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feeling, suffering, or pity” (it also comes from a German word, as we’ll explore below). The English words empathy and sympathy are used interchangeably to refer to the sharing of or knowledge of emotions, whereas apathy relatesto lack of emotions, and antipathy relates to antagonistic emotions. Some sources make a distinction between empathy (the ability to share an emotion viscerally) and sympathy (the ability to understand the emotions of others without actually feeling them yourself ), but this distinction isn’t concrete or stable. In some dictionaries, the definitions of empathy and sympathy are the exact opposite of the ones I just gave you. So, from this point forward, I’ll be folding the contested word sympathy into our larger definition of empathy, and I won’t focus on sympathy as a separate entity in this book.
    In the research, these two seemingly separate categories of empathizing have now been renamed as affective (viscerally feeling) empathy and cognitive (objectively understanding) empathy. Although these new terms address the sympathy–empathy confusion very nicely, they create a distinction that is problematic (and we’ll come back to that problem later in this chapter).
    I was surprised to learn that the English word empathy was coined in 1909. 12 That’s so recent! I was also surprised to learn that the word came into our language as a translation of the German word Einfühlung (pronounced EIN-fhoo-loong), which means “in feeling” or “feeling into” and which first appeared in print in German philosopher Robert Vischer’s 1873 PhD dissertation on aesthetics. 13 Vischer used the word to describe both our capacity to enter into a piece of art or literature, to feel the emotions that the artist had intended, and our capacity to imbue a piece of art (or any object) with meaning and emotions. Einfühlung adds a wonderful dimension to empathy because it helps us view empathy not only as our interactional capacity to share emotions with others, but also as our ability to engage emotively with the world around us and with the nuances and intentions underlying art, music, literature, and symbolism. With the concept of Einfühlung, we can easily see that men—great artists, writers, musicians, thinkers, and lovers of aesthetics—are absolutely equal to women in their capacity to interact deeply and empathically with the world. The same is true for people on the autism spectrum.
    You may have already noticed that when I explain the act of empathizing, I don’t refer specifically to other people. Instead, I refer to others, because empathizing is not limited to human beings. The concept of Einfühlung really helps us encompass the larger aspects of the empathic experience, and it helps us include animals, art, literature, ideas, and symbols in the category of things we can empathize with. The concept of Einfühlung also helps us clearly identify people on the autism spectrum as empaths 14 who, in some cases,focus their intense sensitivities, empathy, and interactional capacities on things other than human beings.
    There’s a beautiful documentary from 2010 called Loving Lampposts, which filmmaker Todd Drezner made about his autistic son, Sam. In it, you can use your own Einfühlung capacity to watch Sam interact adoringly and completely with his beloved lampposts—he communicates with them wordlessly, interacts with them, and has full-bodied, aesthetic Einfühlung with those lampposts right in front of your eyes. It’s clear that the lampposts soothe, calm, and ground Sam. Empathy is an active, interactional, and deeply emotional skill, but it is not—and never has been—restricted to human relationships.
    The concept of Einfühlung really resonates with my experience (does this mean I’m having Einfühlung about Einfühlung?), because the people I know who are most empathic are often very deeply engaged