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

Abstract

ArgumentThis 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 inThe Photoplayand 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, orEinfühlung, 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.

Disciplining Physiological Psychology: Cinematographs as Epistemic Devices in the Work of Henri Bergson and Charles Scott Sherrington

“…In deploying cinematographs as experimental (rather than conceptual) devices,psychologists were beginning to arrive at an appreciation of them as holding a quite different significance to that ascribed by Bergson. The most significant study to emerge from early twentieth-century experimental psychology as far as the conceptualization of the cinematograph as we understand it today was concerned however was that of Münsterberg. As well as becoming the most significant institutional rival to James at Harvard, Münsterberg embarked on a lengthy series of studies that sought to gauge the psychological significance of cinema as an experiential medium (Blatter 2015;Brain 2012;Bruno, 2009. On Münsterberg and James's rivalry see Bordogna 2008, 224-255).…”

“…Where Bergson's cinematograph was entirely “automatic,” Münsterberg found the most interesting effects of cinematography to depend on its operators: “the same series of moving pictures may be given to us with a very slow or with a rapid turning of the crank,” and thus produce very different emotive and perceptual effects (Münsterberg 1916, 127–128). The Photoplay thereby marks the cinematographic culmination of a specifically technical tradition of psychological research, in which cinematographs feature not as devices whose workings reveal the nature of mental existence, or even as counterpoints to a philosophically promising mode of investigation, but as a means of extending mind into the world (Brain 2012, esp. 330–334, 341–349).…”

Screening the Psychological Laboratory: Hugo Münsterberg, Psychotechnics, and the Cinema, 1892–1916

“…Although not applied psychology in the modern sense, this book translated experimental aesthetics, a field pioneered by Fechner, into a kind of instructional guide for art teachers. Many themes from this book were carried over into The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916), Münsterberg's final contribution to applied psychology (Brain 2012; Fredericksen 1977).…”

“…Robert Brain, emphasizing the philosophical framework underpinning The Photoplay , has provided much needed intellectual context for understanding and interpreting Münsterberg's work. While Brain (2012), Bruno (2009), and Schweinitz (1996), to name a few recent examples, have situated The Photoplay in its proper experimental, philosophical, and material context, remarkably little attention has been paid to Münsterberg's contribution to the Paramount Pictographs and its relationship to psychotechnics and vocational psychology 2…”

“…Every one can find the place where he can enjoy his work and grow into a truly useful personality” (Münsterberg 1913b). Deeply influenced by Fichte and Kant (Brain 2012), Münsterberg's idealism was also evidently in line with a more general Progressive Era optimism in science and technology as an instrument to mend the body politic torn asunder by the Civil War, industrialization, and the Gilded Age (Wiebe 1967).…”