Psychic identification. Inquiring into Aristotle and Noël Carroll

Abstract

This paper proposes a re-reading of Aristotle’s well-known reference to fear and pity in terms of identification and empathy respectively: fear (intentional and propositional) as a form of experience in which the spectator puts himself in the position of the character and updates his experience (identification) from the outside inwards; pity as moral feeling that contains necessarily the moment of the empathy: intentional and imaginary occupation of the character’s conscience and update of its experience from within outwards. This consideration can be useful to review the critic that Noël Carroll addressed of the strong meaning of the term identification.

Keywords

• identification
• empathy
• sympathy
• Aristotle
• fear