The In-Between Mind
The contemporary human experience is increasingly defined by a sense of being adrift. In a world of perpetual transition, where digital realms blur with physical reality and the past is perpetually remixed, re-experienced, and re-imagined, a collective feeling of dislocation has taken root. This condition has given rise to a potent new vocabulary of the mind, one that captures the anxieties and longings of a culture in flux. Three concepts in particular have emerged from the cultural lexicon to describe this state: liminal spaces, the unsettling architecture of transition; anemoia, a phantom nostalgia for times unlived; and fernweh, a profound ache for distant, often unknown, places. These are not mere linguistic curiosities or fleeting internet trends; they are significant psychological and cultural phenomena that reveal deep truths about the modern human condition. They speak to a fundamental search for meaning, identity, and belonging in an age of profound ambiguity.
This report will conduct a multi-layered, interdisciplinary analysis of how liminality, anemoia, and fernweh impact the mind. It will argue that these three concepts, while distinct, are deeply interconnected threads in a larger tapestry of modern experience, woven from psychological ambiguity, neurological adaptation, and a cultural longing for meaning in a state of perpetual flux. By drawing from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and media studies, this investigation will construct a holistic understanding of their effects, charting the ways in which the mind navigates the terrain of the “in-between” and yearns for the stability of a home it has either lost, never had, or has yet to find.
Charting the Thresholds of Experience
To comprehend the intricate effects of these phenomena on the mind, it is first necessary to establish a precise conceptual framework. Though often used interchangeably in popular discourse, liminality, anemoia, and fernweh describe distinct yet related modes of human experience. This section will meticulously define and differentiate these core concepts, establishing the terminology and boundaries essential for the deeper psychological and neurological analysis that follows.
The Architecture of the In-Between
The concept of liminality provides the foundational stage upon which the feelings of anemoia and fernweh often play out. Its power lies in its ability to describe a state of being that is fundamentally ungrounded and transitional.
Etymology and Core Definition
The term “liminal” is derived from the Latin word limen, meaning “threshold” (). This etymology is key to its meaning: a liminal space or state is a “crossing over” point, a zone of ambiguity and disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a larger process (). The concept was first popularized in the field of anthropology in the early 20th century by scholars like Arnold van Gennep and later Victor Turner, who used it to describe the transitional phase in rites of passage. During this phase, participants no longer hold their previous status but have not yet acquired their new one; they are, in essence, “betwixt and between”. This is the state of being caught “between the 'what was' and the 'next'”.
Manifestations of Liminality
Liminality is not a monolithic concept; it manifests across physical, psychological, temporal, and metaphorical domains, each with its own distinct characteristics.
Physical Liminal Spaces: These are the most widely recognized and aesthetically documented forms of liminality. They are transitory places, designed to be passed through rather than inhabited for any extended period (). Common examples include corridors, stairwells, waiting rooms, airports, train stations, deserted shopping malls, and dimly lit gas stations in the dead of night (). The unsettling, eerie quality of these spaces often arises from their being unnaturally devoid of people. This absence creates what the cultural theorist Mark Fisher termed a “failure of presence”—the expected context of human activity is missing, leaving a void that is both strange and surreal (). Research from the Journal of Environmental Psychology suggests these spaces may appear eerie because they fall into an “uncanny valley” of architecture, appearing familiar but deviating from reality in a way that causes unease.
Psychological Liminal Spaces: These are internal states of transition and ambiguity. They represent the mental “hallway” one occupies after a major life event, but before a new state of being has been established. Examples include the period following a divorce, the death of a loved one, a career change, or recovery from a traumatic event. These psychological states are defined by a profound lack of clarity, where individuals may feel unsure of their identity, purpose, or direction (). This ambiguity often brings with it heightened emotions, such as fear, anxiety, excitement, or anticipation, as one navigates the uncertain terrain of personal change ().
Temporal Liminal Spaces: These are periods of time that are themselves “in-between.” Adolescence is a classic example, a stage that is neither childhood nor adulthood. On a global scale, the COVID-19 pandemic served as a powerful temporal liminal space, suspending the world's population between the “before times” and an uncertain “after” (). This shared, surreal experience of empty streets and vacated public places brought the liminal aesthetic into the collective consciousness (). As will be explored, the feeling of anemoia can also be understood as a form of temporal liminality, a state of being psychically suspended in a time one has never occupied.
Metaphorical Liminal Spaces: These conceptual thresholds exist in moments of profound indecision or when one is grappling with conflicting ideas (). Philosophically, the concept has deep roots. Plato's Allegory of the Cave, for instance, can be read as a liminal space where prisoners exist between ignorance (the shadows on the wall) and enlightenment (the reality outside the cave) (). Similarly, Martin Heidegger's concept of Dasein as “Being-toward-death” frames human existence itself as a perpetual liminal state, a constant straddling of presence and absence.
Nostalgia for an Unlived Past
If liminality sets the stage of transition, anemoia describes a specific kind of longing that can arise within it—a nostalgia untethered from personal experience.
