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
2 Comments:
Those are really cool drawings and I just read your last post. I hate Tom Cruise. Where did you find these pictures?
Chalk drawings are crazy. I'm even amazed when coffee houses have the specials written in chalk...such penmanship!
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