empathy

empathy

1. This is originally a term used in psychology and aesthetics meaning ‘the power of identifying oneself mentally with (and so fully comprehending) a person or object of contemplation’. In general use it tends to replace sympathy or feeling for when these words are sometimes more appropriate; sympathy can be felt without the element of personal experience that is implied by empathy:

• Seeing our sadness, our empathy with the pain she was surely suffering, she said, ‘What's wrong with you all?’ —A. Davis, 1975

• It was a hard life, and Byron recounts it with empathy and gusto —Anthony Burgess, 1986.

It also gained some currency from educationists who established a fashion for teaching history by getting pupils to feel empathy for (or empathizing with) people of other ages, as an antidote to preoccupation with political history. But all that has changed again.

2. The corresponding adjective is either empathic or empathetic (the more usual form in the OEC, although neither is of particularly high frequency).