Definition and Origin
Anemoia is a neologism coined by writer John Koenig for his project, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which aims to create words for emotions that lack a specific term (). It is defined as “nostalgia for a time you have never known” (). The etymology is a construct of the Ancient Greek words ánemos (wind) and nóos (mind). This combination is a reference to anemosis, the process by which a tree is warped by persistent high winds until it appears to bend backward, a powerful metaphor for a mind bent toward a past it has never directly touched.
Distinction from Traditional Nostalgia
The crucial distinction between anemoia and traditional nostalgia lies in their relationship to memory. Traditional nostalgia, from the Greek nostos (return home) and algos (pain), is fundamentally rooted in autobiographical memory—a sentimental or wistful longing for people, places, or events from one's own lived past (). Anemoia, in contrast, is based on imagination. It is a sentimentality for an imagined past versus a real one (). This disconnect from personal history is what makes anemoia a distinctly modern phenomenon, as its source material is often not lived experience but rather mediated experience—films, music, photographs, and cultural narratives that create a powerful, albeit artificial, sense of a bygone era.
Psychological Mechanism
The leading psychological theory for anemoia comes from philosopher Felipe De Brigard of Duke University. His work builds on the modern understanding that memory is not a simple retrieval process, like playing back a recording, but is instead a highly creative and simulative act. Each time we recollect a memory, our brain constructs a simulation of that past event. De Brigard argues that if nostalgia can be based on these simulations of pleasant lived experiences, it is not a significant leap to propose that nostalgia can also be based on simulations of pleasant imagined past experiences. These imagined pasts are often constructed from “rose-tinted” cultural accounts, propaganda, or art that presents a romanticized vision of a historical period. The mind creates a simulation of what it would have been like to live in that time, and a yearning to experience it for oneself—anemoia—is born.
Fernweh is The Ache of Farsickness
While anemoia is a longing for a different time, fernweh is a longing for a different place. It captures a specific and profound form of homesickness for a place that is not one's home.
Etymology and Core Feeling
Fernweh is a German compound noun composed of fern, meaning “far” or “distant,” and Weh, which translates to “pain,” “ache,” or “woe”. Thus, its literal translation is “far-sickness” or “distance-pain.” It is the direct antonym of the more commonly known German word Heimweh, or homesickness. It describes an intense, wistful, and often melancholic longing for distant places, which may be places one has visited before or places one has never been.
Distinction from Wanderlust
Differentiating fernweh from the English-adopted German word wanderlust is critical to understanding its unique psychological weight. Wanderlust describes a joyful, pioneering, and explorative desire to travel and roam the world. It is the “lust” or passion for the act of wandering. Fernweh, however, is a deeper and more painful emotion. It is not a generalized desire to travel but a specific, soul-deep ache for a distant place. While wanderlust is an inspiration that pushes one outward, fernweh is a feeling that “weighs on the soul,” a sickness that cannot be easily cured except by the adventure it craves. It is the emptiness felt after returning home from a long journey, the craving for the unknown that has become a palpable need.
Historical and Literary Context
The term Fernweh was first recorded in literature in 1835 in a travel account by the German nobleman Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau. He wrote that he “never suffers from homesickness (Heimweh) but rather from Fernweh”. This sentiment is deeply embedded in the cultural soil of German Romanticism, a philosophical and artistic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that championed emotion over reason, individualism, and a profound communion with nature. This romantic spirit gave rise to Wanderlust, the desire to wander, but also to its more melancholic cousin, Fernweh, the ache that comes from being separated from the vast, soul-stirring landscapes of the world.
The Psychology of Dislocation and Longing
Moving from definition to impact, this section analyzes the direct psychological effects of liminality, anemoia, and fernweh. These phenomena are not merely passive feelings but dynamic processes that can shape identity, trigger anxiety, foster creativity, and, in their more extreme forms, contribute to pathological states. They represent the mind's active attempt to navigate a world where the traditional anchors of self, time, and place have become fluid and uncertain.
Navigating Anxiety, Ambiguity, and Transformation
The experience of being in a liminal state is profoundly dualistic, capable of producing both significant psychological distress and immense personal growth. It is the crucible in which the old self is dissolved, and a new one is forged.
The Negative Pole of Anxiety and Disorientation
At its core, liminality is defined by ambiguity and a lack of clear structure, which can be deeply unsettling for the human psyche. This uncertainty can trigger a cascade of negative emotional states, including stress, anxiety, confusion, and a sense of disorientation. When one is caught between a past that is gone and a future that is not yet known, the mind can spiral into self-doubt and anxiety. This experience can be particularly acute for individuals with a history of trauma, for whom the lack of predictability and safety in a liminal space can feel intensely threatening and scary. The feeling is one of existing on the edge of an unknown wilderness, where the familiar world has been fundamentally altered beneath the surface.
