When an experimental subject in Cheves Perky's Reference Perky1910 experiments on the imagination conducted at the Cornell psychology laboratory was told to imagine a bunch of grapes, the report was of “a cool, juicy feeling all over”; when imagining a parrot, the response was of “a feeling of smoothness and softness all over me”; and the image of fish elicited a “slippery feeling in my throat, coolness in my eyes” (Perky Reference Perky1910, 448–49). This subject, an “Observer” in the language of the new experimental psychology, was practicing systematic introspection – painstakingly describing the images, sensations, and affects running through the mind while observing, listening to stimuli, or imagining objects in the laboratory. In this instance, the Observer's felt sense of merging with the image of a fish, parrot, or grape was designated as “kinaesthetic empathy.” Empathy, according to this rendering, was tied to one's own body and not to understanding another's emotional life, a meaning significantly different from that of contemporary American usage. Perky's experiments have been long considered one of the classic studies exhibiting the porous line between imagination and perception, but they were also one of the first to document empathy in a now unfamiliar variety in an American psychology laboratory.Footnote ¹

The term “empathy” was new to the English speaking world.Footnote ² It was a translation of Einfühlung, a process of “feeling into” an object of art and a vaunted aesthetic theory in Germany, beginning in 1866 with the work of Friedrich Theodor Vischer and Robert Vischer, although its roots go back to Arthur Schopenhauer and Hermann Lotze (Mallgrave and Elefttherios 1994, 20; Vischer [1873] Reference Vischer, Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios1994). Vischer described Einfühlung as a process of projecting both body and soul into the inner structure or the form of an object (Vischer [1873] Reference Vischer, Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios1994, 92). One might project one's own feelings, movements, and bodily responses so that, for example, one would feel expansiveness or mental breadth whilst encountering a large form, or perceive a cliff to be standing at attention and defiant (ibid., 105). It was sometimes described as a fusion of the self and object, and most famously was depicted by the Munich psychologist and philosopher Theodor Lipps as pleasure objectified, or experienced in the object of contemplation itself (Lipps [1903] Reference Lipps1923; idem [1906] Reference Lipps1920; Jarzombek Reference Jarzombek2000; Koss Reference Koss2006; Allesch Reference Allesch1987). Lipps declared Einfühlung the sine qua non of aesthetic experience, but he also extended the purview of Einfühlung beyond aesthetics to nature, common objects, and the expressions of others.Footnote ³Einfühlung has a complex history in German philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology: it has been closely associated with Dilthey's aesthetic psychological methods of re-experiencing (Nacherleben) or putting oneself in the position of another (Sich hineinversetzen), and Einfühlung theory has also been theorized as a early phenomenology avant la lettre (Barasch Reference Barasch1998, 117; Friedrich and Gleiter Reference Friedrich and Gleiter2007, 9).Footnote ⁴

If Einfühlung possessed a variety of meanings in late nineteenth-century German intellectual culture, this article asks how it came to be translated as “empathy,” and what it meant in Anglophone psychological contexts. The fact that there are multiple early translations of the term reflects the growing importance of the concept in international circles during the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1909, Titchener had suggested the term as a translation of the Einfühlung in a series of lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes, and early that same year, James Ward, a psychologist and philosopher at the University of Cambridge, had also suggested “empathy” as a translation. Titchener's translation of Einfühlung as empathy is often cited in the social psychological literature on the roots of empathy, but most accounts do not mention Ward's translation, nor do they elaborate on the context and meanings of empathy in Titchener's psychological laboratory (Wispé Reference Wispé, Eisenberg and Strayer1987; Hunsdahl Reference Hunsdahl1967; Gladstein Reference Gladstein1984).Footnote ⁵ This article tackles both projects: first showing that “empathy” had been suggested by James Ward in early 1909 or before, and second (which forms the bulk of the article), exploring the meanings of empathy as it unfolded in lectures, textbooks, and in the practice of scientific psychology at the Cornell laboratory. Only one year after Titchener's translation, the terms “empathy” and “empathic” appeared in observers’ reports of experimental introspections at the laboratory. Empathy's first meanings in American psychology can thus be seen through an excavation of this major site of its emergence – the historical and epistemological moment of a turn of the twentieth-century practice of introspective experimental psychology at Cornell.Footnote ⁶

How then was “empathy” reported as an experimental finding and in the textbooks emerging from Titchener's laboratory? Titchener first defined “empathy” in public lectures held at the University of Illinois at Urbana in March 1909, a sustained argument against the competing claims of the thought-psychologists based, for the most part, at the Psychological Institute at the University of Würzburg in Germany, under the laboratory director Owsald Külpe.Footnote ⁷ Introspective experiments had led thought-psychologists to report that some thoughts, along with a variety of conscious attitudes (Bewusstseinlagen), were not composed of images or sensations, but were themselves elementary aspects of the mind (Mayer and Orth Reference Mayer and Orth1901; Marbe Reference Marbe1901; Kusch Reference Kusch1999; Humphrey Reference Humphrey1951, 106–32). But Titchener's psychology had decreed that all contents of the mind could be reduced to basic mental elements – sensations, images, or feelings. Titchener claimed that thought-psychologists had simply overlooked kinaesthetic images, along with other organic images and sensations in their introspections of higher thought processes. A kinaesthetic image was the mind's image or inner representation of bodily movement, understood by analogy to a visual image, and enacted in the “mind's muscles.” In these lectures, published in November 1909 as Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes, Titchener argued that “empathy” was one among other complex thoughts constituted by more elementary building blocks of the mind – in this case, the kinaesthetic image.

Titchener located “empathy” in the bodily imagination, and at the same time squarely within the academic project to uncover the structure of the mind in the controlled setting of the new experimental psychology.Footnote ⁸ His translation largely followed Wundt, in shifting the emphasis of Einfühlung from the subject's engagement with a beautiful object to a more generic function of the kinesthetic imagination. At the Cornell laboratory, empathy was enacted with everyday objects and situations, along with a variety of experimental stimuli. Titchener also drew from Vischer's characterization of Einfühlung as a process of objectifying one's bodily form, the body's sensations and movements, and even more deeply, one's feelings, into the form of the aesthetic object (Vischer [1873] Reference Vischer, Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios1994). Yet Titchener emphasized the presence of images of movement, or the kinaesthetic image, rather than actual feelings or sensations in empathic response.

