On the Problem of Empathy

Stein's central claim is that empathy (Einfühlung) is an irreducible, sui generis intentional act through which we directly apprehend other persons and their mental states. In empathy, the other's experience is given to us as 'non-primordial': we grasp it in presentification, not as our own lived experience, yet it is genuinely given, not inferred or projected . She rejects the dominant theories of her time: the inference-by-analogy account, which holds that we know others' minds by reasoning from our own case; the imitation and association theories; and Max Scheler's account of an undifferentiated stream of experience . She also distinguishes empathy from a feeling of oneness, insisting that understanding the other requires maintaining the boundary between self and other .

Lipps held that empathy involves projecting oneself into the other, a kind of inner imitation or resonance in which the boundary between self and other is dissolved. Stein rejects this. She argues that empathy is not a feeling of oneness; if the boundary dissolves, the focus shifts back to one's own subjectivity and one no longer understands the other's experience from their perspective . For Stein, empathy requires perceiving the difference between the other and oneself: the selfness of 'I' is brought into relief in contrast with the otherness of the other . The clarity of her analysis allowed her to correct what she saw as errors in Lipps's conception, and Scheler considered her analysis so pertinent that he referred to it three times in the second edition of his own work .

Stein describes empathy as unfolding in three phases. First, the other's experience emerges before me as an object—I see the other's grief or joy. Second, I fulfill this initial grasp by imaginatively entering into the experience, making its content vivid. Third, the experience is brought to completion as I return to my own standpoint, and the other's experience becomes understood as theirs, not mine . This structure matters because it shows that empathy is not a single act of intuition but a temporal process with distinct moments. It also explains how empathy can be corrected: if the initial grasp is misleading, the fuller explication can reveal its inadequacy, and the other's own expressions can correct my understanding . Contemporary scholars have drawn on this three-step model in debates about social cognition .

Stein defended the dissertation in 1916 at Freiburg and published it in 1917 in Halle by Buchdruckerei des Waisenhauses . The published version omits a lengthy historical overview of the problem of empathy; that portion is now lost . The first English translation, by Waltraut Stein (Edith Stein's niece), was published by Martinus Nijhoff in The Hague in 1964 . A second edition appeared in 1970, and a third revised edition was published as volume 3 of The Collected Works of Edith Stein . The 1964 translation was criticized by a contemporary reviewer as 'too literal,' with typographical errors abounding, though it made the work accessible to Anglophone readers for the first time . The standard scholarly English edition is now the ICS Publications version .

Stein wrote the dissertation under Husserl and served as his assistant, editing Ideas II. But the work is not simply an application of Husserl's method. As one scholar notes, On the Problem of Empathy is 'a transmutation of empathy as a problem': Stein not only repeats the master's work but continues and transforms it, following a phenomenology that is directly intersubjective rather than constitutive of a solitary ego . The later Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities (1922) extends the analysis of empathy into a broader account of motivation, community, and the person . The empathy book is thus the seed of a programme that Stein would develop throughout her career, one that privileges embodied, affective intersubjectivity over transcendental constitution .

A frequent misconception is that Stein is offering a theory of empathy as a special kind of sympathy or emotional sharing. Her concern is epistemological and ontological, not primarily moral or therapeutic. She asks how it is possible to know other minds at all, and her answer is that empathy is a distinctive mode of givenness, not a feeling we have about others. Another misconception treats the book as a straightforward Husserlian exercise. Stein departs from Husserl in insisting that the other is given in empathy as a genuine other, not constituted by the ego's own operations. Her account of the 'non-primordial' givenness of the other's experience is a technical contribution to phenomenology, not a variant of the inference-by-analogy view she rejects .