The Positive Pole is Growth and Creativity
Despite this inherent discomfort, liminal spaces are widely recognized as the necessary ground for transformation. It is precisely because the old structures of identity and belief have been suspended that new ones can emerge. These periods of intense self-exploration are crucial for personal growth and self-discovery. The ambiguity forces individuals to confront deep-seated emotions and beliefs, leading to greater self-awareness, resilience, and adaptability. A 2024 longitudinal study in Developmental Psychology found that young adults who actively engaged in self-reflection during liminal periods of transition reported more stable and coherent identities over time. Furthermore, creativity often flourishes in these states of uncertainty. Much like the hero's journey in literature, where a transformative journey follows a disruptive event, real-life creativity can be catalyzed by the ambiguity of the in-between.
Coping Mechanisms
Successfully navigating the psychological challenges of liminality involves a set of adaptive strategies. Research suggests that establishing routines and rituals can provide a sense of structure and stability amidst the chaos. Setting small, achievable goals helps to maintain a sense of forward momentum. Other key strategies include seeking social support, practicing mindfulness to stay grounded in the present, and consciously reframing the uncertainty not as a threat, but as an opportunity for growth and development.
The Creative and Melancholic Power of Imagined Pasts
The psychology of anemoia reveals a complex interplay between dissatisfaction, escapism, and the creative power of the imagination. It is a longing born from the present's perceived inadequacies.
Drivers of Anemoia
A primary psychological driver of anemoia is a sense of dissatisfaction with one's current circumstances. When the present feels lacking, isolating, or overly complex, the mind may construct an idealized, “rose-tinted” version of a past era as a form of psychological refuge. This is particularly evident in the contemporary fascination with pre-digital decades like the 1980s, which are imagined as a time of greater social connection and optimism. Anemoia thus functions as a form of escapism, allowing an individual to mentally inhabit a “simpler” time that is, crucially, a product of their own imagination, curated from cultural artifacts like film and music.
Emotional Duality and Creative Function
Like its parent emotion, nostalgia, anemoia is fundamentally bittersweet, a mixture of pleasant sentimentality and a painful sense of longing. However, because it is based on imagination rather than lived experience, it has a unique psychological function. It is a purely creative mental process, expanding the mind's ability to develop and regulate emotions through the construction of non-autobiographical narratives. While research on its direct effects on mood is still nascent, it is theorized that, similar to nostalgia, anemoia can trigger feelings of longing and sentimentality by allowing one to treasure memories, even if they are not real.
Political and Social Implications
The phenomenon of anemoia has begun to attract the attention of social psychologists and political scientists, who speculate that it could play a role in the rise of populist political movements (). While older voters might be swayed by traditional nostalgia for their own (perhaps inaccurately remembered) past, anemoia helps explain the susceptibility of younger generations to nostalgia-based propaganda. For a young person struggling in the present, a political promise to return to the “good old days”—even days they never lived through—can be powerfully attractive, tapping into a pre-existing, anemoiac yearning for an imagined, better past.
The Fernweh Mind: Identity, Belonging, and the Pull of the Elsewhere
Fernweh is more than a simple desire to travel; it is a profound psychological pull that is deeply intertwined with the processes of self-discovery and identity formation. It represents the negotiation between the self and the wider world.
A Quest for Self-Discovery
Psychologists suggest that underneath the ache for distant places lies a fundamental quest for the self. Fernweh manifests as a deep-seated restlessness, a need to escape the mundane and immerse oneself in new and unfamiliar environments that challenge existing perspectives and expand one's understanding of the world. This is not just about seeing new sights, but about becoming a new self through the experience of elsewhere.
Connection to Identity and Belonging
The pull of fernweh is often strongest when directed toward places tied to a person's core identity. For example, an individual may feel a powerful, inexplicable longing for an ancestral homeland they have never visited. In this context, travel becomes a way of “engaging with this salient facet of self,” a pilgrimage to connect with a part of their own story. In this sense, fernweh and its opposite, Heimweh (homesickness), are two sides of the same coin: both summon a deeper appreciation of who we are and where we come from, whether that “home” is a place of origin or a place of becoming.
The Push-and-Pull Dynamic
The human experience of place is characterized by a constant psychological tension between the pull of fernweh (the desire for the unknown) and the comfort of Heimweh (the attachment to the familiar). Psychologist Zachary Beckstead argues that this dynamic interplay is central to the “developmental self-becoming process.” We construct our sense of self in the movement between “home” and “far away,” balancing our adventurous spirit with our need for grounding and security. This journey between paradigms of thought and physical places is where transformation happens.
When Longing Becomes Maladaptive
While these states of longing and transition can be adaptive, they exist on a spectrum. When the negotiation of identity fails or becomes stuck, these psychological processes can become excessive and dysfunctional, leading to clinically significant distress.
Nostalgic Depression
Nostalgia, including its anemoiac form, is not always benign. While it can be a source of comfort, an excessive fixation on an idealized past can fuel deep dissatisfaction with the present, a condition sometimes referred to as “nostalgic depression”. This is not a formal clinical diagnosis, but it describes a state where the yearning for bygone times becomes coloured with hopelessness and despair. Research suggests that nostalgia can create a vicious cycle: an unpleasant event in the present triggers nostalgic thoughts, which can lead to rumination on negative feelings, sadness, and depression; this distress then prompts further nostalgia as a coping mechanism, deepening the negative mood. This effect appears to be particularly strong for “spontaneous” nostalgia that arises involuntarily in daily life, rather than nostalgia that is deliberately recalled.
