Affective Permeability: On Hysteria and Atmospheres Free

The concept of atmosphere marks a fundamental point of contact between philosophy and psychopathology. It represents a different way of understanding perceptions and affectivity, which favours a trans-individual perspective, reinforcing the importance of what lies “between” the subject and the world [1, 2]. In the context of the renewed interest that the concept of atmosphere has assumed in recent years for its psychopathological and psychotherapeutic implications [3, 4], to the best of our knowledge, attention has been mainly focused on depressive disorders [5, 6] and schizophrenia [7, 8], while little is known about the interaction of atmospheres with other psychopathological conditions.

Our proposal is to consider the concept of atmosphere in the light of a different clinical construct, that of hysteria. In fact, taking up Charbonneau’s [9] description of hysteria as a pathology of aesthetic consciousness, the application of the concept of atmosphere, which has its main frame of interest precisely in aesthetic philosophy, seems to be profitable. To do this, we will start from the philosophical definition of atmosphere, which is rich in clinical repercussions, and apply it to the lived experience of hysterical persons. Clinical phenomenology allows us to address the construct of hysteria outside the stigma that characterized it, suspending the judgement to return to a gaze on phenomena that is not tainted by prejudice. We will develop the concept of “affective permeability,” exploring how hysterical people are sensitive to environmental atmospheres and are able to direct them to achieve centrality. This article takes its basis from some papers already published by our research group about the phenomenological renewal of hysteria [10, 11] and broadens the perspective by analysing the relationship with atmospheres.

What do we mean by “atmospheres”? The notion of atmosphere has been placed, since its first formulations, between philosophy and psychopathology. An example of this is the almost contemporary description provided by a philosopher, Hermann Schmitz, and a psychiatrist, Hubertus Tellenbach: while Tellenbach [7] conceives the atmosphere as a quality (although elusive) of intersubjectivity, Schmitz [12] considers it a set of affective features present independently of the subjects who experience it. An author who has fully developed the concept is the philosopher Gernot Böhme [13], who re-establishes the link between the subject and the atmosphere, pointing out its affective tone.

The atmosphere is not something tangible, which belongs to the material world, and for this reason, it assumes a particular status, that of an “almost-thing,” which is something not belonging to the psyche, but at the same time, not characterized by the consistency of a tangible thing, as spatial emotions – meant as the affective manifestations in the environment – can be [14]. Much has been written on the concordance of affective tones between man and the world, on the tendency to tune in with environments that have not only a spatial location but also an expressive valence [15]. The tradition of Western thought has, since Plato [16], considered emotions something internal to the individual, located in his/her psyche and distinct from the surrounding world [5]. However, it is not the only possible interpretation: for instance, in ancient Greek poetry and tragedy, emotions are not considered as individual phenomena taken place in private, inner realm of subjective experience but linked to a wider feeling of participation in the world [17, 18].

The New Phenomenology inaugurated by Schmitz [19] proposes understanding atmospheres not as the projection of individual emotions into the world but as the person being invested by the independently present affects in space. Such views challenge the cultural prejudice of Western culture and question the very concept of the psyche [20]. A more recent conceptualization of atmospheres, however, such as that of Griffero [2, 5], moderates Schmitz’s position by arguing that emotions represent a communication between the outside and the inside. In this approach, the emphasis is not on the individual but on the intersubjective and intercorporeal experience [3].

In this sense, the atmosphere corresponds to the affective tonality of the intersubjective space [21, 22]. It is pre-dualistic – a kind of affective nebulization of room-filling feelings in the surrounding space [23]. The persons participate in this trans-individual affective tonality, which that takes place “between” them and the world [24]. Persons neither actively colour the world around them with their emotions, nor involuntarily emanate or project emotional tones towards the environment, but are passively immersed and sometimes at the mercy of the influences of the environment [22]. Affectivity is not only acted out but also experienced as something to be undergone. Entering an emotional space with certain characteristics and a certain emotional charge, we feel immersed in its atmosphere, which ends up influencing our emotional state: for example, the architecture and decorations of Gothic churches have the function of inducing in the subject a feeling of smallness in the face of the greatness of God [25].

