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In the history of ideas it fell to James and Alix Strachey to make Freud's complete psychological works available to the English-speaking world. Translation did not always come easily — and the German word Einfühlung posed particular problems for them. Einfühlung has since been handed down to us as “empathy,” a word (I was surprised to learn) relatively new to the English language. Still wrestling with the word “Einfühlung,” Alix Strachey wrote to her husband in 1925:
By the way, about the word “empathy.” Did I suggest it? It's only that at a tea-party Abraham said that Jones had found or invented this word for “Einfühlung”; & I had a sort of feeling that Bullough [a former professor of hers] had created it, for aesthetic purposes, 11 years ago, & that I picked it up there. In any case it's a vile word, elephantine, for a subtle process. I can't help feeling a real English writer would at once produce the right word. The process must have a name. (Strachey and Strachey, 1985, pp. 170-171)
Well, Alix never had her wish. That vile and elephantine word, empathy, stuck. And I have come to agree with Alix Strachey: The German word, Einfühlung, literally meaning “in-feeling” or “feeling into,” although inadequate, comes closer to that ineffable, subtle process than does the word “empathy.” Moreover, for Alix Strachey the very difficulty in translation itself lent the word Einfühlung an air of mystery, conveying its delicate shadings and nuances. Perhaps she feared that in naming the process, we would concretize and violate it, pretending that we understood.