Maladaptive Daydreaming (MD)
Maladaptive Daydreaming (MD) is a proposed clinical condition where an individual engages in extensive, vivid, and compulsive daydreaming that replaces real-life interaction and impairs functioning. This behaviour is often a coping mechanism for underlying conditions like anxiety, depression, OCD, or ADHD, and is frequently associated with a history of trauma. The connection to anemoia and fernweh is clear: MD involves creating complex, idealized fantasy worlds as a refuge from a painful reality. The daydreams often feature a more perfect version of the self experiencing the love, acceptance, and success that are absent from the individual's actual life. This intense, immersive longing for an “elsewhere”—whether a fantasy world, an imagined past, or a distant land—becomes so powerful that it disrupts sleep, social relationships, and basic daily tasks. In some cases, the daydreams can be so vivid that they become indistinguishable from actual memories, leading to the fabrication of false memories and significant psychological distress.
Derealization and Online Aesthetics
The rise of internet aesthetics like Weirdcore and Dreamcore, which are built on the foundations of liminality and anemoia, has introduced another potential psychological pitfall. These aesthetics use surreal, distorted, and dream-like imagery to evoke feelings of nostalgia, disorientation, and uncanny familiarity. For some individuals, intense and prolonged exposure to these aesthetics has been anecdotally linked to episodes of derealization—a dissociative symptom characterized by a feeling that one's surroundings are not real. Users describe a “home-like feeling” within the aesthetic world, which then makes the return to the “real world” feel jarring and unreal. This suggests that when the escapist pull of these imagined worlds becomes too strong, it can destabilize one's fundamental sense of reality, acting as a trigger for dissociative experiences.
Ultimately, these psychological states are not merely feelings but active processes of identity negotiation. They represent the mind's attempt to reconcile the self with its environment—be it spatial, temporal, or social—when there is a fundamental mismatch or transition. Liminality is the raw, uncertain process of change. Anemoia is an attempt to construct an identity by borrowing from an idealized, imagined past. Fernweh is an attempt to discover an identity by projecting it onto a distant, unknown place. They are the psychological work of navigating a fractured sense of self. When this process is fluid and adaptive, it leads to growth. When it becomes rigid, obsessive, or stuck, it can manifest as the pathological states of nostalgic depression, maladaptive daydreaming, and derealization.
Neurological Correlates of Space and Memory
To fully grasp how liminality, anemoia, and fernweh affect the mind, it is essential to move from the psychological to the neurological level. The brain is not a passive recipient of these experiences; it is an active agent, with specific neural systems dedicated to mapping our environment, recalling our past, and regulating our emotional state. Recent scientific discoveries reveal a fascinating interplay between these systems, providing a biological basis for the complex feelings evoked by transitional spaces and nostalgic longing.
The Neuroscience of Spatial Cognition
Our ability to navigate the world depends on the brain's remarkable capacity to create and maintain internal representations of external space, often referred to as “cognitive maps”. This is a fundamental cognitive function, essential for everything from finding our keys to understanding our place in the world. The emerging field of environmental neuroscience studies this bidirectional relationship, demonstrating how the physical environment directly interacts with and shapes neural processing.
This complex task of spatial cognition is managed by a distributed network of brain regions:
The Hippocampus: Buried deep in the temporal lobe, the hippocampus is the brain's master cartographer. It is crucial for forming cognitive maps, particularly for allocentric space—the representation of object locations relative to each other, independent of our own viewpoint. It achieves this, in part, through specialized neurons called “place cells,” which fire only when an animal is in a specific location in its environment (). Studies of London taxi drivers have shown that the right hippocampus, in particular, is heavily involved in navigating large-scale spatial environments.
The Posterior Parietal Cortex: This region is critical for egocentric spatial awareness—processing object locations in reference to the self. It integrates sensory information with body position to guide our actions, such as reaching for an object. Damage to the parietal cortex can cause profound spatial disorientation, an inability to perceive the spatial relationships between objects, and a condition known as contralateral neglect, where a person ignores one side of their body and the surrounding space.
The Entorhinal Cortex: Acting as a major interface between the hippocampus and other cortical areas, the entorhinal cortex contains another remarkable type of neuron: “grid cells”. These cells fire in a repeating, hexagonal pattern as an animal moves through an environment, forming a geometric coordinate system that underpins the cognitive map and is essential for path integration—our ability to keep track of our position as we move.
These regions work in concert to build a cohesive sense of where we are. When we enter a familiar space, this system provides a stable, predictable model of our surroundings. However, when we enter an unfamiliar, ambiguous, or disorienting space—a liminal space—this system is thrown into a state of uncertainty, generating signals of alert and anxiety.
The Neurobiology of Nostalgia
Nostalgia is far more than a simple emotion; it is a complex psychological state with a distinct and powerful neural signature. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have revealed that nostalgic experiences activate a network of brain regions involved in some of our most fundamental cognitive processes.