Titchener did not lay much claim to the interpersonal value of Einfühlung, which Lipps had included among the many different forms of Einfühlung, as a reading of emotion through the sensory signs of others’ expressions (Lipps [1903a]). This intersubjective meaning of Einfühlung often carried with it an assumption that one could read the emotions of others veridically, but Titchener questioned this ability, especially as a method of scientific study.Footnote ⁹ To empathize at the Cornell laboratory, rather, was to imagine objects or stimuli through an intimate kinaesthetic entry into their being. An otherness then, was not only part of the empathic process, but provided the condition for empathic experience to be carried out at all. Unlike the ways in which one might empathize today with another's state of mind or emotional expressions, empathy in experimental introspection remained closely connected to its German aesthetic origin. It merged subjects into things, and made things into subjects, unfolding on the basis of the ontological difference of empathizer and object, rather than on similarity.Footnote ¹⁰

Before Empathy there Was Aesthetic Sympathy

Titchener, along with other English speaking psychologists at the turn of the twentieth century was in the business of translating major German psychological and psychophysiological texts for the English-speaking world.Footnote ¹¹ British by birth, Titchener had studied the classics at Oxford, then physiological psychology in Leipzig with Wilhelm Wundt. He became one of the foremost practitioners of structural psychology in North America, serving as director of the Cornell laboratory from 1892 until his death in 1927 (Evans Reference Evans, Leys and Evans1990; Heidbreder Reference Heidbreder1933). He was an editor of the American Journal of Psychology (with G. Stanley Hall and Edmund C. Sanford), took over sole editorship in 1921, and served as one of the American editors of the journal Mind. Although his method of pinpointing the elemental structures of the mind faded with the rise of behaviorist methods and the popularity of applied psychology around the time of World War I, his laboratory methods were standard practice for experimental psychologists for many years (Evans Reference Evans, Leys and Evans1990, 30–32; Hindeland Reference Hindeland1971).

Many American and British psychologists had earned their doctorates in Leipzig under Wundt and were immersed in German psychological literature in the late nineteenth century. Titchener claimed that nine-tenths of psychologists were trained in Germany in 1895 and consequently, “thinking in German upon psychological questions must be easier that thinking either in English or French” (Titchener Reference Titchener1895, 78). Anglophone psychologists struggled to translate German terminology into English, and the term Einfühlung posed particular difficulties. In 1901, the philologist Wilbur M. Urban at Ursinus College described Lipps's concept of Einfühlung as a process whereby effects produced by an object awakened free activity of one's own, which was then experienced in the objectively conditioned experience. This resulted in an accord between subject and object – a familiar enough experience, as he put it, but it was “difficult to find an English equivalent” (Urban Reference Urban1901, 433).

By 1909, a number of different translations of Einfühlung had emerged. In reviews of Lipps's work in English language periodicals, the preferred term was most commonly “aesthetic sympathy” and sometimes merely “sympathy” (“Philosophical Periodicals” 1900, 563; 1901, 428). Standardizing psychological nomenclature was a challenging task as evidenced by the efforts of editors of the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, published from 1901–1905. This dictionary listed English equivalents for a number of French, German, Italian, and other foreign terms.Footnote ¹²Einfühlung was given the translation “aesthetic sympathy” in an entry written by J. Mark Baldwin with agreement initialed by Urban and Titchener, along with a note that Lipps had also used the term Beseelung or “animation” (Baldwin Reference Baldwin1901–05, 679). Titchener alluded to aesthetic Einfühlung theory in 1899 when he spoke of aesthetic sentiments as “one's own emotions, projected into other people or into external nature, and refound there by one's active attention” (Titchener [1899] Reference Titchener1916, 330). In the Dictionary, however, the psychologist Karl Groos voiced his disagreement with Lipps's theory in an addendum, complaining that the locale of feeling (either in oneself or in the object) was confused in the term Einfühlung (Baldwin Reference Baldwin1901–05, 679).

“Aesthetic sympathy” was not the only term suggested as a translation of Einfühlung: the philosopher James H. Tufts offered “pathos” and “pathetic”; it was also described as the animation of an object with one's own living energy, and the German philosopher J. Volkelt called it a fusion of the self and object (Volkelt Reference Volkelt1876). The German-born Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg treated aesthetic Einfühlung at length in his Philosophie der Werte in 1908, but in his own English translation the following year, described it as “feeling ourselves into” art or nature – a process “by which we introject our emotions into the things. We feel ourselves into the beautiful objects and give life and soul to them” (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg1908, 191; idem Reference Münsterberg1909, 170). As the phenomenologist Andrea Pinotti has pointed out, there was never one simple psychological depiction of Einfühlung or empathy: projection, transfer, association, animation, personification, vivification, fusion, identification, among others were all possibilities (Pinotti Reference Pinotti, Rainer Sepp and Embree2010, 94).

These varied translations not only reflect the range of meanings of Einfühlung in a myriad of English terms, but also underscore the heated international debates regarding the role of association, imitation, motor movement, and the contribution of organic sensations and mental factors in aesthetic Einfühlung (Geiger Reference Geiger1911). Some ventured to document actual motor movements while empathizing (Lee and Anstruther-Thomson Reference Lee and Anstruther-Thomson1897; Groos Reference Groos1902), while others saw it as a form of inner imitation of gestures, and still others viewed it as a more abstract projection of one's own inner willing and striving onto the object without sensory or motor components. Lipps stressed the projection of spiritualized inner activity – the feelings and strivings of the ego or self and not muscular sensations were felt in the perceived object (Allesch Reference Allesch1987, 335; Lipps Reference Lipps1900; Lipps [1903] Reference Lipps and Rader1960). Einfühlung proliferated into many different types – in the main it was seen as an aesthetic process, but Lipps listed mood and nature Einfühlung along with the grasp of others’ emotions through the perception of sensory signs of facial expressions. Despite its diverse meanings, however, Einfühlung theory most often entailed movement or activity, whether overt, inner, or imagined.

