define their understanding as follows:
The first two characteristics go hand in hand; on the one side, the thoughts, desires and emotions associated with personal utopias or the search for an optimal life and on the other hand, the accompanying sense of incompleteness and imperfection in life. Together, these two aspects generate the bitter sweetness or sweet bitterness of life longings, the combination of desire and disappointment and the search for ways to deal with this conflict.
Longing can help us to develop vision. In the feelings of well-being that arise when we imagine our dreams materializing, its quality of sweetness becomes apparent.
By contrast, it can be bitter when we realize that what we long for, what seems like the fulfilment of our dreams, is not fully attainable, is not attainable in the foreseeable future, or indeed at all, and turns out to be permanently unattainable.
A tritime focus does not mean that the entire life span from childhood to the present and into old age is necessarily always considered and borne in mind. However, it is assumed that the feeling of longing always extends from the present moment back into the past as well as forward into the future.
Given this background and often laden with ambivalent feelings, longing can cause us again and again to look back on the life we have lived and can follow us, prompting us to evaluate what is harmonious and fulfilling, what has been successful and what we still have to learn.
Another essential characteristic is the wealth of symbolic meaning. If we keep the symbolic richness in mind, we see that longings are much more than a specific type of behavior or experience. We see that the specific objects or goals of longings are connected to broader mental and emotional representations of what they stand for. We peer into a large, wide space behind them, or at least have an inkling of that space.
According to this characteristic of longing, a specific desire or yearning, for example for a hug from someone you love, is not necessarily a manifestation of longing. According to Baltes, a wish is only seen as a manifestation of longing when the mental and emotional representations associated with it are connected behind it with a larger construct of thoughts and feelings about the direction of one’s own life. Seen in this light, the desire for a hug could of course be only a mundane wish but behind this could also be the longing for intimacy in general.
So far for the findings provided by the researchers surrounding Paul Baltes (cf. Scheibe et al., 2007).
The compass function of longing
In the interaction of these characteristics, especially the tritime focus and life evaluation, longing has a compass function:
Figure 1 Compass function of longing
With the aid of this compass function, we can, for example, look back and question to what extent we have been true to ourselves in the past. We can question how much we agree with how we shape our present life and we can allow the compass effect of longing to question us about how we should direct our life in the future, how we can best be true to ourselves in the interplay of that which yearns for development and that which demands acceptance of the realities of our life.
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