Self-Reflection: Nostalgia is deeply personal. It engages the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), core hubs of the brain's default mode network. These regions are critical for self-referential thought, integrating incoming information with our personal goals, traits, and sense of identity.
Autobiographical Memory: The content of nostalgia is drawn from our past. The hippocampus plays a central role here, retrieving the rich, context-dependent autobiographical memories that form the substance of a nostalgic reverie.
Emotion Regulation: Nostalgic memories are often emotionally charged. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the mPFC are involved in regulating these emotions, managing the bittersweet quality of the experience and ensuring it remains a predominantly positive one.
Reward: Nostalgia feels good. It robustly activates the brain's core reward circuitry, including the striatum and the ventral tegmental area (VTA). These regions are part of the mesolimbic dopamine system, which is also activated by primary rewards like food and social bonding. This indicates that reminiscing about a cherished past is an intrinsically rewarding and motivating experience for the brain.
The mPFC appears to function as a critical hub in this network, linking the retrieval of self-relevant memories from the hippocampus with the positive emotions and rewarding feelings processed elsewhere, creating the holistic and powerful experience we know as nostalgia.
How Spatial Anxiety and Nostalgia Interact
For a long time, the brain's spatial navigation system and its nostalgia system were studied in isolation. However, groundbreaking research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology has revealed a direct and surprising regulatory relationship between them, providing a neurological explanation for the complex feelings evoked by liminal spaces.
The Core Finding and Process
The research, rooted in the regulatory model of nostalgia which posits that nostalgia functions as an emotional homeostasis mechanism, uncovered a clear feedback loop. The process unfolds as follows:
Induction of Spatial Anxiety: When an individual navigates a disorienting or unfamiliar environment—a quintessential liminal experience, such as a virtual maze where a previously learned route is surreptitiously changed—it induces a state of spatial anxiety.
Triggering of Nostalgia: This feeling of being lost and disoriented acts as a psychological stressor. In response, the brain triggers the feeling of nostalgia. Participants in the spatial-anxiety condition reported feeling significantly more nostalgic than those in the neutral condition.
Anxiety Reduction: The induced nostalgia then serves to assuage or reduce the spatial anxiety. This anxiety-buffering effect was observed whether participants were navigating the maze actively or just passively watching a video of it.
Enhanced Goal-Setting: This reduction in anxiety has downstream benefits. Participants who experienced nostalgia were not only less anxious, but were also more likely to choose a more challenging future navigation task, indicating that nostalgia boosted their confidence and goal-setting behaviour.
This discovery extends the regulatory model of nostalgia, which was previously known to counteract negative states like loneliness, boredom, and existential anxiety. We now know that spatial disorientation can be added to the list of adverse conditions that the powerful, positive experience of nostalgia helps the brain to regulate.
This neurological process provides a compelling explanation for the paradoxical comfort many people report feeling in liminal spaces. The experience is not a simple contradiction but a dynamic neurobiological event. The unsettling, eerie, or uncanny feeling associated with a liminal space can be understood as the subjective experience of the brain's spatial cognition system (centred in the parietal cortex and hippocampus) registering ambiguity and disorientation, generating a threat or anxiety signal. In response to this stressor, the brain actively deploys a powerful coping mechanism: nostalgia. The comforting, wistful, or even pleasant feeling that coexists with the eeriness is the subjective experience of the nostalgia system (involving the mPFC and reward circuits) successfully counter-regulating the anxiety. It is the feeling of a psychological antidote being administered in real-time. This feedback loop bridges the gap between the aesthetic experience of liminality and its underlying neuroscience, explaining why these spaces can feel both strange and soothing at the same time. It also provides a direct neural basis for the frequent co-occurrence of liminal aesthetics and anemoia, a potent form of imaginative nostalgia.
Philosophical Lenses for Unseen Landscapes
Beyond the psychological and neurological mechanics, a deeper understanding of liminality, anemoia, and fernweh requires interpretive frameworks capable of capturing their profound and often disturbing existential weight. Major philosophical and aesthetic theories, particularly those concerned with the uncanny, the sublime, and the nature of time, provide powerful lenses through which to analyze these phenomena. These concepts are not merely academic; they give language to the ineffable feelings of dread, awe, and temporal dislocation that define the experience of the in-between.
The Uncanny, the Eerie, and the Familiar-Made-Strange
The most immediate and pervasive feeling associated with liminal spaces is one of strangeness and unease. This is best understood through the psychoanalytic concept of the uncanny.
Freud's Uncanny (Das Unheimliche)
In his 1919 essay, Sigmund Freud explored the concept of das Unheimliche, translated as “the uncanny.” He argued that the uncanny is not simply the unknown, but rather the unsettling feeling that arises when something that was once familiar and homely (heimlich) is suddenly revealed as strange, alien, or concealed (). It is the experience of the familiar becoming defamiliarized, or the return of something that has been repressed from consciousness, like a primitive belief or an infantile complex (). This creates a state of intellectual and emotional uncertainty, blurring the stable boundaries between reality and imagination, life and death, self and other.
