The Seba library treats Homunculus in 8 passages, across 6 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Jung, C.G., Damasio, Antonio R.).
the homunculus into whom Ion is changed devours himself. He spews forth his own flesh and rends himself with his own teeth. The homunculus therefore stands for the uroboros, which devours itself and gives birth to itself
Jung argues that the Zosimian homunculus is symbolically equivalent to the uroboros, making it a figure of self-generating circular transformation prior to psychic differentiation.
, Alchemical Studies, 1967thesis
Wagner, the rationalist, installed in his former laboratory, where he is doing a marvelous thing, producing a little man in a retort, a homunculus. It was the dream of the Middle Ages to make such a little man
Jung reads Goethe’s Faust II to show that the homunculus embodies the rationalist-alchemical dream of artificially producing life, and traces its subsequent quest for embodied existence through consultation with Proteus.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984thesis
the self is not the infamous homunculus, a little person inside our brain perceiving and thinking about the images the brain forms. It is, rather, a perpetually re-created neurobiological state. Years of justified attack on the homunculus concept have made many theorists equally fearful of the concept of self.
Damasio definitively rejects the homuncular model of selfhood while insisting that a non-homuncular neural self remains indispensable to any coherent theory of mind.
, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994thesis
The “model of the body-in-the-brain” to which I am referring is nothing at all like the rigid homunculus creature of old-fashioned neurology textbooks. Nothing in it looks like a little person inside a big person; the model “perceives” nothing and “knows” nothing.
Damasio explicitly distinguishes his body-in-the-brain model from the homuncular fallacy, characterizing the homunculus as a defunct neurological concept that his theory of core consciousness replaces.
, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999thesis
Wilder Penfield called this cross-sectional map a sensory homunculus. A composite representation of the sensory homunculus as a figurine drawing is based on the cross-sectional map. It shows a human with large hands, fingers, and mouth.
Kandel documents the neurological use of ‘homunculus’ as Penfield’s cortical somatosensory map — the technical scientific sense that undergirds and provokes Damasio’s critical philosophical engagement with the term.
, In search of memory the emergence of a new science of mind, 2006supporting
Although some say the homunculus is a sub-human, those in whose heritage they figure feel they are supra-human; wisely trickerish and engendering in their own ways.
Estés rehabilitates the homunculus in a folkloric, psycho-mythological register as a figure of supra-human trickster vitality, contesting its dismissal as merely sub-human or artificial.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
the “inner man” in the Christian sense, but of a “scientific” union of the natural with the spiritual man with the aid of arcane techniques of a medical nature. Paracelsus carefully avoids the ecclesiastical terminology
Jung’s account of Paracelsus’s concept of the inner man (Amadeus) forms the conceptual background against which Paracelsian homunculus-making must be understood as a quasi-scientific rather than ecclesiastical operation.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907aside
there is an audience, YOU. You do not see yourself; you simply sense or feel that in front of the theatricals onstage there sits a sort of YOU, the subject-audience for the show
Without invoking the term directly, Damasio here circles the homunculus problem — the question of who or what observes inner experience — by proposing a subject-audience that does not regress into an inner perceiver.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018aside