“Einfühlung” as “Empathy”

Although the term “empathy” has been widely reported to have first appeared in Titchener's Reference Titchener1909Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes, this was not indeed its earliest appearance. In July of the previous year, it showed up in a footnote, attributed to Titchener but misspelled by the Viennese philosopher Oscar Ewald in his survey of German philosophy in the Philosophical Review. Ewald translated Einfühlung as “sympathy,” adding in a footnote: “Professor E.B. Titchener has suggested the introduction of the term “enpathy” as an equivalent for Einfühlung” (Ewald Reference Ewald1908, 407). This was clearly a misprint, for in November of that year, a correction was printed offering the new term, “empathy” (“Notes” 1908, 694). Given that the editors of the Philosophical Review were based at Cornell, it seems likely Titchener engaged in conversations about the translation of Einfühlung in early 1908 with his colleagues.

But the adoption of “empathy” for Einfühlung is also attributed to the British professor of mental philosophy and logic at the University of Cambridge, James Ward, in a textbook on experimental psychology written in early 1909 by Ward's colleague, Charles S. Myers. Explicating Lipps’ account of Einfühlung, Myers defined Einfühlung as “living into” the experience of the object; or a process by which “the subject feels in himself the suggestions of strain, movement or rest in the object, and makes them part of himself” (Myers Reference Myers1909, 331). Myers then used the term empathy as a translation of Einfühlung, commenting in a footnote: “Professor James Ward suggests to me this convenient translation of the German Einfühlung.” A lecturer at St. Andrews, R.F. Hoernle, also gave credit to Ward for the translation, along with the psychologist Charles Spearman, the reviewer of Myers’ textbook in the journal Mind.Footnote ¹³ And, even more conclusively, Ward himself made this claim in a 1915 letter to the anthropologist Sir James Frazer, writing that recent talk of Einfühlung had been rendered by him as “empathy,” a concept he found similar to Frazer's notion of personification.Footnote ¹⁴ Ward's conception of empathy thus entailed an almost religious personification of the world of objects, perhaps drawing on Vischer's pantheistic views, and supporting Ward's panpsychism.Footnote ¹⁵

Despite being proponents of very different psychologies, Ward and Titchener both proffered the translation at about the same time from different sides of the Atlantic. In October 1908, the term “empathy” appeared in Mind in a summary of philosophical periodicals, likely written by one of the contributing editors, possibly Titchener or Ward: Titchener was the American editorial representative and had been paid for writing this section in previous years, and Ward was on the advisory committee.Footnote ¹⁶ It may have been that Ward and Titchener discussed the translation, as they shared a correspondence, or that they had independently turned to the Greek for the translation.Footnote ¹⁷

Although the precise provenance of the English term remains unclear, by 1908, Anglophone psychologists felt the need to capture the sense of Einfühlung with an English term, albeit by way of the Greek. This need emerged from the central place Einfühlung theory held in German psychological aesthetics, as evidenced in the extended debates on its nature and scope in the Zeitschrift für Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, edited by Max Dessoir beginning in 1906. Ethel Puffer Howes, studying aesthetics at Münsterberg's laboratory at Harvard, gave pride of place to Einfühlung theory which she called Empathy theory (without providing a source) in a 1913 review of recent work on aesthetics (Howes Reference Howes1913). Vernon Lee published her Beauty and Ugliness in Reference Lee and Anstruther-Thomson1912 and referenced therein Titchener's translation, becoming an early source for many of the exclusive attributions of the term “empathy” to Titchener.Footnote ¹⁸ If Ward understood empathy to be a form of personification, Titchener's scientific aim was to discover the elementary mental units of empathy. After 1909, experimental studies at the Cornell laboratory did just that, as Observers in the laboratory began to report kinaesthetic images as the basis for empathy in their introspective accounts.

Empathy as Kinaesthetic Image

Sometime around 1908, Titchener decided that his concurrence on “aesthetic sympathy” as a rendering of Einfühlung, as noted in Baldwin's psychological dictionary, should be amended. Indeed, his rejection of the translation “aesthetic sympathy,” and the substitution of the term “empathy” was an attempt to unmoor the concept from aesthetics, on the one hand, and on the other, to distinguish the process from that of sympathy. In 1895 Titchener published a series of translations of German psychophysical terms into English noting that such translations should be based on Latin-Greek origins, as was the terminology of the natural sciences of physics and chemistry (Titchener Reference Titchener1895, 79). One advantage of new English terms, as he saw it, was that one could adopt a technical term without popular connotations (for instance “cognize” rather than “know”) producing less misunderstanding in scientific practice. He was thus in accord with the translation strategy of his colleague, Edmund C. Sanford, who remarked to Titchener in a letter: “I prefer a good English word to a literal translation of the German-French terms, and where that is for any reason poor, a decent classical term made new for the thing.”Footnote ¹⁹ This is precisely what Titchener did when translating Einfühlung as “empathy,” drawing on the Greek empatheia with its meaning of “pathos” or “feeling,” but with a new twist. Empatheia signaled strong passion, even intense negative feelings toward another person, but Titchener's translation went from the Greek via the German Einfühlung to become in his laboratory, a broad kinaesthetic imaginative capacity. “Empathy” was to be a technical English term, to be used in the new science of experimental psychology, which would not be easily confused with the popular term “sympathy.”

