Mimesis stands at one of the most contested intersections in the depth-psychology corpus: the question of how psychic and cultural life reproduce, transmit, and transform themselves through acts of likening, reenactment, and representation. The corpus reveals at least three distinct registers in which the term operates. First, in its classical Platonic sense — dissected at length by Havelock — mimesis names the dangerous psychic mechanism by which oral poetry colonizes the listener’s identity, compelling sympathetic identification rather than critical reflection; Plato’s ban is thus a psychological, not merely aesthetic, intervention. Second, in Auerbach’s monumental philological project, mimesis designates the entire history of serious literary representation of reality in Western letters, a project whose own method — personal, time-bound, non-systematic — mirrors the embodied contingency it traces. Third, in the somatic-imaginal tradition represented by Bosnak, mimesis resurfaces as a compulsive force underlying embodied imagination and the incarnation of psychic figures in therapy. McGilchrist’s neurological account of imitation and projective identification adds a fourth dimension: mimesis as a right-hemisphere-mediated interpersonal merging that precedes reflective consciousness. Jaynes introduces yet another register, linking mimesis to the collapse of bicameral divine utterance into conscious, laborious literary imitation. The tensions among these positions — mimesis as epistemological danger, as literary method, as therapeutic tool, as neural substrate — make the term a genuinely productive knot in any depth-psychological concordance.
all usage refers to ‘sympathetic behaviour’, not to abstract copying or imitation, and in a great many
Havelock argues that pre-Platonic mimesis denotes enacted identification with another’s conduct rather than the abstract copy-relation Plato imposed upon it, fundamentally revising the term’s genealogy.
, 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 traces Plato’s pivotal conceptual move whereby mimesis slides from a technical description of dramatic composition into an ontological and psychological indictment of all poetry.
, 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 shows that Plato’s expanded concept of mimesis in Book Ten targets all poetry as an epistemic threat, not merely a moral one, rendering the intellect unable to access true knowledge.
, Preface to Plato, 1963thesis
aside from mimetic art and poetry which is bad, and which is the variety discussed and dismissed in the Republic, Plato believed in a wholly non-mimetic variety, i.e. non-representational, which is good.
Havelock reviews the scholarly debate over whether Plato admitted a legitimate non-mimetic poetry, presenting Collingwood’s position that the Platonic attack on mimesis is selectively, not universally, directed.
, 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’s anthropological reading, positions mimesis as a pre-reflective compulsion operative in embodied imagination and the therapeutic incarnation of psychic figures.
, 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 frames post-bicameral literary composition as a mimetic simulation of involuntary divine speech, marking the fall from inspired utterance into conscious, labored imitation.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976thesis
I was no longer concerned with realism in general, the question was to what degree and in what manner realistic subjects were treated seriously, problematically, or tragically.
Auerbach articulates the governing criterion of his entire project: mimesis as serious, tragic representation of reality, distinguished from merely comic or decorative realism.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953thesis
Mimesis is quite consciously a book that a particular person, in a particular situation, wrote at the beginning of the 1940s.
Auerbach insists that his practice of mimetic representation is itself time-bound and perspectival, enacting the very hermeneutical situatedness his book describes.
, 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 identifies Auerbach’s method as reflexively mimetic: the interpreter discovers self-knowledge through the act of representing literary reality.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
we make spontaneous movements signifying our involvement in events we are watching evolve — so long as we believe them to be the result of another’s action.
McGilchrist provides neurological evidence that mimetic identification — spontaneous motor resonance with observed intentional action — is a right-hemisphere-driven embodied process.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
mimesis 129–132
In the index to Embodiment, mimesis appears as a discrete category within embodied imagination practice, cross-referenced to identification and networking the impulsive composite.
, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007supporting
mimesis (imitation, representation) 12, 13, 61–2 see also mousike; role models
Hobbs’s index entry for mimesis, linking it explicitly to mousike and role models, signals that in her account mimesis functions as the psycho-educational mechanism through which heroic character is formed and deformed.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
what realistic depth is achieved in every individual occurrence, for example the measuring of the stocking! Aspects of the occurrence come to the fore, and links to other occurrences, which, before this time, had hardly been sensed
Auerbach demonstrates that modernist mimesis (in Woolf) achieves depth precisely by attending to overlooked creatural detail, linking the ordinary to the determining structures of lived experience.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
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 overwhelming that the figural framework meant to contain human reality is ruptured by the very individuality that mimesis brings into presence.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
evolving slowly from acute observation of events and characters in the mid-nineteenth century, realism in France takes on the character of an aesthetic style capable of rendering sordidness and beauty with unadorned directness
Said traces Auerbach’s genealogy of modern literary mimesis from Flaubert’s disinterested observation through the stream-of-consciousness techniques of Woolf and Joyce.
, 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 comparative reading contrasts Homeric foreground mimesis with the deliberate opacity and depth of the biblical narrative, establishing the two poles of his representational history.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
the religious sign is not simply an instrument of thought. Its purpose is not limited to evoking in men’s minds the sacred power to which it refers.
Vernant’s analysis of the kolossos illuminates the tension between mimetic presence and sacred distance that underlies archaic Greek representational practices, providing a mythological context for the mimesis debate.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983aside
figura is roughly equivalent to spiritus or intellectus spiritalis, sometimes replaced by figuralitas
Auerbach’s concept of figura as spiritual-intellectual energy connecting historical events to truth operates as a typological counterpart to mimesis, mediating between literal representation and transcendent meaning.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside