Section 17. (4) Nostalgia.
The question of home-sickness is of essential significance and
must not be undervalued. It has been much studied and the notion
has been reached that children mainly (in particular during the
period of puberty), and idiotic and weak persons, suffer much from
home-sickness, and try to combat the oppressive feeling of dejection
with powerful sense stimuli. Hence they are easily led to crime,
especially to arson. It is asserted that uneducated people in lonesome,
very isolated regions, such as mountain tops, great moors,
coast country, are particularly subject to nostalgia. This seems to
be true and is explained by the fact that educated people easily find
diversion from their sad thoughts and in some degree take a piece
of home with them in their more or less international culture. In
the same way it is conceivable that inhabitants of a region not particularly
individualized do not so easily notice differences. Especially
he who passes from one city to another readily finds himself, but
mountain and plain contain so much that is contrary that the feeling
of strangeness is overmastering. So then, if the home-sick person is
able, he tries to destroy his nostalgia through the noisiest and most
exciting pleasures; if he is not, he sets fire to a house or in case
of need, kills somebody—in short what he needs is explosive relief.
Such events are so numerous that they ought to have considerable
attention. Nostalgia should be kept in mind where no proper
motive for violence is to be found and where the suspect is a person
with the above-mentioned qualities. Then again, if one discovers
that the suspect is really suffering from home-sickness, from great
home-sickness for his local relations, one has a point from which the
criminal may be reached. As a rule such very pitiful individuals
are so less likely to deny their crime in the degree in which they feel
unhappy that their sorrow is not perceivably increased through
arrest. Besides that, the legal procedure to which they are subjected
is a not undesired, new and powerful stimulus to them.
When such nostalgiacs confess their deed they never, so far as
I know, confess its motive. Apparently they do not know the motive
and hence cannot explain the deed. As a rule one hears, "I don't
know why, I had to do it." Just where this begins to be abnormal,
must be decided by the physician, who must always be consulted
when nostalgia is the ground for a crime. Of course it is not impossible
that a criminal in order to excite pity should explain his
crime as the result of unconquerable home-sickness—but that
must always be untrue because, as we have shown, anybody who
acts out of home-sickness, does not know it and can not tell it.
