Someone I really respect and admire threw out this quote from Brené Brown today: “Empathy drives connection. Sympathy drives disconnection… Empathy is I’m feeling with you. Sympathy, I’m feeling for you.”

That raised my hackles. Because I’ve studied this extensively, over and over. And I’m sorry to inform the Zeitgeist, but you’ve got this one just about exactly backwards. For some reason, for the last thirty years or so our society has adopted a smarmy new connotation for the word empathy that just ain’t so.

I think this passage from the “emotional intelligence” website 6 Seconds captures the popular sentiment very well: “What’s the difference between empathy and sympathy? Basically, emotion. Empathy means experiencing someone else’s feelings. It comes from the German Einfühlung, or ‘feeling into.’ It requires an emotional component of really feeling what the other person is feeling. Sympathy, on the other hand, means understanding someone else’s suffering. It’s more cognitive in nature and keeps a certain distance.” (Emphases in the original.)

Let’s start by looking at the textbook definitions. Now, I occasionally point out that when I really want to know what a word means, I look it up in my trusty 1970 printing of Webster’s New World Dictionary. Why? Because I believe many modern dictionaries, particularly the online ones, are too quick to adopt neologisms and trendy re-definitions, making our language not fluid as it’s supposed to be, but dangerously ungrounded, which creates nonsense.

Webster has the following to say about the two words in question (focused solely on the definition senses most applicable to our discussion; both words have other senses that are only tangentially related or are unrelated):

Empathy – the projection of one’s own personality into the personality of another in order to understand him better; ability to share in another’s emotions or feelings.

Sympathy – an entering into, or the ability to enter into, another person’s mental state, feelings, emotions, etc.; esp., [often pl.] pity or compassion felt for another’s trouble, suffering, etc.

Some of you probably disagree with my opinion above about dictionaries, so I think it’s only fair to include one such online source’s current definitions – in this case, from Dictionary.com:

Empathy – the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

Sympathy – the fact or power of sharing the feelings of another, especially in sorrow or trouble; fellow feeling, compassion, or commiseration.

Finally, let’s look at etymology – where the words come from (thanks to Etymonline.com):

Empathy – 1908, modeled on German Einfühlung (from ein “in” + Fühlung “feeling”), which was coined 1858 by German philosopher Rudolf Lotze (1817-1881) as a translation of Greek empatheia “passion, state of emotion,” from assimilated form of en “in” + pathos “feeling.” A term from a theory of art appreciation that maintains appreciation depends on the viewer’s ability to project his personality into the viewed object.

Sympathy – 1570s, “affinity between certain things,” from Middle French sympathie (16c.) and directly from Late Latin sympathia “community of feeling, sympathy,” from Greek sympatheia “fellow-feeling, community of feeling,” from sympathes “having a fellow feeling, affected by like feelings,” from assimilated form of syn– “together.”

Okay, so let’s analyze all this. In my reading, with the Webster definitions I’m right, hands-down. Empathy is about projecting oneself into another’s situation, about sharing in the feelings of another, while sympathy is actual entering into the other’s mental state. It’s empathy that’s at arm’s length, and sympathy that’s about direct experience.

The new dictionary muddies the water a bit, but I’m surprised that there’s still the basic core left to each word. Empathy is about “psychological identification” or ”vicarious experiencing,” still showing it’s an exercise in projection. Sympathy has been recast in the sense of “sharing,” (note that was originally part of the empathy definition) and worse, “commiseration” – yet still retains its root of “fellow feeling.”

I say root, because when we go to the etymology of each, “fellow feeling” is directly from not just one but two of the Greek source words for sympathy. Meanwhile, we learn that empathy was coined for art appreciation, and therefore has its root in looking at something as an object and projecting one’s own feelings into it. Talk about arm’s length!

Why do the modern-day, popular uses of the words, as exemplified by Brown’s quote and the passage from the 6 Seconds website, have things so backwards? I’m not sure, but my suspicion is that it’s all because of the partial original definition of sympathy that involved “pity or compassion,” which can be construed to imply superiority. For that particular sense of the word, it should, since its connotation implies that the other person’s feelings that we’re engaged in experiencing for ourselves are ones of trouble or pain, such that our own personal feelings beforehand rightly ought to be viewed as better. In our therapeutic culture that first sprang from the 1960s, which cast everything that involved any form of superiority (except the new bosses’ unshakeable belief in their own overwhelming virtue) as evil, however, sympathy had to be overthrown. (Now, that’s particularly stupid given that more broadly, the word means simply feeling what another person is feeling. And there’s another sense of sympathy, one that I haven’t covered here before now, that means merely similarity of thinking: “I’m in sympathy with your deep appreciation of lasagna,” for example. So making the word pejorative because of implied superiority rests on a deplorable ignorance of all the senses of the word.)

Anyway, it was indeed overthrown – in favor of the now misunderstood and miscast word empathy. If I’m right about why, then it’s rank idiocy, but there you go. So was a lot of other stuff that came out of that era.

I for one am sticking with the perfectly good sympathy.