sympathy and empathy

If you have sympathy for someone you feel sorry for them because they are in a bad situation.  Your sympathy is often expressed in words and gestures to show that you care. Used more generally, to sympathise with someone is to share their point of view, to agree with them.

But these days it is not enough to be sympathetic. Empathy is what we now strive for, despite the fact that the difference in meaning between the two is often blurred.  Empathy is the full understanding of what another person is feeling which may lead us to a different way of dealing with them.  An empathetic person or empath can observe and listen and take in the full extent of another person’s feelings without imposing restrictions or judgements or attempts to improve.  A person who lacks empathy has no idea what others are feeling but pursues their own goals regardless of consequences to others. The popular definition of empathy is that you enter into the feelings of others and experience them with the other person in order to understand them completely.  This is not actually possible or desirable unless you want to become a nervous wreck.

In a sense fellow-feeling is a synonym for both words but in the case of sympathy there is more distance between the fellows. Empathy is closer.  But it would be good to distinguish between cases of sympathy and cases of empathy instead of just picking empathy because it is fashionable.  Even our small children are being given lessons in empathy with children’s books and teaching materials supporting the idea.