Application to Liminal Spaces
Liminal spaces are the architectural embodiment of the Freudian uncanny. They take familiar settings—a school, a hotel, a shopping mall—and strip them of their usual context and inhabitants, making them profoundly unsettling. An empty playground, for example, is uncanny because it is a familiar place stripped of its expected context: the presence of children. This aligns with the theory that liminal spaces fall into an “uncanny valley” of architecture, where physical places that appear familiar but subtly deviate from reality create the characteristic sense of eeriness. The uncanny thus provides the primary philosophical explanation for the “creepy,” “eerie,” and “unsettling” atmosphere that defines the liminal aesthetic.
Mark Fisher's Eerie
Building on Freud, the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher provided a more precise definition of a related concept, “the eerie.” Fisher argued that the eerie is constituted by a “failure of presence” (when something is present where there should be nothing) or, more relevant to liminal spaces, a “failure of absence” (when there is nothing present where there should be something). A depopulated schoolhouse or an abandoned mall is eerie because the expected presence of people has failed, leaving a conspicuous void. This “failure of presence” is a hallmark of the eerie aesthetic experience, and articulates perfectly the specific feeling evoked by the unnaturally empty landscapes of liminality.
The Sublime, the Void, and Encounters with Vastness
While the uncanny describes the strangeness of liminal spaces, the concept of the sublime is needed to understand their scale and power.
The Philosophical Sublime
First systematically explored by thinkers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the sublime is an aesthetic experience characterized by feelings of awe, wonder, and even terror in the face of something of immense scale, power, or formlessness. It is distinct from the beautiful, which is associated with harmony, form, and bounded structure. The sublime is triggered by vast, overwhelming phenomena like a raging ocean, a towering mountain range, or the infinite cosmos. The experience is paradoxical and mixed: it involves a negative aesthetic force of anxious discomfort and a feeling of being small and insignificant, which is simultaneously met with a positive feeling of exaltation and a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself.
Application to Liminal Aesthetics
Many artistic representations of liminality, particularly in its more fantastical forms, tap directly into the power of the sublime. The internet phenomenon of The Backrooms is a prime example. The horror of The Backrooms stems not just from its uncanny familiarity, but from its incomprehensible scale—the original “creepypasta” describes it as “approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms”. This evocation of an impossibly vast, endless, and monotonous expanse is designed to overwhelm the viewer's capacity for reason, inducing the mixture of dread and awe that defines the sublime. The terror lies in its formlessness and infinitude, confronting the individual with a void that is both physical and existential.
Derrida's Spectres and the Nostalgia for Lost Futures
If the uncanny explains the what (the strange familiarity) and the sublime explains the how (the overwhelming scale), then hauntology explains the when—the temporal dislocation at the heart of these modern longings.
Derrida's Hauntology
Hauntology is a concept introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx (). A portmanteau of “haunting” and “ontology,” the term describes the way the present is perpetually “haunted” by the spectres of the past. Crucially, as elaborated by theorists like Mark Fisher, this includes not just the past as it was, but also the “lost futures” that the past once promised but which never came to pass. Hauntology describes a state of cultural and temporal disjunction where, unable to imagine a radically new or different future, culture becomes stuck in a loop, endlessly recycling the aesthetics of the past.
Application to Anemoia and Liminality
Anemoia is a quintessentially hauntological feeling. The widespread cultural longing for the aesthetics of the 1980s and 1990s is not merely a stylistic preference. It is a symptom of what Fisher called the “slow cancellation of the future”. The present is haunted by the aesthetics of a past that seemed to possess a more tangible, optimistic, or simply different future than our own. Anemoia is the emotional expression of this haunting.
Liminal spaces, especially those depicting decay and abandonment, are powerful hauntological artifacts. A “dead mall” is a ghost. It is the physical remnant of a particular vision of late 20th-century capitalist promise—a future of endless consumerism and community centred around commerce—that has now failed and died. These empty structures haunt the present landscape, their very existence a testament to a lost future. The internet aesthetic of “Dark Anemoia” makes this connection explicit, merging the concepts of hauntology, anemoia, and liminal spaces into a single genre of fiction and art.
These philosophical lenses are not competing theories but complementary tools in a multi-layered analysis. A single image or experience can be interpreted through all three simultaneously, revealing its impact on different levels of the psyche. Consider the original “Backrooms” image that launched the entire phenomenon. First, it is uncanny: it depicts a recognizable office or hallway, but its sickly mono-yellow colour, unnatural emptiness, and disorienting Dutch angle render the familiar deeply strange. This is a disruption at the perceptual level. Second, it is sublime: the accompanying lore immediately imbues the image with a terrifying and incomprehensible vastness—” six hundred million square miles”—that overwhelms the mind and triggers the existential dread associated with the sublime. This is a disruption at the existential level. Third, it is hauntological: the photograph itself is a digital ghost, an artifact from a 2002 renovation of a HobbyTown in Wisconsin. It is a relic of a mundane, forgotten past that now haunts the digital present, endlessly re-contextualized as a portal to a terrifying, endless non-future. This is a disruption at the historical and temporal level. Together, these frameworks provide a far richer and more complete understanding of the image's power than any single theory could offer alone.
