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“Vischer’s idea of a back and forth between projecting the self and internalizing the world—what he called a “direct continuation of the external sensation into an internal one”—influenced generations of philosophers, psychologists, and aesthetic theorists. To describe his radical new concept, he used the German word Einfühlung, literally “feeling-in.” When psychological works influenced by Vischer began to be translated into English in the early twentieth century, the language needed a new term for this new idea, and translators invented the word empathy. It is pretty shocking to realize that empathy is barely a hundred years old, about the same age as X-rays and lie-detector tests.”
― Damion Searls, The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing

“Rorschach knew Binet’s work and was familiar with Binet’s own inspiration—Leonardo da Vinci, who in his “Treatise on Painting” described throwing paint at a wall and looking at the stains for inspiration.”
― Damion Searls, The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing

“The psychology of the unconscious and abstract art, two groundbreaking ideas of the early twentieth century, were actually close cousins, with a common ancestor in philosopher Karl Albert Scherner, whom both Vischer and Freud credited as the source of their key idea. Vischer called Scherner’s 1861 book The Life of the Dream a “profound work, feverishly probing hidden depths…from which I derived the notion that I call ‘empathy’ or ‘feeling-into’ ”; in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud cited Scherner at length, praising the “essential correctness” of his ideas and describing his book as “the most original and far-reaching attempt to explain dreaming as a special activity of the mind.” Vischer led to abstract art via Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965), whose 1906 art history dissertation Abstraction and Empathy had an argument as simple as its title: empathy is only half the story.”
― Damion Searls, The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing

“Vischer had the same kind of experiences, likewise anticipating Rorschach’s. “When I observe a stationary object,” Vischer wrote, “I can without difficulty place myself within its inner structure, at its center of gravity. I can think my way into it,” feel “compressed and modest” when I see a star or flower, and “experience a feeling of mental grandeur and breadth” from a building, water, or air. “We can often observe in ourselves the curious fact that a visual stimulus is experienced not so much with our eyes as with a different sense in another part of our body.”
― Damion Searls, The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing