1909 Titchener

Edward Titchener

1867-1927 (English)

Edward B. Titchener, one of two psychologists who brought “empathy” into English.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Psychologist

He coined the word "empathy" (feeling-in), as a translation of the German Einfühlung.

Empathy neologism from Greek empatheria - which means appreciation of another person feelings."Process of humanizing objects, of reading or feeling ourselves into them"

(Titchener, 1924, p. 417).

Titchener, Edward B. Lectures of the Experimental Psychology of Thought Processes, New York, Macmillian, 1909.

1909 Edward Titchener

"The psychologist Edward Titchener (1867–1927) introduced the term “empathy” in 1909 into the English language as the translation of the German term “Einfühlung” (or “feeling into”), a term that by the end of the 19th century was in German philosophical circles understood as an important category in philosophical aesthetics."

(Stueber 2014) Stueber, Karsten, "Empathy", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

"Thus E. B. Tichener, a German-trained psychologist writing in English, defined empathy as “the process of humanizing objects, of feeling ourselves or reading ourselves into them.” He remarked, “I see gravity, modesty, courtesy, stateliness [in someone], but also feel them. I suppose that’s a simple case of empathy, if we may coin the term as a rendering of Einfühlung. That was in l909. Whether Tichener worked consciously from stipulative identification by Lipps of Einfuhlüng with empatheia, while disguising or forgetting that influence, I do not know.”"

(Depew 2005)

"Edward Titchener, a student of German philosopher and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, is credited with being the first to translate the term Einfühlung as empathy in 1908 and discussed it in greater detail in his lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes in 1909. "

Edward Titchener, Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the ThoughtProcess, (The MacMillan Company, New York, 1909).

SYMPATHY, EMPATHY, AND THE EVOLUTION OF DARWIN’S MORAL SENSE, Eric M. Johnson