At the end of the 19th Century, art, and the study of art known as aesthetics, became a common point of convergence for two other new disciplines: Psychoanalysis, with its focus on unconscious/indirect experience, and Phenomenology, which in contrast to psychoanalytic psychology, sought to investigate consciousness and direct experience.

Psychologists at the time began to see how looking at people’s emotional responses to art, and the motivations that drove some to create it, could help explain aspects of human nature that had never been fully grasped before. One of these psycho-spiritual conundrums might be conceptualised by the follow question: What is a Self - which is to say: an “I”, a conscious, as well as self-conscious Ego? Also: what universal or variable factors might lie at the heart of such a phenomenon?

A crucial piece of this puzzle, in terms of understanding ourselves and others, arrived in the shape of something that the German philosopher Theodor Lipps called Einfühlung (“feeling into” or empathy). Freud used this notion of empathy in trying to “feel into” the inner world of himself and his patients in ways that had never been attempted before, and so did the young (26 year old) Rainer Maria Rilke, who had studied with Lipps, and was now setting out to apply these ideas in his writing.

Rilke would also learn about empathy at the knee of the sculptor August Rodin, who suggested he might like to empathically “regardez les animaux” (look at the animals) at the Jardin Des Plantes in Paris, where they were kept for this purpose. In applying himself to this special kind of looking, beginning with the task of watching a panther and writing about it, Rilke would learn not only something essential about himself, but also about the nature of the Egoic Self in general.

In this episode, we get a little bit closer to that understanding.

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Transcript: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/rilkes-panther-the-cage-of-self/