Abstract

Sympathy, Einfuhlung, and empathy represent the general idea that people can feel the feelings of other people. The history of empathy is the history of this idea since Plato. As sympathy, the idea appeared in philosophy, literary criticism, physiology, psychology, social psychology, and sociology. As Einfuhlung, the idea informed aesthetic philosophy and psychology, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. As empathy, from 1909 to 1949, the idea appeared first in introspective psychology, and then in cognitive and aesthetic psychology, personality psychology, interpersonal psychiatry, experimental and social psychology, sociology, and psychoanalysis. After 1949, when it became an explanatory concept in psychotherapy, empathy became widely cited in psychology. It has since exfoliated throughout the humanities and sciences, and gained wide interpretive flexibility as well as considerable semantic ambiguity. ;The history of the psychological significance of empathy is the continuing attempt to observe, describe, and explain the nature and consequences of thinking, feeling, and acting, as manifested in the act of feeling other people's feelings. The attempt to bring this topic into the discourse of science, to construct an idiographic vocabulary with nomological pretensions, has involved a debate over terms; but the debate over such terms is psychology. Thus, the history of empathy is a history of psychology from the perspective of one its concepts. It is also an exercise in reflexive education: to know ourselves by the way we have constructed a concept about ourselves, and to know how that concept and the science we have created to study ourselves have shaped each other. ;Although empathy received most attention in psychotherapy, it has become important in social and developmental psychology as well. Recently, it has shown promise in the study of morality and culture. The extent to which empathy can renew its base in clinical and counseling psychology, continue to inform other branches of psychology, and enrich the contemporary discourse on ethics and culture, will depend on the extent to which a theory of the concept can describe and explain the psychological process of empathy.