You Must Change Your Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

defined all of art history, and titled his book after it, Abstraction and Empathy .
    But it was psychologists who transformed the obscure term from German art history into the cornerstone of human emotion that we understand as empathy today. In Vienna, the young professor Sigmund Freud wrote to a friend in 1896 that he had “immersed” himself in the teachings of Lipps, “who I suspect has the clearest mind among present-day philosophical writers.” Several years later, Freud thanked Lipps for giving him “the courage and capacity” to write his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious . He went on to advance Lipps’s research further when he made the case that empathy should be embraced by psychoanalysts as a tool for understanding patients. He urged his students to observe their patients not from a place of judgment, but of empathy. They ought to recede into the background like a “receptive organ” and strive toward the “putting of oneself in the other person’s place,” he said.
    Little known outside of specialist circles today, Lipps was a kind of intellectual celebrity and a highly sought-after speaker. On Friday nights he hosted a lively psychology club, where participants debated the distinction between actions and nonactions, and logicians pitted themselves against psychologists. For a time Lipps also edited an art journal that had the ambitious aim of chronicling the history of art, not dating back to the earliest paintings, but to the origins of creativityitself. When he was appointed chair of the University of Munich’s philosophy department in 1894, thinkers and artists from around the Continent signed up for his classes. The Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi was a student, as was Wassily Kandinsky, from Russia. Lipps’s foundational aesthetics course was also one of the first Rilke enrolled in upon his arrival from Prague.
    BY RILKE’S OWN ADMISSION, he still felt like a child when he arrived in Munich. He moved to Schwabing, a district in the center of town known for a high concentration of students and artists. Apart from Lipps’s class, he signed up for courses on Darwin and Renaissance art, taking an especially keen interest in the paintings of Sandro Botticelli, whose sad, pleading-eyed Madonnas seemed to “stand at the heart of the longing of our time.”
    Soon enough, Rilke found himself moving within social circles alongside Siegfried Wagner, the composer’s son, and Jakob Wassermann, the German novelist. Wassermann introduced Rilke to the work of the Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen, whose book about a young “dreamer, floundering around in a slough of doubt and self-analysis,” Niels Lyhne , would become an essential source of comfort to Rilke for years to come. But even this would not compare with the gift Wassermann gave him when, in 1897, he introduced the poet to Lou Andreas-Salomé. For a woman of any era, Andreas-Salomé’s intellectual influence was extraordinary. For a radical Russian feminist in the nineteenth century, it was almost inconceivable.
    Louise von Salomé, as she was named at birth, was an accomplished philosopher and writer, but today she is better remembered as a muse. She had rejected two marriage proposals from Friedrich Nietzsche, who once called her “by far the smartest person I ever knew,” and another from Nietzsche’s friend the philosopher Paul Rée. Although she didn’t want to marry either man, she was fascinated by their minds and suggested they all live together in an intellectual “holy trinity.” Astonishingly, they agreed.

    Lou Andreas-Salomé with Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Rée, 1882 .
    A photo taken in 1882 to celebrate their “Pythagorean friendship,” as Nietzsche called it, shows the two men hauling Salomé, then twenty-one, in a wooden cart while she brandishes a whip. The trio’s amusement didn’t last