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The phenomenological approach to mental states consists of a very accurate, detailed and exhaustive description and classification of them and thus provides a rich field of material for psycho-analytical investigation, which is chiefly concerned with their causation and dynamics.
Among such states that of sympathy has been
very fully dealt with by Scheler. He distinguishes between (1) sharing a grief in common with another person, as when both parents mourn equally the loss of their child, (2) taking part in another person's grief in the sense of feeling compassion for him and (3) feeling another person's grief through direct emotional contagion. He thinks that feeling sympathy in the first two senses immunizes the subject from feeling it in the third sense of emotional contagion, since they pre-suppose that he has retained his existence as a separate individual. For Scheler regards the feeling of oneness (or identification) with another person as the basis rather than the consequence of such a contagion. But this does not apply to pseudo-sympathy, which often involves an identification with the other person's grief in order to accentuate the subject's own sufferings. Some phenomenologists however, think that sympathy is felt by means of identification.
Psycho-analysts take wider views and ascribe it not only to identification but to a reaction to sadism and even to an endeavour to get rid of an identification. Various psycho-analytical attempts to trace the origin of the feeling are open to criticism; but the best account has been given by Jekels, who divides sympathy into two kinds—one felt through identification and the other through objectification—and who describes the steps by which the second kind is arrived at as a process of getting rid, by projection and identification with the super-ego, of the primary emotional contagion from the object of sympathy (or identification with him), which is based upon masochism and a sense of guilt.