The Development of Ideas About Empathy

Abstract

This article consists of a review of the different concepts of empathy, in the fields of ethics, esthetics, social psychology, psychoanalysis, and counseling. Empathy seems to involve projection and introjection. An historical survey of the literature is presented. Researches based on the role theory model of empathy are reviewed. Chaiacter and personality traits related to empathy are presented. A proposal is made for a study of empathic understanding in counseling involving five dimensions of empathy: 1. Tone or sensory and imitative responses, 2. Pace or kinesthetic similarity, 3. Strategy and flexibility or intellectual and objective prediction, 4. Adaptation of frame of reference or cognitive perception of the other person, and 5. Repertoire of leads or imaginative variation of responses. Research and study of empathy become important to anyone or any group that has a professional interest in what another person or another group may be thinking or feeling. Observers have long wondered about the reasons for the difference in the ability to understand, feel along with, and to anticipate or to predict what others will do. The fields of esthetics, ethics, social psychology, psychoanalysis and counseling, for example, all share an interest in studying the empathic process. The ethical person may speculate about the empathic process in this way: If man can put himself in another man's place as if it were he himself, then man will not harm another man for he will have compassion and good will. In the esthetic concept the observer, or interactor, allows the other, or the object das fremde ich (Lapps, 1907) to project into him. In a sense he introjects, while in the ethical concept the observer or interactor projects onto the other. In these two conceptions we see the basic difference in the approach to empathy as well as the reciprocity that is inherent in the empathic process.