What is the object of an empathetic emotion?

Although empathy is a common and integral part of social life, it has proven exceedingly difficult to analyze. One question that remains unanswered concerns the object of an empathetic emotion. If you empathize with my fear of a dog, is your empathetic emotion about my fear or about the dog? In affectively empathizing, we are simultaneously related to another person and—through that person’s emotional perspective—to the world. It thus seems that the object of an empathetic emotion must be both a target person’s emotion and the object of that person’s emotion. However, it also seems that a single emotion can only have one object. Despite its relevance for providing a coherent account of empathy, this puzzle has hitherto been neglected. To this date, only Julien Deonna and Derek Matravers have recognized the problem and provided extensive discussion. In this paper, I critically analyze their solutions and offer an alternative solution as well as a diagnosis of why the puzzle arises. The proposed solution is based on a specific understanding of empathy, which draws on an analogy with the practice of modelling. In addition to providing a solution to the puzzle, this conception of empathy is in line with empathy’s interpersonal and epistemic functions and allows us to distinguish empathy from related phenomena.