posted by SES @ 3:52 PM
"live to the point of tears" albert camus
why do I waste my time in supermarket checkout lines perusing which latest starlet is suffering from an eating disorder? or why do I watch "Entertainment Tonight" despite my extreme distaste for Mary Hart? In short, it's this: [Einfuhlung]...a term coined in 1903 by a student of aesthetics named Theodore Lipps. He was searching for a way to express the strangely intimate emotional connection that arises between a viewer and an onstage performer. He used the example of watching an acrobat stepping across a high wire, that moment of breathless suspension when audience members gasp as if they themselves were teetering on a tightrope; the sense of, as Lipps described it, "I feel myself inside of him." Lipps defined empathy as an "inner participation...in foreign experiences." Cognitive scientists refer to this ability to read another's feelings, thoughts, or intentions as a "theory of mind." from Field Notes on the Compassionate Life by Mark Ian Barasch
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