Titchener therefore differentiated empathy felt into situations and objects, from sympathy together with another (Titchener Reference Titchener1915, 198; Jahoda Reference Jahoda2005; emphases in original). “Sympathy” had been in wide circulation in the eighteenth century in a variety of fields from philosophy, medicine, and metaphysics, to aesthetics and everyday discourse.Footnote ²⁰ By the nineteenth century, sympathy represented a reliable access to another's feelings, and as Titchener explained, “empathy” was an imaginative entry into one's experience of objects. Although it could also signify an understanding of another's state of mind, Titchener did not find this method reliable. The Cornell laboratory rejected the use of Einfühlung as a method of understanding another's introspective reports, sometimes adopted at the Würzburg laboratory. Purported objective psychological observations of others were too often tinted with a “coloring of empathy or of introspective analogy,” making empathic methods a faulty method for scientific inquiry (Jacobson Reference Jacobson1911, 576; Titchener Reference Titchener1912, 432). Other psychologists of the time made similar distinctions: Helen Wodehouse distinguished between a genuine sympathy in which one shared another's experience, and an imaginative Einfühlung in which one played at sharing such feelings; and J. Mark Baldwin contrasted the realms of knowledge and imagination, the latter of which was one of semblance, make-believe, or Einfühlung (Wodehouse Reference Wodehouse1910, 531; Baldwin Reference Baldwin1908, 182). In short, empathy was too closely associated with the self and semblance to undergird accurate perceptions of others.Footnote ²¹ It was rather a projective capacity, an imaginative movement of the mind into perceived objects.

Titchener introduced his translation in a series of lectures, in which he argued that complex, or “higher” forms of thought such as surprise, expectation, and familiarity, which the Würzburgians claimed were sui generis, could be reduced to more elementary sensations, images or affects (Kusch Reference Kusch1999; Brock Reference Brock, Woodward and Sonné Cohen1991; Titchener Reference Titchener1908, 8). Because the psychologists at Würzburg had not been sufficiently attuned to the presence of kinaesthetic and other bodily images, he declared, they had fallen into this error. For Titchener, the mind was populated by images, and not surprisingly, his own introspection had revealed that his mind was decidedly of “the imaginal sort” (Titchener Reference Titchener1909b, 7). He told his audience that he could not read or write a paragraph without hearing imagined musical accompaniment – usually the sound of the wood-wind, as he was keen on the oboe.Footnote ²² In addition to experiencing vivid auditory imagery, he reported a plethora of visual images, which he could “mould and direct at will” (ibid., 10). When reading complex psychological literature, he assembled facts and arguments into a visual pattern –generally colored a dull red, containing angles rather than curves, and demonstrating movement along lines, and “neatness or confusion where the moving lines come together” (ibid., 11–12). These were vivid visual patterns, but “bodiless and papery” when compared to direct perception. Titchener envisioned his own mind as a “fairly complete picture gallery, not of finished paintings, but of impressionist notes” (ibid., 13).

Granting individual variance in imaginal ability, Titchener nonetheless affirmed that all conscious experience could be derived from images and sensations. Experienced introspectors could painstakingly discover these elements of consciousness in controlled conditions, the essential task of a scientific psychology. This experimental psychology, based on a description of the existing contents of consciousness, occupied a new epistemological niche, not to be confused with philosophical theories of mind, logic, or knowledge (Titchener Reference Titchener1910a, 405).Footnote ²³ Scientific psychology was to describe the contents of consciousness “not as they mean but as they are” (Titchener Reference Titchener1909b, 25).

Images in the mind thus formed the psychological vehicles for logical and abstract meanings. Titchener's own vehicle of “horse,” for instance, took the shape of “a double curve and a rampant posture with a touch of mane about it.” Cow was “a longish rectangle with a certain facial expression, a sort of exaggerated pout” (ibid., 18). Even “meaning” had a picturable meaning – “the blue-grey top of a kind of scoop, which has a bit of yellow above it . . . and which is just digging into a dark mass of what appears to be plastic material” (ibid., 19). He attributed this image to his classical education, during which he had busied himself in ferreting out the meanings of Greek and Latin texts. Titchener quizzed his graduate students to find that some of them visualized “meaning” too: one saw it as the unfurling of a white scroll, and another saw it as a horizontal line with two short verticals at each end (ibid).

In 1909, Titchener added another set of images to his crowded inner picture gallery – this time, the moving image. Kinesthetic images or images of movement functioned on analogy with visual images. As Titchener explained, the verbal description “stately” was, for him, composed of the visual image of a heroine – a tall figure, with a hand holding up a steely grey skirt (Titchener Reference Titchener1909b, 13). Just as one could visualize the heroine in one's mind, one could also kinaesthetically form an image of her movements. The kinesthetic capacity to read oneself into a situation, object, or stimulus based on some image of bodily movement formed the essence of his understanding of “empathy.” In an oft-cited passage, Titchener explained: “Not only do I see gravity and modesty and pride and courtesy and stateliness, but I feel or act them in the mind's muscles. This is, I suppose, a simple case of empathy, if we may coin that term as a rendering of Einfühlung” (ibid., 21). One could visualize the idea of gravity in the mind's eye, as well as sense the image moving. The empathic kinaesthetic image thus entered the structure of the mind in Titchener's psychology.Footnote ²⁴

The nature of the mind's images was the focus of Titchener's laboratory and graduate student projects in 1908, the year he dedicated to the study of the imagination, and the year he was thinking more intensely about Einfühlung and empathy.Footnote ²⁵ He may have drawn directly from Wilhelm Wundt's third volume of his Völkerpsychologie on art, which appeared that same year. Wundt stressed the importance of the study of the imagination, noting that it was extremely complex, but that it formed the individual psychological basis that informed the understanding of aesthetics (Wundt Reference Wundt1908, 5). Titchener's rendering of empathy as a product of the imagination rather than as a theory of aesthetics tethered it to the functioning of the individual mind. He lamented the fact that there was “as yet no psychology of the imagination,” even as experimental psychology had made amazing progress. Such an in-depth study would need ten more years, he declared (Titchener to T.A. Hunter, Jan.1, Reference Titchener1908, EBT).