The implications for psychopathology are obviously considerable, and in particular for those forms of treatment, psychotherapeutic and psychiatric, which imply a dialogue between two individuals, a “dance” between the clinician’s and the patient’s bodies [3, 4]. That the “object” of care is not placed within the patient but in the intersubjective and intercorporeal space of the encounter is a concept on which the clinical phenomenologists have written a lot [4, 26‒28]. It is precisely in the “between” that the potential of the relationship is realized, the possibility of overcoming individualistic and internalistic positions in search of a shared and dialogic experience of reality [4, 24]. This connective space between the two subjects is atmospherically coloured: it is therefore no longer a question of merely conceiving this affective space only as pathically shared but also as a pre-existing affective tonality with respect to the subjects, in which the objects participate [29]. The clinical encounter involves both a dialogue of words and a dialogue of bodies – and now we would add that it is also a dialogue of bodies affected by emotional tonalities.

Talking about hysteria may seem obsolete since this diagnosis, which was included (as hysterical neurosis) in the Second Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [30, 31], has been eliminated from the current psychiatric classifications (DSM-5) [32], split up into different disorders, including histrionic personality disorder, conversion disorder, dissociative disorders, somatoform disorders. However, beyond the long history of this concept and the gender stigma [33, 34] that has characterized it, it is possible to identify a clinical construct which survived [35]. In fact, although the diagnosis of hysteria may seem outdated, we assist in recent years to a growing interest in the concept, and it remains rooted in the language of psychiatrists and psychotherapists [35‒37]. If we consider hysteria not in light of the symptoms but of the use that the patient makes of his symptoms, we see that despite metamorphoses and less dramatic manifestations, hysteria continues to exist. Clinical phenomenology can provide an important contribution in this context because, through its method of suspension of judgement (epochè), it can help to understand the clinical phenomena of hysteria beyond the prejudices and stigma that have long characterized it [10]. The concept of hysteria taken as akin to an existential condition resumes the distinction between “abnormal variants of psychic life” and mental illnesses in keeping with Kurt Schneider [38]; thus understood, hysteria does not appear as an illness (like bipolar or schizophrenic psychoses) but as an “abnormal variant of psychic life,” a variant that goes beyond the extent of the average departure of a personality from the statistical norm, characterized by suffering and difficulty in entering into a relationship with other people. Hysterical persons, in this perspective, belong to the group called “psychopaths in need of esteem” sensu Jaspers and Schneider [38, 39]: the artificiality of these characters in need of receiving recognition from others makes it difficult for them to relate to others. Pioneering work in this direction is that of Georges Charbonneau [9], who proposed to defeminize and desexualize hysteria, considering it not as a diagnostic category, but as an existential position.

Fundamental contributions for the development of a phenomenological perspective on hysteria are the works of Kretschmer [40] and Kraus [41, 42]. According to Kretschmer [40], hysteria is represented by a psychogenic pattern of reaction to external stimuli, which is not characteristic of a specific diagnostic category but can appear not only in every man/woman but also in animals under sufficient stress. A type of reaction which could be called hysterical is characterized by the tendency to dissimulate, which can be expressed in “death feint” (immobilization reflex) and “instinctive flurry,” which resemble some hysterical symptoms (i.e., paralysis, dissociative states) [40]. Furthermore, Kraus [41, 42] characterized hysteria by the so-called “structure of non-identification,” which is an existential vulnerability whose core feature is the hypo-sufficiency of the self. Hysterical people struggle to define their identity, perceive themselves as indefinite and inconsistent, and have a weak grip on the first-person experience of themselves and their bodies [10]. It is in the frantic search for the answer to the question “Who am I?” that hysterical people encounter the gaze of others and its power of definition [43]. Feeling looked at by others has a defining and coagulating effect that compensates for the original “manque d'être.” Since people with hysteria need others to feel themselves, to consist, and even to exist, the importance of capturing their gaze is therefore fundamental [44]. The motto of the hysterical person is “You see me, therefore I am,” or perhaps even “You desire me, therefore I am” [11]. Visibility becomes a priority value.

