My wife told me today about a “German” word she heard/read about on Brené Brown’s book/podcast that is supposedly schadenfreude’s opposite, “freudenfreude” or “joy felt from other’s joy.”
It stuck in my head as interesting because I know the word “compersion,” from the polyamory community, as essentially meaning “joy at your partner’s joy with their other partner (a.k.a. their metamour)” but not in the more general sense that it seems like “freudenfreude” is supposed to mean.
The fact that compersion as a concept had to be created relatively recently on account of there not being a term for that feeling, I thought it odd that there would be an existing German term for something that I don’t think is as common to the human condition as schadenfreude is.
Functionally, it is a word being used in English, between English speakers, around the mental health/psychology community, but my question, is it a word used in German between German speakers?
I haven’t been able to find *anything* about it in my internet searching (outside of the aforementioned psychology circles) except for [one book written in 2016 by Clemens Sedmak](https://books.google.com/books?id=pkl4DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT26&dq=Freudenfreude&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj12IS60oP4AhVaHjQIHZi6DfI4ChDoAXoECAYQAw) that, from my Google translating, seems to confirm my suspicion that “freudenfreude” is not used by Germans the way that “schadenfreude” is, but rather came out of modern English speaking psychology as a type of antonym to the perceived negativity of schadenfreude. Other suggested German antonyms of schadenfreude I found were “Mitfreude” or “Mitgefühl,” and even “Muditā” and “firgun” (pronounced fear-goon) though Muditā comes from Sanskrit and Buddhism and firgun is a modern Hebrew word.
Regardless, I believe “freudenfreude” is now a neologism and is starting to gain more usage in at least the English speaking psychology world, but I’m just curious if its implied etymological origins of being a German word are true or made up (the implication being that it is used relatively commonly by native German speakers, like schadenfreude).
Thanks everyone for your input!