The kinaesthetic image, however, was still a contested element in experimental psychology. Could one distinguish an actual movement or sensation from an image of that sensation or movement? Indeed, it had taken time for Titchener himself to come to believe in the possibility of an image of movement. In 1904 he had expressed doubt as to whether a kinaesthetic image could exist without reviving or recalling accompanying sensations. Although others had reported the existence of such images, Titchener thought it was easy to confuse the re-instatement of sensations with an image of that sensation (Titchener Reference Titchener1904). Titchener had attacked Théodule Ribot's theory of affective memory on this basis – that it was impossible to remember a feeling without enacting it.Footnote ²⁶

If the existence of the kinaesthetic image was in question, by the end of the nineteenth century the kinaesthetic sense had been well established as an important feature of a wide assortment of theories of mental life. The early nineteenth-century neuroanatomist Charles Bell added muscle sensibility to the catalog of five senses, sometimes called a sixth sense. In 1880, the pathological anatomist and professor of clinical medicine at University College London, H. Charlton Bastian coined the term “kinaesthesis” for this sense, which judged weight, resistance, and the awareness of the body's movement, and was experienced in a range of impressions from conscious to unfelt (Bastian Reference Bastian1880, 543). Kinaesthesis thus bridged the body and mind as the mind's registration of the body's movement.

By the turn of the twentieth century, neurologists, and animal and functional psychologists avidly took up the topic. Titchener's laboratory was equipped with a kinaesthetics room, which he had set up in 1907 with a Mach rotation apparatus in which Observers would sit in a chair mounted in rectangular frame that could be pivoted on a vertical axis to test perceptions of bodily movement.Footnote ²⁷ The psychologist John B. Watson experimented on mice in 1906 to see if they could utilize a kinaesthetic sense to reach the end of a Hampton maze. He blinded the mice, knocked out pads in their feet, destroyed the tympanic membrane in the ear and their olfactory bulbs to see if they could navigate with this kinaesthetic sense alone. An editorialist in the New York Times decried this method as torture not sufficiently warranted by the scientific results (Topics of the Times 1907). Nonetheless, Watson reported that the de-sensitized mice could orient through the maze, affirming the existence of the kinaesthetic sense (Watson Reference Watson1907).Footnote ²⁸

Despite the recognized existence of a kinaesthetic sense, however, the extent to which bodily states could be registered as an image in the mind and not merely as a sensation was still in question (Titchener Reference Titchener1908, 102). S. S. Colvin's overview of the differences between kinaesthetic sensation and image recounted confusion on the topic, and he resorted to defining the image as existing when an object of sensation was not immediately present to the senses (Colvin Reference Colvin1908, 169). Some psychologists confidently reported that they possessed images of bodily feelings: one reported images of coldness: the cool spray of the surf, the cold shock of a shower bath. Images of heat included the “hot and stuffy interior of another bathing-house,” and warm water touching his feet in a bay (Lay Reference Lay1904, 70). Titchener sought to make clear distinctions between the image and sensation, especially in the case of kinaesthesis, but he also acknowledged the difficulty of disentangling the two (Titchener Reference Titchener1909a, 199). Sensations seemed to root one to the actual perception of one's surroundings, while images had more power – as mental pictures they could carry ideas and concepts, they comprised the essence of memory and imagination, and could carry one back to the past or into an imagined future (Titchener Reference Titchener1910b, 48). Images thus went a step beyond sensation in neural development, and represented the more advanced mind, which, of course included Titchener's own (Titchener Reference Titchener1909a, 283).Footnote ²⁹

In Titchener's first public use of the term “empathy” in his March lectures of 1909, he tried to convince his audience that the kinaesthetic image did indeed exist. Just as a trained introspectionist knew the difference between seeing a red square and imagining a red square, he or she should distinguish between having a sensation and having an image of that sensation. The criterion that could adequately make this distinction was that actual movement engaged many more muscles than were necessary, whereas an image of movement was limited to the particular muscles involved. So, an actual nod of the head employed more muscles than the more limited mental nod of the head, just as an actual frown was different from a mental frown (Titchener Reference Titchener1909b, 21).

Enticing his audience to imagine mental nods and frowns, Titchener conducted an informal poll at the close of his lectures, and determined that one-third of the attendees possessed a kinaesthetic form of ideation (Colvin Reference Colvin1910, 266).Footnote ³⁰ Colvin, Titchener's host for the lectures, confessed later that year at the American Psychological Association meeting that before recognizing that he possessed kinaesthetic images, he believed that one could indeed have thoughts without images. But he came to believe in “those kinaesthetic experiences (whether central or peripheral in their origin) which we employ at times in our thinking and which constitute the mind-stuff of certain of our ideational processes.” (ibid., 260). For instance, when imagining the outline of a circle, he did so with a kinaesthetic idea based on eye movements and eye fixation in attending to the center (ibid., 261). Even an abstract word like infinity was haloed by a kinaesthetic symbol that involved the prolonging of the word, projecting it from the mouth, with a “bending forward and tension of the entire body, setting itself as if for flight” (ibid., 264).Footnote ³¹ Colvin concluded that kinaesthetic imagery had been often overlooked in introspections of trained observers (Colvin Reference Colvin1909, 236).

As he had convinced Colvin and at least a third of his audience that higher thought could be constituted by kinaesthetic images, so had Titchener's own introspection convinced him that “I have turned round, time and time again, upon consciousnesses like doubt, hesitation, belief, assent, trying to remember, having a thing on my tongue's tip, and I have not been able to discover the imageless process” (Titchener Reference Titchener1909b, 182). As Titchener explained, his experience of sitting behind an enthusiastic lecturer who often employed the conjunction “but” led him to construct a feeling of “but” that comprised a “flashing picture of a bald crown, with a fringe of hair below, and a massive black shoulder, the whole passing swiftly down the visual field from the northwest to southeast” (ibid., 185). Words like “but” emerged from situations in which an organism was in a position to perform two incompatible responses at once, constituting the experience of a suspended, baffled, motor attitude. In the language of Titchener's descriptive psychology it was a kinaesthetic acting out, but in images (ibid., 185–86). It was precisely these kinds of images of bodily movement that Titchener claimed were overlooked by the thought psychologists, and constituted the basis of what he called a motor empathy (ibid., 292).

