According to Berrios (2014), the ancient concept of ‘sympathy’ originally referred to a supposed affinity or force that connected all natural objects together. Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments (Smith, 1759/1817) represents a turning point, because here the term ‘sympathy’ is used to explain the way in which human beings relate to and feel for each other. Scholars working on the concept of empathy in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and psychopathology will find interesting insights into this topic here, since many of the problems that will characterize the future debate on empathic understanding are already present in Smith’s work.

Smith discusses the epistemological problem that our senses cannot directly grasp what the other person is experiencing. Senses, he writes, never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Sympathy, adds the author, does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation that excites it. In every passion the emotions of the observer always correspond to what, by intuition, he imagines should be the experience of the sufferer. Given a situation, the observer imagines what he would feel in that situation, and therefore it is on the basis of this conception that he can judge the appropriateness or otherwise of the other’s reaction in the same circumstances. Finally, in one paragraph Smith also discusses the problem of the possibility of understanding the person with mental problems, writing that usually those who observe from the outside feel anguish because they imagine being reduced to the same unhappy situation, while perhaps the patient at that moment is indifferent to his own misery. The interesting point that the author raises is that the observer feels anguish because he imagines himself in the situation but with the reasonableness and lucidity that he has now, without considering that the other is not in the same state. An important reminder, this, that empathy cannot be a direct projection of oneself into the other, but an effort to imagine how one might feel being in the other’s condition.