Inside words: Empathy

I will start this journey "Inside words" by talking about Empathy. If you scroll through the Linkedin feed, and you are interested in management, you will be overwhelmed by professionals that talk about the importance of "Empathy" in the work environment. I would like to investigate more and give my insight.

Our current Western idea of empathy arises from two places. In English, the word?empathy?comes from the Greek root?pathos, which means emotion, feeling, suffering, or pity. The second root of our current concept of empathy comes from the German word?Einfühlung?(pronounced?eín-fhoo-loong), which means “in-feeling” or “feeling into” – and first appeared (in print) in German philosopher Robert Vischer’s 1873 Ph.D. dissertation on aesthetics. Vischer used the word to explore the human capacity to enter into a piece of art or literature and feel the emotions that the artist had worked to represent – or to imbue a piece of art (or any object) with relevant emotions.

Einfühlung?adds a wonderful dimension to empathy (actually, the English word?empathy?was coined in 1909?as a translation of?Einfühlung) because it helps us view empathy not only as our interactional capacity to share emotions with others, but also as our ability to engage emotively with the world around us – and with the nuances and intentions underlying art, music, literature, and symbolism.

When the British psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener translated the German?Einfühlung?into the English “empathy” in 1909, he drew upon several recent writings dedicated in part to revising and refining the term’s aesthetic and moral implications.?Einfühlung?had been used by the German Romantics to describe the aesthetic experience, particularly the experience of “feeling into” the natural world, but had become the object of serious philosophical scrutiny only in the later nineteenth century through the work of German philosophers like Robert Vischer and Theodor Lipps. The remainder of this essay considers why the introduction of that new term was important, what it meant, and how it differed from (or was continuous with) existing understandings of sympathy.

If empathy originally had an aesthetic meaning, American psychologists began to extend its scope to include the understanding of other people. One could, for example, project one’s own remembered feelings of sadness into another’s sad expression to grasp what they were experiencing. In the 1930s, psychologists and sociologists explored how empathy might help clinicians more deeply understand their clients.

By the Second World War, social psychologists began devising experiments to gauge a subject’s empathy for others. Empathy now meant that one could make correct predictions about another person’s preferences, without contaminating those predictions with one’s ideas. As empathy came to denote the ability to accurately grasp another’s thoughts and feelings, the idea that it was an aesthetic?projection?of one’s feelings into objects disappeared.

As far as I could search and learn, there is no precise study or research that begins to give "empathy" the meaning of "a strong leadership skill", a powerful leadership tool that must be used to bring a positive work environment.

Instead of just posting about empathy, professionals should take the time to truly understand what empathy means and how to apply it in their leadership roles. This means taking the time to research and learn about the different aspects of empathy, such as emotional intelligence, active listening, and understanding different perspectives.