reader

“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

“Rorschach’s body could activate his vision: “When, for example, I am unable to call up Schwind’s painting Falkenstein’s Ride as a memory image but I know how the knight is holding his right arm (‘knowing’ here as a nonperceptual mental image), I can voluntarily copy the position of this arm, in my imagination or in reality, and this immediately gives me a visual memory of the picture that is much better than without this aid.” This was, he reiterated, precisely the same as what happened in his schizophrenic patients: by holding his arm the right way, he had “hallucinatorily called forth, so to speak, the perceptual components of the visual image.”
― Damion Searls

“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’s dissertation, which he finished in 1912, set out to define the physiological pathways that make empathy in Vischer’s sense possible. “On ‘Reflex Hallucinations’ and Related Phenomena” may be a brain-numbing title in English, but the subject was nothing less than the connection between what we see and how we feel. Reflexhalluzination was a technical psychiatric”
― Damion Searls, The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing