Mindsight

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The capability to be aware of and understand one's internal emotional and cognitive states while also recognizing the psychological experiences of others
2. An insight-driven skill that encompasses awareness of personal thoughts and feelings as well as the ability to perceive others' mental processes
3. The ability to comprehend one’s own mental and emotional conditions while simultaneously recognizing and interpreting the emotional states of others

Etymology: "Mindsight" is a plain compound of "mind" and "sight," and its history is correspondingly direct. "Mind" comes from Old English "gemynd," meaning memory or remembrance, and "sight" comes from Old English "gesiht," the faculty of seeing. Joined together, the pair offers a metaphor: just as sight lets us perceive the outside world, mindsight would let us perceive the workings of a mind, our own and other people's. The compound is a modern coinage used in psychology and popular writing about emotional understanding, so its meaning is closer to a deliberate figure of speech than to an inherited term. The metaphor does its work in the word itself, which turns the act of inner reflection into a kind of seeing.