How Einfuhlung and Starbucks Make You a Better Website Builder

In the mid-1800s, a German philosopher coined the term Einfühlung. The internet is not quite sure who deserves credit, as it appears both Rudolf Hermann Lotze and Robert Vischer first used the term in about the same decade. Both were aesthetic psychologists — they studied the way humans relate to art. Einfühlung, loosely translated, means “feeling into.” The psychologists used it to describe the way a human projected his or her feelings onto the natural world around them. In aesthetic psychology, the word described the way one human looks at a created object and experiences a feeling or emotion from the viewing.

Theodor Lipps, a German philosopher and famed university professor, borrowed Einfühlung into psychology to explain how we understand that the people around us also have selves. Sigmund Freud (a passionate admirer of Lipps) in turn took Einfühlung to represent the ‘process that allows us to understand others by putting ourselves in their place.’

In 1908, an Englishman named Edward Titchener moved to Cornell University and took a position as a professor of psychology. He later went on to create great fame and recognition. But before all that, he translated Einfühlung into English (with help from the Greek): empathy.