Synchronicity Cambray

The notion of a resonant, mirroring capacity of mind that can
bring knowledge of our environment has a particular parallel in Western
psychology that can be explored through the concept of empathy.
The purpose is not to suggest an equivalency between empathy and
the mind of the sage but rather to engage the evolving Western understanding
of empathy in the hope that we may find intersections with
Eastern attitudes on cultivating the mind that were helpful to Jung in
his formulation of the synchronicity principle.
The articulated idea of empathy is of surprisingly recent vintage.
The original term is German, Einfühlung, literally “feeling-into,”
coined by the art historian Robert Vischer only in 1873 and distinguished
from an older notion, Mitgefühl, sympathy. 6 Vischer’s work
inaugurated the psychological approach to the study of aesthetics. His
idea was to relate the dynamics within a work of art to the subjective
experiences stemming from somatic and affective states engendered
by viewing the art. Aesthetic pleasure was seen to be based in
a melding of self and object, something he derived from the study of
the projection of self in dreams. Vischer’s Einfühlung thus involved
an unconscious, involuntary act of transference of self into objects.
All of this antedates Freud’s psychoanalytic theorizing by twentyfive
years. “Empathy” as the translation of Einfühlung entered the
English language in 1909 through the work of the American psychologist
Edward B. Titchener. 7
The German philosopher of aesthetics, Theodor Lipps, in publications
from 1900 to 1913 and beyond, further developed the psychological
understanding of empathy by proposing the inner imitation of the
actions of others as crucial for generating empathic experiences. 8 For
Lipps human empathy included responses to gestures, facial expressions,
and tone of voice, all carrying emotional qualities and capable
of enlivening the same emotions in the viewer. However, Lipps also
insisted that empathy is not an inference from analogy but a unique
form of knowledge.
Both Jung and Freud derived their views on empathy directly from
Lipps. 9 Jung equated Lipps’s perspective to a central feature of the
analytic process: “As a rule, the projection transfers unconscious contents
into the object, for which reason empathy is also termed ‘trans­
( 70 ) Chapter 4