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The term “empathy” (“Einfühlung”) first appeared in 1798, in the work the Disciples of Sais, by the German romantic poet, Novalis.
The romantics, through the vital circulating sap of the synphilosophieren and synpoetisieren (thinking together, poetising together), shared a fundamental experience which today, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, would be defined as fusional, the sicheinfühlen, that is man's feeling that he is in unison with nature, his feeling at one with it, his experiencing its forces as if they were part of his own soul. The external macrocosm was perceived as mystically corresponding to the internal microcosm (Cisotti 1982).
Romantic empathy corresponded to a mental style which favoured feeling (pàthos) and massively employed projective functions in its poetry, making use of magical, grandiose, total and fusional experiences, and which did not greatly respect the separateness of objects from the subject.
Until the early 1900's, the concept of empathy, bound to this artistic-philosophic root, remained characterised by a predominance of projection