Abstract

In 1910 Geiger presents at the 4th Congress of Experimental Psychology a lecture on empathy. The focus is on the key psychological question: How do I know external personalities and what is the origin of this knowledge? He immediately shows that this question is complex and needs clarification. There are at least three different questions linked with it, and they must be disentangled. The first question is the “question of fact”, which is a phenomenological question: What experiences are in my consciousness when I’m aware of facing an external ego? This requires a descriptive answer showing what kind of phenomena are given in the empathic act. Geiger further subdivides it in two parts. The first one is whether the other’s spiritual life given in empathy is experienced or just imagined. The second one asks if the relationship between the other’s perceived body and empathized spiritual life shall be conceived as just an associative process, or rather as a tighter “symbolic relation of empathy”. The second question is about the psychological function performed by the empathic act. Here Geiger contrasts the theory of association to the theory of empathy, considering whether we understand what the other is experiencing through an analogical induction or by means of a direct transposition of ourselves into the other. The third question asks if the correlation between expressive movements and corresponding feelings in the other person is acquired in the personal development. Here the empiricist, the associative and the imitation theories are considered in their features and limitations. Finally, in the last part of this paper Geiger introduces a very important distinction between the empathic act for single experiences, and the act of retrospectively reliving the internal motivations which link subsequent mental phenomena occurring in the other person.