Lanzoni Susan
Science, Technology, and Society program, MIT and Harvard Extension School, USA.
J Hist Behav Sci. 2009 Fall;45(4):330-54. doi: 10.1002/jhbs.20395.
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.
19世纪后期，心理学家和美学家痴迷于对审美反应的心理和生理方面的研究，英国知识分子兼美学家弗农·李是这项事业的主要参与者。李在学院之外开展工作，与克莱门蒂娜·安斯特鲁瑟 - 汤姆森进行了非正式实验，记录了呼吸、平衡、情绪以及身体动作对审美形式的反应变化。在构建她的移情美学时，她挖掘了当时丰富的心理学理论，包括心灵的运动理论、情绪的生理学理论、艺术实用性的进化模型，以及最突出的将情感和运动移情投射到形式之中。李分发问卷、为科学期刊撰稿、进行自己的内省研究，并与顶尖心理学家辩论美学问题。本文批判了将李的美学视为其性别或性取向的替代标志的主流观点，并质疑她仅仅作为心理学领域业余人士的地位。相反，我认为李基于实证的艺术移情理论在20世纪初对心理美学的辩论做出了重大贡献，它融合了利普斯的唯心主义移情说和基于感觉的审美反应模仿理论。
