"Concept 4: Intuiting or Projecting Oneself into Another’s Situation
Listening to your friend, you might have asked yourself what it would be like to be a young woman just told she is losing her job. Imaginatively projecting oneself into another’s situation is the psychological state referred to by Lipps (1903) as Einfühlung and for which Titchener (1909) first coined the English word empathy. Both were intrigued by the process whereby a writer or painter imagines what it would be like to be some specific person or some inanimate object, such as a gnarled, dead tree on a windswept hillside.
This original definition of empathy as aesthetic projection often appears in dictionaries, and it has appeared in recent philosophical discussions of simulation as an alternative to theory theories of mind. But such projection is rarely what is meant by empathy in contemporary psychology. Still, Wispé (1968) included such projection in his analysis of sympathy and empathy, calling it “aesthetic empathy.”"
These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena
By Dan Batson
A paper on 8 different ways the word empathy is uses.