Titchener's exposition of the meanings that derived from imagined movements or motor empathy brought Titchener closer to functional psychologists such as William James and James Angell, even as it marked a decisive contrast to the imageless thought school. Angell, a prominent functional psychologist at Chicago wrote to Titchener in early 1910 with ample praise for Titchener's book on thinking: “you have punctured some of the fallacies of the ‘imageless thought’ crowd so nicely that my soul is delighted.”Footnote ³² As one psychologist of the period noted, the debates between Würzburg and Cornell brought to the fore the contested status of kinaesthetic and organic elements in thought (Downey Reference Downey1929, 37). Indeed, Titchener's documentation of kinaesthetic elements in introspection was a decisive refutation of the claim that thought could take place without images (Heidbreder Reference Heidbreder1933, 145–46). In the heat of debate between Titchener and his one-time student Robert Ogden, who had gone over to the image-less thought school, Ogden declared: “I am not prepared to assert as you do, that a bodiless mind is a scientific impossibility.”Footnote ³³ For Titchener's elemental psychology, in contrast, the mind's registration and imagining of bodily movement stood as an anchor of thought. The crux of the debate between Cornell and Würzburg was, in no small part, the nature of the body's contribution to thought, and empathy, the expression of the kinaesthetic image, stood precisely at this juncture.

Experimenting with Empathy

After Titchener had consolidated his view of empathy in 1909, empathic kinaesthetic images began to appear in the introspective reports in studies on belief, conscious attitudes, imagination, and meaning at the Cornell laboratory. “Observers” (or experimental subjects) in early psychological laboratories, unlike in most psychological experimentation today, were not naïve undergraduates, but graduate students, professors, and laboratory assistants, all highly trained to report on the elementary bits of their thought processes (Danziger Reference Danziger1990). In laboratory spaces and dark rooms, they fixated lights, watched shadowy shapes appear from projected lantern slides, or narrowed their attention while being prompted verbally or visually with a stimulus word or image. Respiration would sometimes be measured with a kymograph, responses might be timed with a chronometer, and extended introspections were carefully recorded. Observers were trained to use the language of descriptive science to report on the perceived colors, images, shapes, tones of the stimulus object, rather than to casually describe it, which was to fall into the “stimulus error” (Titchener Reference Titchener1909b, 145–46; Henle Reference Henle1971; Kroker Reference Kroker2003).

Far from anonymous participants, Observers were identified by name and position in the published experimental protocols, and were categorized as verbal, auditory, visual, kinaesthetic, and even empathic types, each of whom tended to report on particular kinds of images and sensations. At Titchener's laboratory, “Observers” ranged from graduate students working towards their doctorates, newly minted Ph.D.s who served as assistants in the laboratory, and more established psychology professors, along with a significant number of women researchers. These women had taken advantage of the fact that many graduate schools had opened their doors to them in the 1890s. The new academic field of scientific psychology had sought recruits, becoming so popular that by 1897 psychology could boast more doctorates than any science other than chemistry (Miner Reference Miner1904, 302).

In 1910 and 1911, work proceeded apace at the Cornell laboratory to counter the imageless thought claims, and reports of empathic kinaesthetic images soon were documented. Kinaesthetic images were compelling introspections, sometimes attributed directly to the stimuli, sometimes identified with the observer's own body image, and at other times reported as odd and startling images of a bodily fusion or confusion between self and stimuli (Jacobson Reference Jacobson1911; Okabe Reference Okabe1910). In a 1910 study of belief conducted by Titchener's doctoral student Tamekichi Okabe, the graduate student Alma De Vries reported an empathic kinaesthetic response of a “visual image of a trick elephant dancing. Felt big and clumsy myself, as if I were the elephant” (Okabe Reference Okabe1910, 568–69). A frequent participant in imagery studies in the Cornell lab, De Vries had earned her doctorate in 1912 and went on to study the retinal afterimage with the psychologist Margaret Washburn at Vassar (Schaub Reference Schaub1911). She was described in Clarke's study as a mixed type, who reported many colored visual images, tactual images on the finger, verbal ideas, affective processes, and kinaesthetic and organic sensations (Clarke Reference Clarke1911, 216). A strong feeling of belief or disbelief was signaled by a stiffening or shrinking of her body. The instructor in psychology, L.R. Geissler also reported empathic-kinaesthetic responses in this experiment even though he was primarily a verbal type. While listening to a sentence about drinking, he imagined he turned his own head away: “there was a very vague, kinaesthetic and motor attitude, representing a woman of the total-abstainer kind, with disgust for drunkard, turning away her face and head and wrinkling her forehead: these things seemed to occur in my own case (feeling of disgust, tendency to turn head and wrinkle forehead)” (Okabe Reference Okabe1910, 589). In this report, an empathic response was an imagined bodily imitation.

Perky's 1910 experiments on the interrelation of imagination, perception, and memory, as mentioned above, elicited a number of empathic responses. Observers in these experiments, both trained and naïve, felt as if they were in a dreamlike state and described shapes they thought they had imagined, but had actually been presented to them as stimuli: The faint yellow shape of a banana projected from the lantern slide was described as imaginary; in another case the trickle of a stream of water was reported to continue even after it had been stopped (Titchener Reference Titchener1909a, 198). The imagination called up powerful, stable images, accompanied by kinaesthetic participation and feelings of strangeness or surprise. Some of these images were described as photographic. Observers also called up remembered images, which, in contrast to imagined images, were unstable, impermanent, and laden with personal meanings. Memory images were sometimes accompanied by actual bodily movements: for instance, the observer De Vries moved her nostrils when she introspected remembered olfactory images.

