wish to discuss which experiences we call on and how they are used, consciously or unconsciously, to provide reassurance.

We recognise that nostalgia may be experienced as unconsciously prompted sensational engagement, a brief touch of an evocative surface, a forgotten but familiar sound or smell, or consciously to replay reassuring experiences. As we navigate these challenges, nostalgia emerges as a lens through which people seek solace and certainty in the face of ambiguity; however, does nostalgia offer a retreat to a perceived sense of stability and familiarity, or does it hinder progress by anchoring individuals and societies to an idealised past? To begin we wish to explore recent social phenomena in the U.K. that may have encouraged people to recollect the past and how that has been accessed.

Considering a need to re-experience the comfort, holding, containment and security offered by an environment created by Winnicott’s “good enough mother”, as well as the sense of control offered by Kleinian psychodynamics, we probe the role that imagination, creativity and nostalgia play in providing readily evoked experience that offer a route back to feelings of security; through this round table discussion, we explore how nostalgia can aid in facilitating the transition from past to present. However, it is important to consider whose nostalgia is being accessed; is it a subjective encounter of one’s own past, a collective experience or a personal or collective fantasy?

We hope to foster a deeper understanding of nostalgia as a psychoanalytic phenomenon, shedding light on its functions as a mechanism for holding and containing in times of uncertainty while discussing complex experiences of nostalgia that can be both adaptive and maladaptive.