The term 'mouth' occupies a surprisingly rich and multi-layered position across the depth-psychology corpus, appearing not as a marginal anatomical detail but as a structurally significant site where the somatic, the psychic, and the cosmological converge. Plato's Timaeus provides the philosophical ground: the mouth is purposively designed as a dual threshold, the passage through which necessity enters (food) and the best departs (discourse), establishing the mouth as a boundary between body and logos. This teleological reading persists in Cicero's De Natura Deorum, where the tongue, teeth, and palate are praised as instruments of speech — the mouth as instrument of reason's outward expression. Ancient Greek epic traditions, as traced by Snell and Caswell, locate the soul's departure through the mouth as the primary aperture of psychic exit, making it a liminal organ at the boundary of life and death. In developmental and embodied-cognitive perspectives, Gallagher and Winnicott converge on the mouth as the first relational organ — the nexus of hand-mouth coordination, orally targeted reaching, and the first possessions. The I Ching tradition, in multiple translations, treats the mouth (K'ou) as the literal site of words going out and food coming in, encoding a cosmological bidirectionality. Rabelais, as read by Auerbach, mythologizes the mouth as a world entire. Together these positions frame the mouth as threshold, instrument, aperture of soul, and first relational site.
In the library
14 passages
The mouth was equipped by our makers for its office with teeth, tongue, and lips arranged as now, for the sake at once of what is necessary and what is best. They devised it as the passage whereby necessary things might enter and the best things pass out
Plato establishes the mouth as a teleologically designed dual threshold — the necessary (food) enters, the best (discourse ministering to intelligence) departs — making it the architectonic site where bodily need and rational speech divide.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997thesis
ordinarily the psyche leaves the body through the mouth (Il. 9.409) or through a wound (Il. 14.518; 16.505), i.e. through an aperture of the body
Snell documents that in Homeric tradition the soul characteristically exits through the mouth as the primary bodily aperture, establishing the mouth as the canonical threshold between life and death in early Greek psychology.
Snell, Bruno, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953thesis
There is plenty of reference in psychoanalytic literature to the progress from 'hand to mouth' to 'hand to genital', but perhaps less to further progress to the handling of truly 'not-me' objects
Winnicott situates the mouth at the origin of the developmental trajectory from primary orality to object-relations, noting that the psychoanalytic literature's 'hand to mouth' schema marks the earliest phase of relational and possessive life.
When the infant is hungry, the mouth more frequently opens in anticipation of arrival of the hand than when the infant has been fed. This suggests that hand-mouth coordination in the fetus and the neonate may be an early form of orally targeted reaching linked to the appetitive system.
Gallagher's developmental neuroscience demonstrates that the mouth is not a passive receiver but an anticipatory agent in hand-mouth coordination, constituting the earliest form of goal-directed bodily action linked to appetite.
Gallagher, Shaun, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005thesis
The missing hand comes to be represented as the 'other end' of that circuit. Implicit in the representation of the motor possibilities of the mouth, there must be a representation of the missing limb as well — enough, at least, so it 'closes the circuit' (by opening the mouth in anticipation)
The mouth figures here as one pole of an innate motor schema for hand-mouth coordination, such that phantom limb phenomena in aplasics can be understood as the mouth's representational 'expectation' of its absent partner.
Gallagher, Shaun, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
Mouth, K'OU: literal mouth, words going out and food coming in; entrance, hole.
The I Ching's technical gloss on K'ou encodes the mouth's bidirectional cosmological function — as site of ingestion and of verbal outflow — within a system of change and perseverance.
Rudolf Ritsema, Stephen Karcher, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994supporting
I walked there as they do in Sophie, at Constantinople, and saw there great rocks, like the mountains in Denmark — I believe that those were his teeth. I saw also fair meadows, large forests, great and strong cities
Rabelais's image of a world discovered inside a giant's mouth mythologizes the oral cavity as a cosmos unto itself, representing one of literature's most radical inflations of mouth-symbolism into cosmogonic proportions.
Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
in ore sita lingua est finita dentibus; ea vocem inmoderate profusam fingit et terminat atque sonos vocis distinctos et pressos efficit cum et dentes et alias partes pellit oris
Cicero, in the Stoic tradition, presents the mouth's anatomical components — tongue, teeth, palate — as a precision instrument for the production of articulate speech, celebrating it as nature's masterwork of rational expression.
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), -45supporting
we might now expect that this freshly heated air would travel out through mouth and nostrils and keep up a continual process of exhalation
In Plato's pneumatic physiology, mouth and nostrils function together as the primary channels of breath-exchange, positioning the mouth within the cosmological circuit of fire and air that animates the body.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
Shi He is to close the mouth to bite. This gua indicates a situation where, after biting, the obstruction is eradicated.
The hexagram Shi He reads the closed mouth in the act of biting as an image of decisively eradicating obstruction, giving the mouth an active, resolving function within the I Ching's symbolic grammar.
Alfred Huang, The Complete I Ching: The Definitive Translation, 1998supporting
such as have mind in them are in general less fleshy, except where the creator has made some part solely of flesh in order to give sensation, — as, for example, the tongue
Plato's account of the tongue as an exceptional fleshy organ granted for sensation situates the mouth's inner instrument at the intersection of reason, sensation, and divine craftsmanship.
Rejoice(-in), HSI: feel and give joy; delight, exult; cheerful, merry. The ideogram: joy (music) and mouth, expressing joy.
The I Ching ideographic analysis of 'rejoice' compounds music and mouth, suggesting that in the Chinese symbolic tradition the mouth is intrinsic to the expression of joy and not merely to speech or feeding.
Rudolf Ritsema, Stephen Karcher, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994aside
the columns of air defined by the mouth and nose and the gullet and trachea... When we breathe out, the columns of air flow back again towards, and out through, the mouth and nose.
Plato's technical pneumatology describes mouth and nose as paired channels defining the airflow columns that sustain life, integrating the mouth into a broader physiological cosmology of breath and fire.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside
Jawbones/brace, FU: support, consolidate, reinforce, strengthen, stiffen, prop up, fix; rigid, steady, firm; help, rescue; support the mouth that speaks.
The I Ching's commentary on conjoining jawbones, cheeks, and tongue treats the mouth's anatomical frame as a system of mutual support for the act of speech, encoding an ethic of articulation.
Rudolf Ritsema, Stephen Karcher, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994aside