In Charbonneau’s conception [9], hysterical persons are characterized by a continuous search for centrality, emotional intensification, and figurality. They tend to oversaturate experiences with a high level of emotionality, which is generally expressed in a spectacular way, with the purpose of gaining visibility and attention from the other. The purpose, obviously involuntary and unconscious, is above all to hide the original inconsistency, the hypo-sufficiency of the self: to put on a show so captivating that one does not notice the “manque d'être” it hides – Minkowski [45] would call it “phenomenological compensation”.

Most of the characteristics of hysterical persons can therefore be interpreted as attempts to attract the gaze of the others they need to feel themselves: the need for centrality, emotional hyper-expressiveness, theatricalization [10, 46]. There is an anthropological disproportion [47] between I and the other, where otherness takes primacy [46]. Another feature closely related to these is seduction. Hysterical seduction deserves a special characterization since it does not merely refer to a kind of behaviour with sexual implications but as a “capturing” strategy aimed at attracting others and bringing them close to oneself [48‒50]. Rather than corresponding to the need to fascinate others sexually (“sex-duction”), the hysterical person’s seduction is aimed at attracting others’ attention to gain identity recognition [48].

Questions about one’s sexual and gender identity are not extraneous to the concerns of people with hysteria: “What does it mean to be a woman?”, “What does it mean to be a man?” [42], and “Am I (seen) as a woman or as a man?”, “Am I attractive to women or to men?” [11]. Capturing the others’ gaze must confirm hysterical persons in their belonging to a given gender – and, more in general, in their identity and very existence.

The notion of figurality moves closely together with the experience of the body [9]. Failing to bring autonomously into play an unmediated perception of their own body, hysterical persons appropriate representations of their own body and self from their environment, in which personal but also cultural and social aspects are agglomerated [51]. In one of our previous works, we spoke of “figural body” to express this network of meanings and representative symbols which overwrites the lived body and ends up replacing it in the individual experience [10]. It is in this way that hysteria has lent itself over the centuries to passive adherence to gender models, as well as to other stereotypes [33]. This attempt to shape one’s own self by resorting to “types” derived from fashion, from others’ behaviour, especially that of significant and successful others – called “typification” [52] – is meant to acquire a consistent identity. The existential position of hysterical persons is characterized by a gender typification that can affect both the male and female sex. Charbonneau [9] in fact describes some forms of hysterical males which are characterized not by femininity, as was previously described by Charcot [53], but by the claim to represent the man par excellence, i.e., the macho, the histrionem, or the dandy. The existential position of hysterical persons, therefore, is not gender-specific but concerns both males and females.

It is starting from the concept of figurality that Charbonneau [9] speaks of hysteria as a pathology of aesthetic consciousness: hysterical persons are caught up in a world of images and representations. They end up being imprisoned by the “power of images” [9, 54]. On the one hand, they show themselves to others as images and thus try to impress others. They thrive on suggestions, theatricality, surface ripples. On the other hand, they are fascinated by the images and are impressed by them. What characterizes them above all is impressionability, that is the power that images have over them – but they also try to acquire power by impressing others with those images [10, 55]. It seems that hysterical persons try to charm the others through that typification, that figurality by which they have been first and foremost captured. The result is an iridescent, mutable life-world, a world of the surface and of lightness, which abhors responsibility and commitment. It is a continuous dance on the abyss of nothingness, of not feeling, of not existing, accompanied by the need to be recognized, confirmed, and validated from the outside [52].

With all that in place, the relationship of hysterical persons with the space that surrounds them, in its intersections with the concept of atmosphere, takes on particular interest. The lived space is experienced by persons with hysteria in the dialectic between centrality and periphery, in the continuous effort to get out of the grey area of the outside edge to reach the visibility of the centre [9]. Our proposal is that the hysterical person’s hypo-sufficiency of the self, resulting in difficulty in feeling defined and delimited, is accompanied by an alteration of the affective permeability of the self with respect to the environment. By “affective permeability,” we mean the porosity of the boundary between inner and outer. The emotions that fill the space surrounding the hysterical person are picked up and “enter” the hysterical person with ease; and, on the other hand, the emotions that are present on the “inside” of the hysterical person “filter” outwards and fill the external space.

