Practicing psychology in the art gallery
Vernon Lee's aesthetics of empathy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4004657 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Susan Lanzoni (Harvard–MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 330-354 |
| Publication date | 2009-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-5061 • E-ISSN: 1520-6696 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1002/jhbs.20395 |
| PMID | 19798650 |
| OpenAlex | W2109801410 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 13 |
| References cited | 46 |
Late nineteenth-century psychologists and aestheticians were fascinated by the study of psychological and physiological aspects of aesthetic response, and the British intellectual and aesthete Vernon Lee was a major participant in this venture. Working outside the academy, Lee conducted informal experiments with Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, recording changes in respiration, balance, emotion, and body movements in response to aesthetic form. In fashioning her aesthetics of empathy, she mined a wealth of psychological theories of the period including motor theories of mind, physiological theories of emotion, evolutionary models of the usefulness of art, and, most prominently, the empathic projection of feeling and movement into form. Lee distributed questionnaires, contributed to scientific journals, carried out her own introspective studies, and debated aesthetics with leading psychologists. This paper critiques the prevailing view of Lee's aesthetics as a displaced sign of her gender or sexuality, and questions her status as simply an amateur in the field of psychology. Instead, I argue that Lee's empirically based empathy theory of art was a significant contribution to debates on psychological aesthetics at the outset of the twentieth century, offering a synthesis of Lipps's mentalistic Einfühlung and sensation-based imitation theories of aesthetic response. (c) 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc
Aestheticism · Aesthetics · Art · Cognitive psychology · Empathy · Feeling · Imitation · Introspection · Period (music) · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Sympathy · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Aesthetic Perception and Analysis · Creativity in Education and Neuroscience · Psychology · Social Psychology
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| Unique citing works | 13 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,87 |
| Citation span | 2011 - 2025 (15) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 12 |