_A surprising, sweeping, and deeply researched history of empathy—from late-nineteenth-century German aesthetics to mirror neurons_ _Empathy: A History_ tells the fascinating and largely unknown story of the first appearance of “empathy” in 1908 and tracks its shifting meanings over the following century. Despite empathy’s ubiquity today, few realize that it began as a translation of _Einfühlung _or “in-feeling” in German psychological aesthetics that described how spectators projected their own feelings and movements into objects of art and nature. Remarkably, this early (...) conception of empathy transformed into its opposite over the ensuing decades. Social scientists and clinical psychologists refashioned empathy to require the deliberate putting aside of one’s feelings to more accurately understand another’s. By the end of World War II, interpersonal empathy entered the mainstream, appearing in advice columns, popular radio and TV, and later in public forums on civil rights. Even as neuroscientists continue to map the brain correlates of empathy, its many dimensions still elude strict scientific description. This meticulously researched book uncovers empathy’s historical layers, offering a rich portrait of the tension between the reach of one’s own imagination and the realities of others’ experiences. (shrink)

ArgumentThe new English term “empathy” was translated from the GermanEinfühlungin the first decade of the twentieth century by the psychologists James Ward at the University of Cambridge and Edward B. Titchener at Cornell. At Titchener's American laboratory, “empathy” was not a matter of understanding other minds, but rather a projection of imagined bodily movements and accompanying feelings into an object, a meaning that drew from its rich nineteenth-century aesthetic heritage. This rendering of “empathy” borrowed kinaesthetic meanings from German sources, but (...) extended beyond a contemplation of the beautiful to include a variety of experimental stimuli and everyday objects in the laboratory. According to Titchener's structural psychology, all higher thought could be reduced to more elemental aspects of mind, and experimental introspection showed empathy to be constituted of kinaesthetic images. The existence of kinaesthetic images, Titchener argued, formed an incisive critique of the view that thought could take place without images, held by one of Titchener's major psychological rivals, the school of thought-psychologists in Würzburg, Germany. The new term “empathy” in early American academic psychology therefore delineated a kinaesthetic imaginative projection that took place on the basis of ontological difference between minds and things. (shrink)

The Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger is best known for his existential analysis (Daseinsanalyse) presented in a series of case studies in the 1940s, but his existential anthropology of mania of the early 1930s has received less attention. He introduced this new existential science as a disciplinary hybrid of existential philosophy and clinical psychiatry, and, in doing so, transformed the genre of narrow medical case study into a broader discourse of philosophical anthropology. The very ambitiousness of his method, however, tended to (...) eclipse the individuality of his manic patient; its delineation of the conditioning structures of manic experience rendered the patient’s life-history and her functional state as secondary to these structures. (shrink)

Emotion and feeling have only in the last decade become analytic concepts in the humanities, reflected in what some have called an “affective turn” in the academy at large. The study of emotion has also found a place in science studies and the history and philosophy of science, accompanied by the recognition that even the history of objectivity depends in a dialectical fashion on a history of subjectivity. This topical issue is a contribution to this larger trend across the humanities (...) and the history of science, and yet is circumscribed by attention to a particular kind of emotion or condition for feeling: one centered not in an individual body, but in the interstices between bodies and things, between selves and others – what we call empathy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sympathy in Mind (1876–1900)Susan LanzoniIn the April 1884 issue of Mind, William James published his influential account of emotion, which stressed the bodily and physiological constitution of various feeling-states.1 The article reflected new trends in physiological psychology, but came under attack by numerous respondents in the journal who argued that there was more to the emotions than physiology.2 As the evolutionary psychologist Hiram Stanley intoned, "emotions in the higher (...) stages are filled out by knowledge and will."3 Many noted that the higher emotions—aesthetic sentiments, sympathy, pity, envy, love—were not marked by clear physiological changes. Charles Darwin had observed that love was not discernable by prominent facial expressions.4 There was also little agreement as to how to divide sentiments from appetites, affections, and passions. What came to be known as the James-Lange theory [End Page 265] of emotion, then, was only one of a variety of theories of emotion circulating in Anglo-American intellectual culture of the late nineteenth century.5In debates about the nature of emotion, the higher emotions—particularly that of sympathy—played a crucial role. Sympathy was most often understood to be a kind of tenderheartedness linked to, but distinct from love. At the same time, sympathy was tethered to a variety of moral and epistemological ends—as a cornerstone in evolutionary ethics, an element in aesthetic appreciation, and even as a source for knowledge of other minds. Sympathy had had a prominent place in eighteenth-century theories of aesthetics, moral sentiments and taste, in the writings of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. In the late Victorian period, theories of sympathy drew on this lineage and increasingly became tinged with evolutionary and developmental features.Although sympathy in the Victorian period has gained the attention of literary scholars, historians of the mind sciences have not paid it much due, even though its psychological origins and moral correlates were of sustained interest in this period.6 Stefan Collini has argued that British intellectual culture was intrigued by the interplay of egoistic and altruistic tendencies, and the birth of a number of ethical societies in the final two decades of the century attests to the increased emphasis on the moral dimensions of sympathy.7 Anti-vivisection movements and societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals and children, often with appeals to sympathy, gained adherents in this period in Britain and America.8 In one study, [End Page 266] psychologists distributed scientific questionnaires in order to assess the experiences of sympathy and pity of nearly four hundred subjects.9 There was no underestimating the importance of sympathy for Anglo-American intellectuals, who confidently claimed it was becoming more refined and more widely diffused in their era. Darwin believed that sympathy had been extended to those of the same nation, and prescriptively wrote that it should extend to all nations and races, as well as the imbecile and the maimed. Darwin was echoing here the broader enlightenment sentimentalist tradition that linked the feeling of sympathy to a conception of humanity.10In the pages of the British professional psychological and philosophical journal Mind, sympathy was under scrutiny by scholars in evolutionary and developmental psychology, ethics, and aesthetics. This journal, first published in 1876, and funded by Alexander Bain, examined new trends in physiological and scientific psychology and sought a broad philosophical framework for the understanding of mental life.11 It played a mediating role in the overlapping discussions of science and philosophy and published on a diverse array of topics. Although Mind saw itself as a specialized journal for psychology and philosophy, it was founded at an historical moment when discussions of the mind were not narrowly portioned out to the psychological sciences, as would increasingly be the case after 1900. Indeed, the experimental psychological laboratory emerged as a new scientific institution [End Page 267] only in 1879 with Wilhelm Wundt's Leipzig laboratory, and then in 1897 at the Universities of London and Cambridge. Specialization in the late Victorian age on topics relating to the mind was downright eclectic: during the editorships of George Croom Robertson (1876–1892) and of G.F. Stout (1892–1920), Mind published on physiological... (shrink)