Affective permeability thus implies suggestibility and impressionability, i.e., the possibility of emotions present in the outside being imprinted on the person’s “inner” world. Phenomenological psychopathology has described suggestibility as one of the core aspects of hysteria [9, 46]. In fact, hysterical persons are permeated by the affective states of the environment, without interposing any resistance. Indeed, it can be said that they take those affective states as their own. Hysterical persons undergo environmental affects passively, theatrically embodying them without personalizing them. This is not a very different concept from that of impressionability mentioned by Charbonneau [9]. Using the words of Maldiney, “impressionability and suggestibility are deficient form of receptivity” ([56], p.136): deficient because the difficulty of defining oneself with respect to the world leads to an abnormal receptivity. Hysterical persons are like wax that can be imprinted by the environment in which they are and by the people with whom they interact. Affective permeability also entails intensification [52] of one’s emotions and especially of their expression – a phenomenon that we are tempted to name expressionality, i.e., an excess of expression and thus visibility to the outside world of “internal” emotional states. Thus, affective permeability leads to a greater passage of affective and emotional states between the person and the environment, in a bidirectional way.

Affective permeability is not to be confused with the self-boundary disturbances characteristic of schizophrenia, which include, for instance, the experience that thoughts or emotions in one’s head are felt as inserted, influenced, manipulated, or stolen from outside, or that such thoughts or emotions spill outward and are therefore readable by other people (see, e.g., Schneider [57]). Affective permeability does not imply disorders of agency and ownership of one’s mental states. They are not disorders of selfhood (of the pre-reflexive feeling of being a cohesive, unitary embodied self, demarcated from the environment, and continuous over time) [58], but are related to anomalies of personal identity. Hysterical persons run into the difficulty of delineating one’s personal identity with respect to the outside. As discussed above, they often “borrow” external representations to acquire an identity consistency: this happens in the phenomenon of typification – adhering to the desire of others [52] – and in seduction – the “capturing” strategy aimed at attracting the others exhibiting one’s emotions, intensifying them so that they “filter” from the inside out and become visible for people out there. Visibility is to persons with hysteria the proof of their existence.

On this ground, art critique and historian Didi-Huberman, in his essay on the photographic iconography of Salpêtrière Hospital, writes provocatively of the “invention” of hysteria by Charcot [59]. Surely Charcot [53] is credited with a first exhaustive clinical description of this disorder, taking into consideration its psychogenic and traumatic aspects. Furthermore, his works have provided us with detailed descriptions of the extremely protean phenomenal manifestations of hysteria [59]. According to Didi-Huberman, Charcot took advantage of the complacency of the women admitted to the Salpêtrière, of their tendency to please the doctor, to show him what he wanted to see. Hysteria as we know it exists because Charcot, by giving attention to his patients when they were experiencing symptoms, reinforced their theatrical and overly expressive tendencies. The women admitted to the Salpêtrière would have “acted out” hysteria in order to get interest in return and would have eventually identified with their theatrical performances [59]. Didi-Huberman’s account is extremely well documented and interestingly underscores the double bond that united Charcot with his hysterical patients. Hysterical persons were suggestible with respect to the context; they tended to repeat what was asked of them to get attention; they acquired a role from the outside and continued to recite it, until identifying with it [52] – a compensation [45] to the hypo-sufficiency of their own self [40, 41].

We tend to place the core characteristics of hysteria not so much in its stereotyped and macroscopic theatrical manifestations (including contractures, paralysis, or pseudo-epileptic crises) highlighted by Charcot’s clinic [10], but in its existential background. Why did these women need to be watched so much? Why were they willing to play the role of the mentally ill to get attention? A deeper understanding of patients’ hysteria is placed more in their existential position than in its external manifestations.

