What is the difference between empathy and sympathy?
Sympathy is literally 'feeling with' - compassion for or commiseration with another person.
Empathy, by contrast, is literally 'feeling into' - the ability to project one's personality into another person and more fully understand that person. Sympathy derives from Latin and Greek words meaning 'having a fellow feeling'. The term empathy originated in psychology (translation of a German term, c. 1903) and has now come to mean the ability to imagine or project oneself into another person's position and imagine and/or experience the sensations involved in that position.
