Mimesis occupies a contested and generative position in the depth-psychology corpus, where it operates simultaneously as a philosophical problem inherited from Plato, a literary-historical method, a somatic-psychological mechanism, and a pre-reflective compulsion underlying identity formation. Auerbach's monumental study establishes the term's literary-critical valence: mimesis names the historically variable modes by which Western literature represents reality, with serious and tragic treatments of everyday life forming the central concern. Havelock complicates the Platonic inheritance decisively, arguing that pre-Platonic usage of mimesis denoted 'sympathetic behaviour'—an enactive, embodied identification rather than abstract copying—and that Plato's abstraction of the term into a relation between original and copy was itself a philosophical intervention, not a neutral description. Hobbs extends this into moral psychology, treating mimesis as implicated in role-model formation and the education of thumos. Bosnak brings the concept into clinical depth-psychology via Taussig's notion of a compulsion to become like others, locating mimesis as a force operative within embodied imagination practice. Jaynes, characteristically, reads mimesis as a late and labored substitute for what was once the direct utterance of bicameral gods: conscious poets perform in mimesis of the older divine speech. McGilchrist anchors mimetic capacity neurologically in right-hemisphere empathic identification, distinguishing genuine affective resonance from left-hemisphere verbal simulation. The tensions among these positions—between mimesis as cognitive abstraction, somatic identification, moral formation, and neurological process—make it one of the most productively unstable terms in the concordance.
all usage refers to 'sympathetic behaviour', not to abstract copying or imitation, and in a great many
Havelock argues that pre-Platonic mimesis denoted enactive bodily identification with another rather than the abstract representational relation Plato imposed on the term.
, Preface to Plato, 1963thesis
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 how Plato's argument in Book Ten extends mimesis from a formal description of dramatic composition to a comprehensive indictment of all poetry as epistemically dangerous.
, Preface to Plato, 1963thesis
the term mimesis has been usefully and rather precisely applied to define a method of composition. But there is slipped in, during the course of this part of the argument, a very curious statement
Havelock identifies a logical slippage in Plato's argument by which mimesis shifts from a description of compositional technique to an assertion that the poet himself is transformed into the character he represents.
, Preface to Plato, 1963thesis
besides the character's apparent desire to come into being, there is a corresponding compulsion to become like others, a compelling force already observed in monkeys, hence the verb 'aping.'
Bosnak, drawing on Taussig, positions mimesis as a pre-mammalian compulsion to become like others that undergirds embodied imagination and the incarnation of imaginal characters.
, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007thesis
conscious men now wrote and crossed out and careted and rewrote their compositions in laborious mimesis of the older divine utterances.
Jaynes recasts literary mimesis as a compensatory and laborious substitution for the lost spontaneous speech of the bicameral mind, marking the term as a symptom of consciousness's emergence.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976thesis
there is significantly increased right-sided activity in the limbic system specifically during imitation, compared with mere observation, of emotional facial expressions.
McGilchrist grounds mimetic identification in right-hemisphere limbic activity, distinguishing genuine empathic imitation from the verbal simulation of feeling characteristic of left-hemisphere processing.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
mimesis (imitation, representation) 12, 13, 61-2 see also mousike; role models
Hobbs situates mimesis within Plato's moral psychology as a mechanism of character formation operating through mousike and role-model identification, directly implicating thumos.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
mimesis 129–132; multiple states 24, 25, 38; multiple subjectivities 22, 65
In Bosnak's clinical index, mimesis appears as a named technique within embodied imagination, coordinated with multiple subjectivities and networking of imaginal composites.
, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007supporting
'Socrates' in Plato's Republic divided poetry into two kinds, one representative and the other not … and banishes all representative poetry but retains certain specified kinds of poetry as not representative
Havelock surveys the scholarly debate over whether Plato condemned all mimesis or only a representational sub-type, exposing the interpretive instability at the heart of the Platonic argument.
, Preface to Plato, 1963supporting
realistic subjects were treated seriously, problematically, or tragically. As a result, merely comic works, works which indubitably remained within the realm of the low style, were excluded.
Auerbach clarifies that his study of mimesis is specifically concerned with the serious and tragic representation of low or everyday reality, distinguishing his project from a general theory of realism.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
Mimesis is quite consciously a book that a particular person, in a particular situation, wrote at the beginning of the 1940s.
Auerbach affirms that Mimesis is an avowedly situated, time-bound hermeneutical act rather than a claim to systematic or objective historiography.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
interpreting literature is 'a process of formulation and interpretation whose subject matter is our own self.'
Said's introduction emphasizes that for Auerbach the representation of reality in literature is ultimately reflexive—a process in which the interpreter's own selfhood is the real subject matter.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
Aspects of the occurrence come to the fore, and links to other occurrences, which, before this time, had hardly been sensed, which had never been clearly seen and attended to, and yet they are determining factors in our real lives.
Auerbach reads Woolf's technique as a mimetic achievement of new psychological depth, rendering the unconscious determinants of lived experience visible through literary representation.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
Even this opening startles us when we come to it from Homer. Where are the two speakers? We are not told.
Auerbach's foundational comparison of Homeric and Biblical mimesis establishes the two poles of Western representational style: externalized luminosity versus background depth and psychological interiority.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
realism in France … takes on the character of an aesthetic style capable of rendering sordidness and beauty with unadorned directness
Auerbach traces the evolution of literary mimesis through nineteenth-century French realism toward the stream-of-consciousness techniques of Proust, Woolf, and Joyce.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside
The hallmark of his own curriculum is conveyed in the Greek term episteme for which our word science is one possible equivalent.
Havelock contextualizes Plato's attack on mimesis within the institutional ambitions of the Academy, where episteme rather than poetic identification was to be the basis of education.
, Preface to Plato, 1963aside
The image of man eclipses the image of God. Dante's work made man's Christian-figural being a reality, and destroyed it in the very process of realizing it.
Auerbach argues that Dante's mimetic power is so great that the figural-Christian framework is subverted by the very human reality it was meant to contain.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside