Article ID: CBB001251565

Self-Projection: Hugo Münsterberg on Empathy and Oscillation in Cinema Spectatorship (2012)

unapi

Brain, Robert Michael (Author)


Science in Context
Volume: 25, no. 3
Issue: 3
Pages: 329-353


Publication Date: 2012
Edition Details: Part of the special issue, “The Varieties of Empathy in Science, Art, and History”
Language: English

This essay considers the metaphors of projection in Hugo Münsterberg's theory of cinema spectatorship. Münsterberg (1863--1916), a German born and educated professor of psychology at Harvard University, turned his attention to cinema only a few years before his untimely death at the age of fifty-three. But he brought to the new medium certain lasting preoccupations. This account begins with the contention that Münsterberg's intervention in the cinema discussion pursued his well-established strategy of pitting a laboratory model against a clinical one, in this case the master-trope of early cinema a spectatorship drawn from hysteria, hypnosis, and related phenomena like double-consciousness. Münsterberg's laboratory-oriented account also flowed from his account of cinema technology as an outgrowth of the apparatus of his own discipline of experimental psycho-physiology, which entailed a model of cinema spectatorship continuous with the epistemological setting of laboratory relations. I argue that in The Photoplay and related writings projection functioned in three registers: material, psychological, and philosophical. Münsterberg's primary concern was with psychological projection, where he drew upon his own work in experimental aesthetics to articulate an account of how the basic automatisms of cinema produce a state of oscillation between immersion and distraction. I show how Münsterberg's experimental aesthetics drew upon German doctrines of aesthetic empathy, or Einfühlung, which Münsterberg sought to modify in accordance with the dynamic and temporal characteristics of psycho-physiological experiment. Finally, I argue that Münsterberg's cinema theory was enfolded in his action or double-standpoint theory, in which the transcendental self posits the material, objective conditions of laboratory experience as a means to know itself. This philosophical projection explained cinema's uncanny ability to suspend ordinary perceptions of space, time, and causality. It also made cinema uniquely suited for the philosophical emancipation of a popular mass audience

...More
Included in

Article Lanzoni, Susan (2012) Introduction: Emotion and the Sciences: Varieties of Empathy in Science, Art, and History. Science in Context (pp. 287-300). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001251565/

Similar Citations

Article Stoffers, Manuel; (2003)
Münsterberg's Nightmare: Psychology and History in fin-de-siècle Germany and America (/isis/citation/CBB000300900/)

Book Susan Lanzoni; (2018)
Empathy: A History (/isis/citation/CBB756539201/)

Article Young, Allan; (2012)
The Social Brain and the Myth of Empathy (/isis/citation/CBB001251568/)

Article Lanzoni, Susan; (2012)
Empathy in Translation: Movement and Image in the Psychological Laboratory (/isis/citation/CBB001251564/)

Article Blatter, Jeremy; Casper, Stephen T.; (2015)
Screening the Psychological Laboratory: Hugo Münsterberg, Psychotechnics, and the Cinema, 1892--1916 (/isis/citation/CBB001552002/)

Article Turner, Stephen; (2012)
The Strength of Weak Empathy (/isis/citation/CBB001251567/)

Book Hale, Matthew, Jr.; (1980)
Human science and social order: Hugo Münsterberg and the origins of applied psychology (/isis/citation/CBB000002447/)

Article Eckhardt, Georg; (1998)
Die Thematisierung des Sozialen in der frühen Psychotechnik in Deutschland (/isis/citation/CBB000083409/)

Article Moskowitz, Merle J.; (1977)
Hugo Münsterberg: A study in the history of applied psychology (/isis/citation/CBB000026277/)

Thesis Hale, Matthew, Jr.; (1977)
Psychology and social order: An intellectual biography of Hugo Münsterberg (/isis/citation/CBB001563748/)

Article Curtis, Robin; (2012)
Einfühlung and Abstraction in the Moving Image: Historical and Contemporary Reflections (/isis/citation/CBB001251569/)

Article Gallagher, Shaun; (2012)
Empathy, Simulation, and Narrative (/isis/citation/CBB001251566/)

Article Sam Fernández-Garrido; Rosa M. Medina-Domenech; (2020)
‘Bridging the Sexes’: Feelings, Professional Communities and Emotional Practices in the Spanish Intersex Clinic (/isis/citation/CBB196479953/)

Article Charland, Louis C.; (2008)
Alexander Crichton on the Psychopathology of the Passions (/isis/citation/CBB000950370/)

Chapter Samantha Evans; (2017)
Observing Humans (/isis/citation/CBB082062252/)

Chapter Dror, Otniel E.; (2010)
Seeing the Blush: Feeling Emotions (/isis/citation/CBB001221459/)

Article Winter, Alison; (2004)
Screening Selves: Sciences of Memory and Identity on Film, 1930--1960 (/isis/citation/CBB000501056/)

Authors & Contributors
Hale, Matthew, Jr.
Lanzoni, Susan Marie
Casper, Stephen T.
Charland, Louis C.
Curtis, Robin
Dror, Otniel E.
Journals
Science in Context
American Psychologist
History of Psychiatry
History of Psychology
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Publishers
Temple University Press
Yale University Press
University of Maryland
Concepts
Emotions; passions
Psychology
Physiological psychology
Social psychology
Empathy
Philosophy of mind
People
Münsterberg, Hugo
Bergson, Henri Louis
Brentano, Franz Clemens
Crichton, Alexander
Darwin, Charles Robert
Moede, Walter
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
20th century, late
21st century
Places
Germany
United States
Great Britain
Americas
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment