Homeric Mimesis occupies a pivotal and contested position within the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a technical term in ancient poetics, a theory of psychological identification, and a diagnosis of pre-philosophical consciousness. Havelock’s Preface to Plato furnishes the most sustained treatment, arguing that mimesis, as deployed by Plato against the Homeric tradition, names not abstract imitation but total psychosomatic re-enactment: poet and audience alike surrender individual selfhood to the performed tradition, engaging larynx, limb, and unconscious nervous system in an act of emotional identification. This reading transforms the Republic’s attack on poetry from aesthetic puritanism into a struggle over the very architecture of mind. Nagy’s work on rhapsodic performance corroborates the re-enactment model, showing how dramatic impersonation of Achilles or Odysseus moves along a continuum toward full cultic identification. Auerbach approaches the Homeric text from the opposite direction, characterizing its representational mode — uniform illumination, foreground externalization, uninterrupted presence — as a distinct realist style rather than a psychology of absorption. Jaynes introduces a neurological inflection, reading post-bicameral poetry as laborious mimesis of earlier divine utterance. Across these voices, tension persists between mimesis as dangerous ego-dissolution enabling oral mnemonics, and mimesis as a formal literary style whose psychological stakes are secondary to its representational logic.
The term mimesis is chosen by Plato as the one most adequate to describe both re-enactment and also identification, and as one most applicable to the common psychology shared both by artist and by audience.
Havelock establishes mimesis as Plato’s master-term for the psychosomatic process of identification uniting performer and audience in shared re-enactment of the oral tradition.
, Preface to Plato, 1963thesis
One would better say that all usage refers to ‘sympathetic behaviour’, not to abstract copying or imitation, and in a great many
Havelock argues that pre-Platonic mimesis consistently denotes sympathetic behavioural identification rather than the abstract copy-relation that later scholarship has imported into it.
, Preface to Plato, 1963thesis
He has transcended the critique of Book Three, which confined itself to drama as its target. Now, not only the dramatist, but Homer and Hesiod come into question. Nor is the issue any longer confined to protecting the moral character. The danger is one of crippling the intellect.
Havelock traces Plato’s expansion of mimesis from a critique of dramatic style to a comprehensive indictment of Homer as an intellectual, not merely moral, threat.
, Preface to Plato, 1963thesis
When the poet speaks a speech in the person of another, he makes his verbal medium (lexis) resemble the speaker — and then Plato continues: ‘Any poet who makes himself resemble another in voice or gesture is imitating him’
Havelock exposes Plato’s logical sleight-of-hand whereby making one’s verbal medium resemble a character slides into the stronger claim that the poet himself imitates and therefore psychologically becomes that character.
, Preface to Plato, 1963thesis
a rhapsode of epic uses its dialogues to show off his full powers of dramatic performance (mimêsis); cf. also Ion 536a. Else (1965.69) summarizes: ‘The rhapsodes did not merely recite Homer, they acted him, and from this quasi-impersonation of Homeric characters it was only a step to full impersonation’
Nagy, citing Plato’s Ion, documents the continuum from rhapsodic recitation to full dramatic impersonation of Homeric heroes, anchoring mimesis in live performance practice.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting
On mimêsis as ‘reenactment’, in song and dance, of themes in myth, see Ch.13§12n3.
Nagy links mimesis to ritual reenactment in song and dance, extending its psychological scope beyond verbal recitation into embodied cultic practice.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting
when Plato chose mimesis as his all-inclusive term for ‘poetry’, his readers would have little difficulty in following him, but would have been shocked indeed when in Book 10 he demoted poetry to a status below that of a skilled craft.
Havelock argues that Plato’s use of mimesis as a blanket term for poetry was culturally intelligible, making the Republic’s demotion of Homer all the more scandalous to contemporary readers.
, Preface to Plato, 1963supporting
on the one hand fully externalized description, uniform illumination, uninterrupted connection, free expression, all events in the foreground, displaying unmistakable meanings, few elements of historical development and of psychological perspective
Auerbach characterizes Homeric mimesis as a representational style defined by radical externalization and foreground presence, contrasting it with the psychologically layered depth of Old Testament narrative.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
Homer’s feeling simply will not permit him to see it appear out of the darkness of an unilluminated past; it must be set in full light, and with it a portion of the hero’s boyhood
Auerbach reads the Homeric digression on Odysseus’s scar as evidence of a representational compulsion to illuminate every detail fully, leaving nothing in psychological shadow.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
conscious men now wrote and crossed out and careted and rewrote their compositions in laborious mimesis of the older divine utterances.
Jaynes reframes post-bicameral poetic composition as a secondary, effortful mimesis of originally involuntary divine speech, inverting the relation between inspiration and imitation.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
Plato is reporting the traditional estimate placed upon his poetry, and that estimate crystallised itself in the conception of Homer as the Hellenic educational manual par excellence.
Havelock contextualizes Plato’s attack on Homeric mimesis within the tradition of Homer as the encyclopedic educator of Greek civilization, the repository of all practical and moral knowledge.
, Preface to Plato, 1963supporting
mimesis (imitation, representation) 12, 13, 61-2 see also mousike; role models
Hobbs situates mimesis within the Platonic educational complex linking mousike, role models, and the formation of thumos, treating it as a mechanism of psychological character formation.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
in the Homeric poems life is enacted only among the ruling class—others appear only in the role of servants
Auerbach observes that Homeric mimesis of social reality is structurally limited to the aristocratic class, with subordinate figures possessing no inner life independent of their masters.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside
the oral techniques for preserving and transmitting knowledge, and the sensorial habits associated with those techniques, were, as we shall see, largely incompatible with the sensorial patterns demanded by alphabetic literacy.
Abram, drawing on Havelock, situates Homeric mimetic performance within the broader conflict between oral sensorial habit and the abstract perceptual demands of alphabetic writing.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996aside
The drama even down to Euripides took over for Athens some of the functions of epic and retained some basic elements of what we can call the functional (rather than the merely formulaic) style.
Havelock traces the survival of Homeric mimetic function into Attic drama, arguing that the encyclopedic and behavioral repertoire of epic was partially absorbed by tragedy before literacy dissolved it.
, Preface to Plato, 1963aside