« Feeling sad during a funeral and being relaxed while having dinner with friends are atmospheric feelings. However, the notion of “atmosphere”, meaning not only a subjective mood, but a sensorial and affective quality that is widespread in space and determines the way one experiences it, has intensified only recently in scientific debate. 
The discussion today covers a wide range of theoretical and applied issues, involving all disciplines, paying attention more to qualitative aspects of reality than to objective ones. These disciplines include the psy- approaches, whose focus on an affective experience that is emerging neither inside nor outside the person can contribute to the development of a new paradigm in psychopathology and in clinical work: a field-based clinical practice. This collection of essays is the first book specifically addressing the link between atmospheres and psychopathology. It challenges a reductionist and largely unsatisfactory approach based on a technical, pharmaceutical, symptomatic, individualistic perspective, and thus promotes the exchange of ideas between psy- disciplines, humanistic approaches and new trends in sciences. »
Biography
Gianni Francesetti, MD, is a psychiatrist, Gestalt therapist, and Adjunct Professor of Phenomenological and Existential Approaches to Clinical Practice in the Department of Psychology at the University of Torino, Italy. He is also Co-Director of the International Institute for Gestalt Therapy and Psychopathology-IPsiG, and was formerly President of the European Association for Gestalt Therapy (EAGT) and the Association of the Italian Federation of Psychotherapy (FIAP).
Tonino Griffero is Full Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy, Director of Sensibilia and editor of the book series Atmospheric Spaces: Aura, Stimmung, Ambiance and the e-journal, Lebenswelt: Aesthetics and Philosophy of Experience. His most recent publications are Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces (2014), Il pensiero dei sensi. Atmosfere ed estetica patica (2016), and Quasi-Things. The Paradigm of Atmospheres (2017).
Editeur : cambridge scholars
background of this success may be seen in the ubiquitous aestheticization of our lifeworld, or from another perspective, of the staging of everything, every event and performance. The theory of atmospheres becoming an aesthetic theory thus reveals the theatrical, not to say manipulative, character of politics, commerce, of the event-society. But, taken as a positive theory of certain phenomena, it offers new perspectives on architecture, design, and art. It made the spatial and the experience of space and places a central subject and hence rehabilitated the ephemeral in the arts. Taking its numerous impacts in many fields together, it initiated a new humanism: the individual as a living person and his or her perspective are taken seriously, and this fosters the ongoing democratization of culture, in particular the possibility for everybody to participate in art and its works.