Titchener drew on Perky and similar experiments to conclude in his psychology textbook: “Memory was characterized by the feeling of familiarity and by imitative kinaesthesis; imagination by the feeling of strangeness and by empathy” (Titchener Reference Titchener1915, 200). Empathy familiarized the strange by way of the imagination, and transformed sensations into an abstract world of images. Even more striking, the imagined kinaesthesis could merge the self in the object: “The object spreads all over me and I over it; it is not referred to me but I belong to it” (Perky Reference Perky1910, 448). Immersion in the image was the hallmark of empathy; an Observer reported: “there, I seemed to jump into it; went all over me” (ibid., 449). In these instances, empathizing meant that one experienced the self as part of the object.

If empathy was based on kinaesthetic images, it could also be extended to an “attitudinal feel” – organic and whole-body responses to experimental materials and everyday situations (Titchener Reference Titchener1909b, 21). When sitting down at a desk to write a letter, Titchener explained, his own organic movements and kinesthetic representations were quite different from those when he sat down to compose a lecture. These bodily differences resulted from different visceral pressures or distributions of tonicity in his back and leg muscles, and differences in facial expression, all of which made up a global attitudinal feel. Attitudinal feels shaded into empathic experiences, so that the body's attitude appeared in the mind as a kind of feeling “in the mind's muscles” (ibid., 181). Empathy thus translated bodily impulses and motor activity into representations and images that could comprise a holistic attitudinal feel.

An empathic sense could also convey the meaning of shapes, as the graduate assistant Anna Sophie Rogers demonstrated in a 1917 study. Although meaning had been relegated to the sidelines in Titchener's psychology, meaning was for him directly related to kinaesthesis, usually understood as a bodily attitude, or sensations of the organism in a situation (ibid., 176).Footnote ³⁴ Observers introspected their visual, kinaesthetic, and auditory images while viewing ink-blots, hieroglyphs, and shapes with some semblance of meaning (Rogers Reference Rogers1917, 551).Footnote ³⁵ Rogers carried out these experiments before Rorschach published his own inkblots as psychological tools in 1921, and published them in Titchener's flagship journal (ibid., 575) (see fig. 1).

Fig. 1.

Stimuli presented in Rogers, “An Analytic Study of Visual Perceptions,” 1917.

Observer Helen Clarke reported while studying the shapes that: “I felt myself (general empathic kinaesthesis) standing erect and rigid, and then the meaning ‘grass’ came” (ibid., 558). Empathic kinaesthetic responses of this type were classed as interpretative perceptions – attempts to read meaning into the figures – in distinction to what Rogers called appreciative and orientating efforts. In another Cornell study of 1920, the observer Dr. L.B. Hoisington reported an empathic kinaesthetic response to visual squares, which had a “stability” or “compactness” based on a sensory or imaginal process felt in his chest and throat; the graduate student Observer, C. Comstock felt that the lack of balance in an oblong shape was determined by the images or sensations of pressure felt in the chest (Zigler Reference Zigler1920, 287). Other empathic responses were feelings of imbalance or solidity felt in the shapes themselves rather than as the Observer's own sensation.Footnote ³⁶

The finding that kinesthetic images could be localized in oneself, in the object, or in some kind of merger of the two, had repeatedly cropped up in the findings of the Cornell laboratory, and Alice Helen Sullivan's doctoral work of Reference Sullivan1921 explicitly sorted out these differences (Hull Reference Hull1920, 516).Footnote ³⁷ She instructed observers to feel rather than think about the image in question: “Feel: yourself running downstairs; Feel: an acrobat walking a tight rope; Feel: Laocoon struggling in the coils of the serpent; Feel: yourself stooping to pick up a pencil” (Sullivan Reference Sullivan1921, 69). She then classed these kinesthetic images according to whether they referred to oneself (resident) or to something else (projected).

She concluded that empathy was best characterized as a projected kinaesthesis (ibid.). For example, when asked to feel a farmerette (a Canadian term for a young woman working on a farm) pitching hay, one observer responded: “The kinaesthetic image belongs to the farmerette, it is a kind of empathy” (ibid., 70). To empathize meant to imagine another performing an action, or how it might feel to move in the way the stimulus object subject might move. If the action was unusual, and one the Observer had never performed, the Observer reported empathy as a projected kinaesthesis, rather than feeling it in her or himself. And Observers who more actively tried to imagine the performance of an action were more likely to report empathic responses. In short, empathic responses were unfamiliar images of movement felt as if they took place in another. Images of one's own actions (resident kinaesthetic images), on the other hand, were not empathic. They were usually fleeting and accompanied by a passive or receptive attitude. Projected kinaesthetic images – the hallmark of empathy – were more persistent and fixed. As Sullivan explained, empathy took focus and mental work: it was correlated with “an attitude which is active, exploratory, detached, scrutinising” (ibid., 80). As reported by the Cornell laboratory, then, empathy was a sophisticated imaginal complex actively undertaken. It was much more complicated than the simple sensory process of feeling something for oneself.

When encountering the unfamiliar, as Sullivan study's demonstrated, one was more prone to empathize. Titchener explained to beginning psychology students that empathy was feeling oneself into a situation, an experimental object or a stimulus at a distance from oneself. Sympathy, in contrast, meant one identified with the mental capacities of another person – presumably an experience that was familiar or usual. The preposition “in” rather than “with” marked this key difference. Titchener instructed students to examine their own empathic experiences and to ferret out their constituent elements while reading, while contemplating art or architecture, in the theater, even while day-dreaming (Titchener Reference Titchener1915, 201):

Rather than sympathizing with the familiar, empathy was a bodily imagining of oneself in a situation that was foreign or strange. Far from assuming similarity, then, empathy was predicated on difference.

As a projection of the mind's images into the space of a strange other, empathy was a form of mind theater, a way of carrying oneself towards and into the object of perception. It not only transformed the mute presence of an object in the world with feeling, life, and movement, but more radically inserted the self into the object. Some introspectors reported feeling a self – object amalgam, blurring the lines between the contents of mind and objects in the world. Titchener was intrigued by empathic processes because they extended beyond perception to engage the imagination and could be haloed by kinaesthetic and organic sensations. Empathy, as defined by introspectors was never a matter of reading the world veridically, but of imputing images and feeling to it. It was a way of seeing the world as it might be: “Take the empathic tendency: what lover of books has not shifted the place of certain volumes on a shelf, because he could not bear to put good and bad, sound and trivial, side by side, – as if the books would feel the incongruity?” (ibid., 206).

