In today's academy, the topic of empathy is ubiquitous: it plays a critical role in social neuroscience in the study of autism spectrum disorders; in trauma studies it is a contested means for grasping another's experience of suffering, and in visual studies it is a conduit for the viewer's emotional involvement in film. Despite this recent attention, however, there is little understanding of the historical roots of empathy. "Empathy" is a modern term, a 1909 translation of the German Einfühlung made by the Cornell psychologist Edward Titchener. Einfühlung did not originate in the realm of social or interpersonal psychology as might be expected, but in German psychological aesthetics.
The intellectual merit of this project lies in filling this historical lacuna by charting the emergence of Einfühlung in German aesthetics, its translation into "empathy," and its subsequent adoption by psychiatrists in the United States and Germany in the 1920s. This narrative will begin in 1873 with the German aesthetician's Robert Vischer's use of Einfühlung as an embodied, emotional engagement with aesthetic objects. In psychological and aesthetic journals of the late nineteenth century, psychologists debated whether Einfühlung was a kinesthetic or symbolic activity, a form of projection, or an imitative capacity. Einfühlung was variously understood as a psychological epistemology; a physiological foundation for aesthetics; a bridging concept between subject and object, mind and body; and a support to a philosophical monism and religious pantheism. Einfühlung thus reflected and captured many diverse intellectual and cultural agendas during a time of rapid modernization and growing scientific specialization.
After describing the German intellectual and cultural debates on Einfühlung, Lanzoni's research will then illuminate the context of Titchener's 1909 translation. For Titchener, "empathy" entailed a kinesthetic response to sensory stimuli, and over the next decade he found evidence of empathic responding in his experimental introspective studies. By the 1920s, due to new developments in psychiatry, the complex meanings of empathy began to coalesce into a definition that stressed its interpersonal and mental constitution. Psychiatrists devised empathic indices, psychoanalysts called empathy a form of identification and in 1927 introduced the term to a popular audience. In German-speaking countries psychiatrists also adopted "empathy" as an important element in the doctor-patient relationship, but unlike their American counterparts, were cognizant of the aesthetic meanings of Einfühlung, employing the concept for the interpretation of schizophrenic-created art and Rorschach inkblots.
The broader merit of this work is that it unearths empathy's complex history, revealing a rich set of theorizations about the embodied, physiological and psychological aspects of the relation of the self to objects and others at the turn of the twentieth century. This intellectual and cultural history of empathy will provide depth to current interdisciplinary dialogue on empathic processes. Beyond this, empathy offers an engaged participatory tool for the acquisition of knowledge and the development of understanding across individuals and cultures. For this reason, this research will generate methodological insights for a range of fields: from the psychiatrist's and psychologist's consulting rooms, to educational settings, as well as the historian's archive. As both object of study and epistemological tool, empathy stands in a unique position in the psychological sciences, and this historical investigation will track its little known passage from aesthetics to psychotherapeutic practice to popular understandings.
