2006/03/01 by Juliet Koss · 2 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Cinema and Media Studies #Art, Politics, and Modernism #Visual Culture and Art Theory #Empathy #Feeling #Movie theater #Narrative #Perception #Object (grammar) #Abstraction #Discipline #Aesthetics #Art #Psychology #Visual arts #Psychoanalysis #Sociology #Social psychology #Literature #Philosophy #Epistemology #Linguistics #Social science
paper · doi:10.1080/00043079.2006.10786282
openalex publication_date 2006/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
In late-nineteenth-century Germany, Einfühlung, or empathy (literally, “feeling into”) described an individual spectator's active perceptual experience—both haptic and optical—of an image, object, or spatial environment Critique from within the discourse and a loss of interest among art historians and psychologists around 1900 preceded more forceful rejections by Wilhelm Worringer in 1908 and, later, Bertolt Brecht. The concept's critical history reveals and reflects disciplinary fractures; a rejection of narrative with the birth of visual abstraction; and widespread transformations, with the birth of cinema, in the objects of spectatorship and the status of spectators themselves.