360 GRADI MAGAZINE January/February 2021

Stein argued that the notion of
empathy, hence the feeling inside
the other, should not be limited to
the mere sharing of emotions and
feelings, a partial vision that often
dominates. Stein and Husserl with her
defined empathy as something even
more fundamental than a mechanism
that allows me to understand if the
person in front of me is angry, happy,
sad, surprised or disgusted. We
experience the other, says Stein, as
another human being like us, thanks
to the perception of a relationship of
similarity. So I don’t have to reinvent
myself every time the discovery that
Mrs. Rossi or Mr. Bianchi standing in
front of me are human beings like me
at the end of a complicated path of
logical inferences; empathy is at the
basis of this detection of similarity in
otherness, it is another not me, it is
another human being like me, if this
were not the case we would enter
the domain of psychopathology. This
perception of similarity, this other
that speaks to me in a language that
is more or less familiar to me, that is
understandable to me, this creature in
which I find myself, which is not alien,
always within certain limits and with
enormous inter-individual variability,
is the product of this basic mechanism
that allows me to detect this similarity
which, I repeat, is not only a similarity
of affects, emotions and sensations
but which is global. Stein has also
specifically emphasized the domain
of action, comparing the hand of the
child, the hand of the monkey and the
hand of the elderly: even if visually
they have different dimensions,
different colors, different levels
of hirsute certainly very different
nevertheless for us they are all hands;
their characteristic of belonging to
this same semantic category derives
precisely from the common domain of
movement, of action that we recognize
regardless of age, genus or even
species.
In Germany, the character
who has ferried the
notion of empathy from a
debate totally within aesthetics to
psychology is Theodor Lipps. Theodor
Lipps is an author that Freud read
avidly, for whom he felt a great
esteem, and whom he mentioned in
many passages in his writings about
him. For example, in Inhibition
Symptom and Distress, an essay he
published in 1926, he argues that it is
only thanks to empathy that we know
the existence of a psychic life different
from ours. Therefore, empathy is the
fundamental element that allows us to
relate to the other, certainly not the
only one but, probably from an
evolutionary point of view, the much
older one and also present in animal
species that have not yet reached the
language.
Now we see how the theme of
empathy, of this direct resonance
between me and the other,
becomes a crucial aspect of my
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