The Mind as Empathic Projector

Titchener's science of psychology focused on the elementary structures of the mind, opening up a complex interior space brimming with images. From Perky's findings that one's imaginings could occlude the perception of real objects, from the ways in which Observers felt themselves merge with stimulus objects, systematic introspective methods revealed complex inner images, which were accorded the sober label of fact – the facts of the mind, that is. For Titchener, scientific introspection was, by definition, the “disinterested and impersonal observance of facts,” and these facts took place in the Observer's own mind.Footnote ³⁸

If Titchener is often portrayed as narrowing psychology to structural elements in the mind and excluding meanings or lived experience (Danziger Reference Danziger1990, 46–47; Green Reference Green2010), the ways in which the mind spun images in his laboratory and the rich complexity of this inner terrain adds another dimension to this portrait. Although kinaesthetic empathic response was firmly based on an individualistic, introspective model, it was reported as complicated feeling- and movement-based images projected into another shape, form, or stimulus. Titchener described imaginative constructions of the mind as accompanied by all sorts of feelings and “empathic experiences, vivifying and personalising the partial products of the constructive effort” (Titchener Reference Titchener1915, 200). He nevertheless acknowledged that the workings of the imagination in empathy moved him away from his framework of a strict scientific psychology: “Figurative, again, all this, and lamentably far from scientific accuracy – but, in broad outline and on the average, we may hope that it is true to the psychological facts” (ibid). But even his student and ardent disciple, Edwin G. Boring, noted that by 1917, Titchener had begun to alter his view of the sensation, and was moving toward phenomenological observation rather than narrow introspection (Boring Reference Boring1927, 502).

At the Cornell introspectionist psychological laboratory, then, empathy performed the work of the imagination in kinaesthetic form, bringing the Observer into the interior life of objects; domesticating the strange with “our own concernment” in the imagined situation (Titchener Reference Titchener1915, 197). Empathy partook of Titchener's focus on the image – part idea, part mental picture – an elementary mental structure which underlay all conscious responses to the world. Images bore the stamp of the advanced mind; they transmuted sensation into idea, but for this reason, were less apt to merely signal the outside world, or mirror its objects faithfully. Empathy was never a method of accurately perceiving the objects in the world, but was rather a projective capacity, a way of seeing the world according to one's own lights.

In some respects, empathy shared many facets of early models of filmic projection in the German-speaking world.Footnote ³⁹ Although early German film theorists did not explicitly use the term Einfühlung, the centrality of Einfühlung in debates on modern aesthetics, the tendency to focus on perception in aesthetic experience, as well as the adoption of a language of emotional projection, as film historian Scott Curtis has described, all point to interesting convergences between empathy theory and film, at least in the German context (see Curtis Reference Curtis, Curtis and Koch2009, 81). Hugo Münsterberg published one of the first psychological theories of film in 1916, stressing the suggestive qualities of movement in film, which were projected onto the images on the screen by the viewer, in a manner not dissimilar to projected moving images as described in Titchener's laboratory (Münsterberg [1916] 1970, 30). This view was directly counter to the imageless thought view, as voiced by the psychologist George F. Stout as early as 1896, when he had spoken against the notion that consciousness could be “a picture gallery or as a magic lantern in which the slides displace each other in rapid succession” (Stout Reference Stout1896, 85). Did the mind function as a sequencing of images as in a gallery, in a slide presentation, or even in the cinema?

It may have been that the kinaesthetic image became a viable entity for Titchener's psychological science in light of the emergence of moving pictures. Titchener, however, did not venture into applied domains to craft a psychology of film, although he was well aware of the recent popularity and appeal of the “movies.”Footnote ⁴⁰ He did conceive the mind as a picture gallery, and in accord with modern trends, it contained impressionist notes, as he put it. But by 1909, the mental images reported in his laboratory began to move, and through empathic kinaesthesis one could imaginatively move into and inhabit unfamiliar objects or situations.

The Future of Empathy

“Empathy” in this kinaesthetic or motor-based register became a critical element in the psychologies of art put forth in the following decades by Herbert Langfeld (1920), Kate Gordon (Reference Gordon1934), and Robert Ogden (Reference Ogden1938). The aesthetician Vernon Lee adopted Titchener's conception of the kinaesthetic image as the core of what she called formal-dynamic empathy in distinction to representational empathy (Lanzoni Reference Lanzoni2009). This projection model enjoined the entire self, and in Warren's Reference Warren1934Dictionary of Psychology was listed as empathy's primary definition: the “imaginal or mental projection of oneself into the elements of a work of art or into a natural object” (Warren Reference Warren1934, 92). This model was also adapted by the head of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, Elmer Ernest Southard, to develop what he called an empathic index based on a projection of the physician's self onto a patient, in order to gauge the peculiarity of schizophrenic thinking (Southard Reference Southard1918; Lanzoni Reference Lanzoni and Alberti2006). As an imaginal capacity to remake the unfamiliar through forms of bodily projection, the phenomenon of empathy was a projective means to access the strange in these early decades of the twentieth century, circulating nearly exclusively within the walls of the academy, and with roots in the German Einfühlung.

Yet empathy's kinaesthetic core began to fade as its interpersonal meaning was taken up by psychoanalysts Otto Rank and Sandor Ferenczi, dissenters from Freudian orthodoxy, along with social workers, sociologists, and psychologists of various stripes. Only after World War II did the American public and media, popularizing psychologists and advertising experts seize upon the interpersonal meanings of empathy as a means to improve family relationships, attract audiences, and sell products. By this time empathy had been much transformed from its early depiction in the turn of the century introspectionist laboratory, and was enlisted to forge social understandings across many aspects of everyday, consumer, and even political life.