Cultural and Artistic Manifestations in the Digital Age
The psychological and philosophical power of liminality, anemoia, and fernweh is not confined to academic theory; it is vividly reflected and actively shaped by contemporary culture. In the digital age, these concepts have found fertile ground in online communities, artistic movements, and media, becoming a shared language for a generation navigating a world of unprecedented flux and mediated reality.
From The Backrooms to the Pandemic Cityscape
The visual culture of liminality exploded into mainstream consciousness in the late 2010s, driven by the unique affordances of the internet and catalyzed by a global crisis.
Internet Origins and the COVID-19 Catalyst
The “liminal space aesthetic” first emerged on internet forums like 4chan and Reddit around 2019. It was defined by a shared fascination with photographs of empty, abandoned, or transitional locations that appeared surreal, eerie, and strangely nostalgic. These were images of places caught between use and disuse, evoking a complex mix of comfort and unease. The aesthetic's popularity surged dramatically with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Widespread lockdowns transformed previously bustling public spaces—city streets, airports, schools, offices—into real-life liminal zones. The eerie, depopulated ghost towns depicted in the online aesthetic became a lived, global reality, making the abstract concept tangible and deeply resonant for millions.
Case Study: The Backrooms
The most significant cultural artifact of the liminal aesthetic is “The Backrooms.” This phenomenon began as a simple post on 4chan's paranormal board, featuring a single, unsettling photograph of a hallway with yellow carpets and wallpaper, accompanied by a short, evocative caption. The caption described a terrifying fate: if one were to “no clip out of bounds in real life,” they would end up in the Backrooms, an endless expanse of empty corridors defined by “the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, and the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz”.
The power of The Backrooms lies in its masterful use of the uncanny and the sublime. The space is uncanny because it is vaguely familiar—an office, a basement, a hotel—but stripped of all context and purpose. Its horror is sublime because it is rooted in the terrifying concept of a boundless, featureless void. The fear is not of a specific monster (though entities were later added by the community), but of the psychological torment of infinite isolation in a maddeningly monotonous landscape.
This simple premise exploded into a massive, collaborative world-building project, with users creating countless “levels” of the Backrooms, each with its own unique liminal aesthetic. The phenomenon was propelled into the mainstream by a series of found-footage style short films created by teenager Kane Parsons (known online as Kane Pixels). His videos, which have garnered hundreds of millions of views, introduced a narrative framework involving a shadowy research organization named Async that accidentally opened a portal to the Backrooms in the 1980s. Parsons' work gave the abstract horror a concrete storyline, cementing The Backrooms as a cornerstone of a new genre of collaborative, internet-native horror, alongside projects like the SCP Foundation.
Anemoia as Zeitgeist
Anemoia is not just a niche feeling; it has become a defining characteristic of the contemporary cultural zeitgeist, shaping music, fashion, and a host of online artistic movements.
Gen Z and the 80s Dream
Anemoia is particularly prevalent within Gen Z culture, manifesting as a powerful and pervasive fascination with the 1980s. This longing for a decade most of them never experienced is fuelled by popular media like the Netflix series Stranger Things, which meticulously recreates the era's aesthetic. The 80s are often romanticized as a pre-internet time of greater optimism and more authentic social connection, an imagined paradise just out of reach. This anemoiac yearning drives trends in fashion (oversized blazers, denim-on-denim), music (the resurgence of synth-pop), and technology (the return of film cameras and even flip phones).
Dreamcore and Weirdcore
The online aesthetics known as Dreamcore and Weirdcore are direct artistic expressions of anemoia and liminality. They utilize surreal, low-fidelity, and dream-like imagery to evoke a potent mix of nostalgia, disorientation, comfort, and unease. These aesthetics explicitly draw on the visual language of liminal spaces—empty rooms, playgrounds, and hallways—and are designed to trigger anemoia, a nostalgia for a past you've never known. Weirdcore, in particular, often incorporates unsettling elements like disembodied eyes or cryptic text to heighten the sense of confusion and dread, while Dreamcore leans into more ethereal, pastel-toned visuals. For many young people, these aesthetics function as a form of “digital art therapy” or a coping mechanism, providing a visual language to express feelings of anxiety, isolation, and a longing for escape.
Synthetic Romanticism
The appeal of these aesthetics, especially the strange comfort found in images of “boring, empty, soulless, identity-less corporate places,” can be understood as a new, “synthetic” form of Romanticism. Whereas the classic Romantics of the 19th century found solace and sublime experience in the untamed wilderness of misty mountains and tranquil forests, the modern “liminalist” finds a similar sense of melancholic longing and mystification in the artificial, prefabricated environments of their own childhoods—shopping malls, school corridors, and suburban office parks. The object of romantic longing has shifted from the natural to the synthetic, but the underlying psychological impulse remains the same.
Fernweh in the Modern Imagination
Fernweh, the ache for distant places, also finds potent expression in contemporary art and literature, where it is often framed not as a joyful desire but as a complex, melancholic, and sometimes instructional longing.
