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61 Hofer was not only the first to give nostalgia its modern name but also to try to ascertain its precise etiology. His dissertation of 1688 starts with the initial hypothesis that images of objects are represented in the brain by way of the motion of animal or vital spirits (spiritus animales) in their respective channels of the nerves. Like Willis, Hofer situates the imagination to reside in the corpus callosum, the “oval tubes of the center of the brain” (Medical Dissertation, 381). This, in a very technical sense, is the nervous or nerve-based “imagination” he has in mind and which in nostalgia becomes an “afflicted imagination.” Yet what are the occasioning forces? Hofer’s intricate logic calls for exigent analysis. His initial premise is that in nostalgic patients the imagination is “affected because men thus oppressed are moved by small external objects and nothing creates a stronger impression than the desire recalling the homeland.” His explanation continues: For when that faculty of the mind is indifferent in its normal state, toward anything whatever, to be moved, to form ideas, it follows entirely that that thing is lessened, if it is aroused towards small things, and if at least they represent the living spirits continually by penetrating the single courses of the brain, only also (they represent ) an opportunity of forming an idea of a single object. (Medical Dissertation, 381) Hofer thus thinks it possible to identify the local seat of the disease. It is “that portion of the brain” which “is affected primarily, in which such images of objects are represented through a certain motion of animal spirits.” It is “the deepest part of the brain,” afflicted “constantly from the infinite nerve fibers in which the spirits continually move about in waves” (MediChapter 3 Nostalgia’s Original Theories: Implications and Effects 62 Chapter 3 cal Dissertation, 384).1 The “work” of imagination is the work of the animal spirits, and it is that work which affects just that cerebral portion which is—through that work—responsible for the imagination. Nostalgia is an extreme form of such work, as a continual, wave-like excitement of those cerebral nerve fibers in which the impressions of the native land are stored. For Hofer, such excitement not only perpetuates but also intensifies itself, and this is because in nostalgia the vital spirits have learned to move in these channels of their own accord, continually and automatically evoking the selfsame images and impressions. If this may call to mind modern ideas about the recurrence of dreamimages through somatic as much as psychic stimuli, Hofer himself keenly suggests that analogy. “Just so we observe in sleep, frequently, ideas of things to be suggested which had happened to people awake, and had made a profound impression” (Medical Dissertation, 384). Yet the difference is that nostalgia is a waking dream, a manic obsession of the animal spirits which, while they proceed with an imaginative “freedom” analogous to sleep, wind up “penetrating” and “enlarging” “certain paths”: thus they “bring forth former motions, and thus continually rule these pristine ideas.” It signals the critical point and onset of the disease when the animal spirits have “enlarged the pores and tubes in which those same spirits put forth the determined motion received from the objects” (Medical Dissertation, 385), that is, when they have enlarged a certain imaginative path so much that they find it easier “freely” to take the same path again and again, to the point of perpetual overstimulation. This is, as Hofer accentuates, a form of imaginative strength. But why should such strength translate into such a debilitating disease, nostalgia? Hofer advances a dialectic of strength and weakness that could not be more compelling in rendering his nostalgic patients’ symptoms—their exhaustion and indifference toward their immediate surroundings—as merely the final stage of an inner process. Manically stimulated into continuous vibrations, their animal spirits are too occupied and concentrated in their cerebral paths to respond promptly to other impressions, and consequently do not flow in adequate quantity or potency to other parts of the brain to serve the natural functions. The result is the perceivable symptoms (such as loss of appetite, anxiety, slower heartbeat), and the eventual languor of the whole body is thus in direct proportion to the intensity of a cerebral “continuous quasi-ecstasy”: In truth, where the animal spirits are regenerated in niggardly supply , and at the same time are devoured on account of the continuous quasi-ecstasy of...

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