On the Problem of Empathy

Edith Stein's doctoral dissertation, written under Edmund Husserl, completed at Freiburg in 1916 and published in 1917. It asks how we experience other people's experiences. Stein argues that empathy (Einfühlung) is a distinct kind of act, not reducible to inference by analogy, inner imitation or a feeling of oneness. When I grasp your grief, my act of empathising is my own present experience, but the grief it gives me is yours and is given as yours, not lived through by me. She criticises rival accounts, especially Theodor Lipps's view of empathy as inner imitation. She then shows how empathy lets us constitute others as psycho-physical individuals: I see another's living body (Leib) as a centre of orientation and sensation, like my own. Empathy also lets me understand others as spiritual persons with values and motives, and, through reiterated empathy, see myself as others see me. Only the later parts of her planned study were printed.

It is a short, careful account of how we know other minds, and is now a key source for philosophers and psychologists working on empathy and social cognition.