Travel Writing and Photography
In the hands of contemporary writers and photographers, fernweh is explored with nuance. Author Teju Cole, in his book of photographs titled Fernweh, captures the feeling not as a simple desire to travel, but as a meditative and melancholic re-seeing of a place (in this case, Switzerland), tracing the subtle signs of human presence in landscapes that are often devoid of people. His work embodies the idea that fernweh is an “ache for distance,” a longing that can be felt even for familiar places made strange through close observation. Photography becomes a medium for evoking this feeling, framing landscapes in a way that conveys this deep, often bittersweet, attachment to a place.
Instructional Longing
In an era of ecological crisis, fernweh can take on an instructional quality. It can manifest as a profound longing for lost or damaged landscapes, such as the pristine, vibrant Colorado River Delta described in the writings of ecologist Aldo Leopold, a place that no longer exists in that form. This type of fernweh is not merely nostalgic; it is a form of ecological grief that serves as a powerful benchmark against which we can measure our present environmental degradation. It becomes a way of connecting past and future landscapes, using the ache for what has been lost to envision and evaluate what could be restored or protected.
Case Study: The Liminal Worlds of Andrei Tarkovsky and Other Cinematic Explorations
Film has proven to be a particularly powerful medium for exploring the psychological and spiritual dimensions of liminality.
Tarkovsky's Liminality
The films of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky are masterful and profound explorations of liminal states. His cinematic worlds are drenched in an atmosphere of transition and spiritual unease. He uses natural elements like rain, fire, and wind, as well as domestic spaces, not as stable, comforting anchors, but as fluid, liminal zones where his characters experience psychological and spiritual crises. His characters are often adrift, caught in incomplete rites of passage or states of profound internal conflict, and their external environments serve as direct reflections of this “in-betweenness”. In films like Ivan's Childhood and Stalker, nature itself becomes a surreal “comfort zone,” a place of dream-like respite from the pain of the world, but this respite is itself a liminal experience, hovering between reality and memory, life and death.
Other Cinematic Examples
Tarkovsky is part of a rich cinematic tradition of using transitional spaces to explore the human psyche.
The Uncanny Hotel: Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) is a quintessential example. The Overlook Hotel, with its impossibly long corridors, vast empty ballrooms, and symmetrical, repeating patterns, is a perfect physical and psychological liminal space that mirrors the protagonist's descent into madness. The hotel is a place of transition, not permanent residence, making it a space where the walls of reality are thin.
Lynchian Surrealism: Director David Lynch has built his career on exploring liminality. From the iconic Red Room in Twin Peaks—a metaphysical waiting room—to the dark, deserted highways of Lost Highway, Lynch's films consistently blur the lines between reality, dream, and the subconscious, often making the liminal space the primary narrative environment.
Gothic Literature: This cinematic tradition has deep roots in Gothic literature. The Gothic genre is fundamentally built on liminality, featuring transitional characters (vampires, who are neither living nor dead), liminal geographies (isolated castles on national borders), and liminal spaces (thresholds, doorways, secret passages) that represent the porous boundary between the natural and the supernatural, the sane and the mad.
Synthesizing the In-Between
The exploration of liminality, anemoia, and fernweh reveals more than just a collection of esoteric feelings; it uncovers a deeply interconnected psychological framework for understanding the modern human condition. These concepts are not isolated curiosities but are intertwined responses to a world defined by dislocation, ambiguity, and perpetual change. Liminality, in its physical, psychological, and temporal forms, provides the fundamental stage—the transitional, uncertain space where the old rules are suspended. Anemoia and fernweh represent two of the primary modes of longing that populate this stage. They are the mind's reach for an anchor in the flux: anemoia reaches backward to a comforting, imagined past, while fernweh reaches outward to a transformative, distant elsewhere.
The contemporary potency of these concepts cannot be overstated. They resonate so strongly now because they speak directly to the disorienting nature of digital life, where we exist in a constant liminal state between physical and virtual worlds. They are amplified by a “hauntological” sense, a cultural anxiety that the future has been stalled or cancelled, prompting a cultural turn inward and backward searching for meaning, identity, and authenticity. The rise of internet aesthetics like The Backrooms and Weirdcore is a direct artistic manifestation of this collective psyche, a way for a generation to build a shared visual language around feelings of anxiety, nostalgia for times they never knew, and the uncanny sense of being unmoored.
Neurologically, the mind is not a passive victim of this disorientation. The discovery of the regulatory feedback loop between spatial anxiety and nostalgia shows a brain actively working to maintain equilibrium. The uncanny comfort of a liminal space is the felt sense of the brain deploying the rewarding, self-affirming power of nostalgia to counteract the threatening signals of spatial confusion. It is a testament to the mind's profound capacity for adaptation.
Ultimately, to understand liminality, anemoia, and fernweh is to understand the unsettling but fundamentally generative process of becoming. These “in-between” states, though often born from anxiety and a sense of loss, are the necessary crucibles for transformation. They are the quiet, empty spaces where old identities are shed, where creativity flourishes, and where the self is re-forged. In a world that is itself perpetually in transition, the ability to navigate these thresholds—to tolerate their ambiguity and embrace their potential—may be the most essential psychological skill of all.