We suggested that the basic phenomenon is the hysterical persons’ hypo-sufficiency of the self, their difficulty to autonomously feel themselves, that is, to access the first-person experience of their lived body. Partly as a consequence of that, hysterical persons are strongly affected by the emotions they encounter on the outside, and from here emerge the impressionability, the suggestibility, the typification that characterize them [35]. However, this trend has a counterpart. By experiencing themselves as a string resonating with ambient vibrations, hysterical persons become highly adept at those vibrations. A great ability to perceive the atmospheric affectivity in its forms develops. On the one hand, a great interpersonal sensitivity derives from it. On the other hand, hysterical persons develop expressionality – the ability to (involuntarily and unconsciously) manipulate the environment through their intensified manifestation of their feelings. Being crossed by atmospheric affectivity is a way to catalyse it, to ride it, to make it at your service. The shades of the environment are therefore assumed to increase one’s visibility, one’s centrality, one’s ability to attract attention. Hysteria makes the exteriorization of one’s affective states its fundamental existential nucleus.

There is a debate in philosophy between a conception of atmospheres in line with that of the study by Schmitz [19], which limits the possibility of modifying atmospheres to propaganda, manipulation, and advertising, and Böhme’s conception [13], according to which, on the contrary, every person modifies the atmosphere in which he or she is immersed [5]. Böhme [13] even speaks of “aesthetic work,” which aims at producing atmospheres. From this point of view, hysterical persons, for whom maintaining high visibility is an indispensable condition for feeling that they are there and that they exist, would be professional producers of atmospheres. Their whole life, their very existence, depends on their ability to navigate atmospheres in order to keep attention high on themselves and to create atmospheres polarized by their presence.

Each clinical encounter is set within a certain atmosphere. The clinical encounter itself acts through the atmospheres it creates: a welcoming and peaceful atmosphere can help patients not to hide their fragility [5]. Also, the ability on the part of the clinician to recognize the atmosphere created in the encounter with the patient helps to settle both diagnosis and understanding, as in the well-known example of praecox Gefühl in schizophrenia [60].

Not being able to perceive themselves from within, hysterical persons are particularly sensitive to the affective imprint of the outside, whether it is the gaze of a concrete other or the atmosphere of the emotional space in which they are immersed. In the present paper, we focused on the latter. We argued that hysteria is characterized by affective permeability, the bidirectional transfer of emotional states between a person and the environment. Hysterical persons are particularly capable of “sniffing” an atmosphere and predisposed to modify themselves by chameleonically adapting to the environment. They are equally predisposed to manipulate the atmosphere by filling the environment with their own emotions. They make atmospheric manipulation one of their distinctive features. It is an involuntary and unconscious strategy, not a fiction or the consequence of bad faith.

This is, we argued, their way to compensate the hypo-sufficiency of the self which characterizes their existential position. Their behaviour may have the same purpose of a smoke screen: to confuse and prevent others from seeing deep into them. Due to their interpersonal sensibility, hysterical persons are very keen to intuit the other’s reticence and rejection. To fill the emotional void that can occur, they saturate the space of the encounter with their own feelings, through their lively figurality. Hysteria presents itself first and foremost as a mystery that must be discovered, and this activates a dynamic of fascination that affects the therapeutic encounter. The more the hysterical person senses the atmosphere of fascination in which the clinician is immersed, the more the therapeutic relationship becomes her/his stage, and the clinician becomes her/his audience.

The exaggeration, the theatricality, the need to always keep the attention on oneself, which clinicians often find difficult to deal with, take on a new meaning if they are seen as attempts, however crude, to gain centrality in the other’s world and to establish an I-Thou relationship with the clinician charged with affectivity. This relationship will have to be elaborated and obviously stripped of all the camouflages with which hysterical persons have covered it; however, it is necessary for the clinician to recognize that it is often the only way in which the hysterical patient is able to form a bond with the other.

This paper presents all the limitations intrinsic to the fact that it proposes a hypothesis that, at the moment, is not supported by large-scale empirical research. Yet, we believe that this hypothesis provides useful reference points for the caring relationship with hysterical persons. Its usefulness lies in the ability to recognize and understand the atmosphere surrounding the encounter. This atmosphere, if not elaborated and analysed, risks dragging the clinician into the whirlwind of hysterical hyper-emotionality. Spellbound to this atmosphere, the clinician may lose his/her therapeutic function. That is why understanding the hysterical person’s use of atmospheres and being able to recognize it becomes an essential emotional skill for every clinician.

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This article represents original material never published before.

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Prof. Giovanni Stanghellini and Dr. Cecilia Maria Esposito both worked on researching and writing the article.