“It also comes as a surprise that the term was invented not to talk about altruism or acts of kindness, but to explain how we can enjoy a sonata or a sunset. Empathy, for Vischer, was creative seeing, reshaping the… — Damion Searls Copy Share Image
“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… — Damion Searls Copy Share
“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… — Damion Searls Copy Share
“From Binet, the idea of measuring imagination with inkblots spread to a string of American intelligence-testing pioneers and educators—Dearborn, Sharp, Whipple, Kirkpatrick. It reached Russia as well, where a psychology professor named Fyodor Rybakov, unaware of the Americans’ work, included a series of eight blots in his Atlas of the Experimental-Psychology Study of Personality (1910). It was an American, Guy… — Damion Searls Copy Share
“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… — Damion Searls Copy Share Image
“It also comes as a surprise that the term was invented not to talk about altruism or acts of kindness, but to explain how… — Damion Searls Copy Share Image
“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… — Damion Searls Copy Share Image
“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… — Damion Searls Copy Share Image
“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’… — Damion Searls Copy Share Image
