Across the depth-psychology and humanistic corpus indexed in Seba, ‘realism’ operates on at least three distinct registers that only occasionally converge. In Auerbach’s monumental philological project, realism names a literary-historical achievement: the emancipation from classical style hierarchies that allowed everyday social life — in all its triviality, ugliness, and historical contingency — to be treated seriously, even tragically, in prose fiction. For Auerbach, modern realism is inseparable from the French nineteenth century (Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert) and is fundamentally constituted by the mixing of styles and the embedding of characters within fluid historical movement. Barrett’s neuroscientific contribution introduces ‘affective realism’ as a cognitive-phenomenological category: the brain’s tendency to treat internally generated affective states as objective facts about the world, producing perceptions rather than neutral observations. This concept stands in productive tension with Auerbach’s aesthetic realism, since Barrett’s account undermines the very notional transparency of representation that literary realism presupposed. Heidegger’s treatment of the realism thesis appears obliquely, as a position to be interrogated rather than endorsed — the claim that an external world is ‘really present-at-hand’ — and is folded into his broader ontological argument about Being-in-the-world. Romanyshyn’s Jungian register adds yet another layer: the autonomous unconscious as a ‘sui generis reality,’ a figural realism of soul that challenges both positivist and purely constructivist accounts. These positions collectively map a field in which realism is always contested — aesthetic, affective, ontological, and depth-psychological variants pulling against each other.
modern realism in the form it reached in France in the early nineteenth century is, as an aesthetic phenomenon, characterized by complete emancipation from that doctrine
Auerbach identifies modern realism’s defining feature as the total break from classical style hierarchies, enabling serious, even tragic representation of everyday contemporary social reality.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953thesis
the serious treatment of everyday reality, the rise of more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of subject matter for problematic-existential representation … these, we believe, are the foundations of modern realism
Auerbach formulates the dual structural foundations of modern realism: the elevation of low social strata to tragic subject matter, and the embedding of persons within dynamic historical movement.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953thesis
This phenomenon is called affective realism, because we experience supposed facts about the world that are created in part by our feelings.
Barrett defines affective realism as the neurological process whereby internally generated affect is misattributed as objective properties of external reality, producing perception rather than fact.
, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017thesis
Affective realism keeps you believing something even when the evidence puts it highly in doubt. It’s not because of ignorance or malevolence — it is simply a matter of how the brain is wired and operates.
Barrett argues that affective realism is a structural feature of brain architecture, not a moral failing, making ideological rigidity and perceptual inflexibility biologically grounded.
, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017thesis
I call the realism that is alien to antiquity serious, problematic, or tragic; I set it in express opposition to the ‘moralistic.’
Auerbach sharpens his operative definition of realism by distinguishing it categorically from both comic and moralistic modes, anchoring it in existential seriousness and tragic problematization.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953thesis
in the form determined by its actuality, its triviality, its inner historical laws, he takes it seriously and even tragically. This, since the rise of classical taste, had occurred nowhere
Auerbach attributes to Balzac the decisive step of treating historically embedded, trivial everyday life as proper matter for tragic representation, marking a rupture with classicist decorum.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
The Church Fathers … had successfully defended figural realism, that is, the maintenance of the basic historical reality of figures, against all attempts at spiritually allegorical interpretation.
Auerbach traces a pre-modern form of realism — figural realism — in patristic thought, where historical events retain their literal weight as figures pointing forward without being dissolved into allegory.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
when they come to develop a sense of historical dynamics, of the incomparability of historical phenomena and of their constant inner mobility … the realistic method in historism and in the fields of contemporary life go hand in hand
Auerbach links the epistemological preconditions of realism — historical sensibility, recognition of social totality, rejection of abstract norms — to the intellectual conditions that made the nineteenth-century novel possible.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
A change in our manner of viewing history will of necessity soon be transferred to our manner of viewing current conditions.
Auerbach argues that historical consciousness and realistic representation of contemporary life are mutually constitutive, each transformation in one domain producing corresponding shifts in the other.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
This existential-ontological assertion seems to accord with the thesis of realism that the external world is Really present-at-hand.
Heidegger acknowledges a surface convergence between his existential ontology and the realist thesis of an external world, but frames realism as a position that has not mastered its own ontological basis.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
through affective realism, they would come away with only perceptions, not facts, constructed in line with their own beliefs, entirely without their awareness
Barrett demonstrates how affective realism operates legally and socially, producing divergent ‘factual’ perceptions from identical stimuli depending on affective and ideological priors.
, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017supporting
the inclusion of the fourth estate in serious realism was decisively advanced by those who, in their quest for new aesthetic impressions, discovered the attraction of the ugly and pathological
Auerbach offers the paradox that aesthetic rather than social motivations — the Goncourts’ attraction to the pathological — were the decisive drivers of realism’s expansion to the working class.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
Homer’s realism is, of course, not to be equated with classical-antique realism in general; for the separation of styles, which did not develop until later, permitted no such leisurely and externalized description of everyday happenings
Auerbach differentiates Homeric realism — immediate, externalized, foreground-dominated — from classical-antique realism shaped by the separation of styles, establishing a typology spanning antiquity.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
it is closer to our modern conception of a realistic presentation than anything else that has come down to us from antiquity; and this not so much because of the common vulgarity of its subject matter but above all because of its precise and completely unschematized fixation of the social milieu
Auerbach identifies Petronius’s Satyricon as the ancient text most anticipatory of modern realism, attributing this not to low subject matter but to its unschematized, individualized fixing of social milieu.
, 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 characterizes French realism as an aesthetic style defined by its capacity for direct, unadorned rendering of social reality across the full register from beauty to sordidness.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
the unconscious is a sui generis reality and not just the outcome of the conflict between instinct and culture
Romanyshyn argues, via Jung, for a depth-psychological realism in which the autonomous unconscious constitutes its own ontological domain — neither reducible to biology nor to cultural construction.
, The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007supporting
the reality which he encountered was so constituted that, without permanent reference to the immense changes of the immediate past … one could not represent it
Auerbach argues that Stendhal’s realism was not a chosen method but a formal necessity imposed by the historically turbulent reality he encountered, making political history inseparable from narrative representation.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
Emma Bovary, too, the principal personage of the novel, is completely submerged in that false reality … the way in which language here lays bare the silliness, immaturity, and disorder of her life
Auerbach uses Emma Bovary to demonstrate the distinctive mode of Flaubert’s realism: neither tragic nor comic, but a relentless, coldly analytical exposure of a life’s wretchedness that defies both classical categories.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
the type of realism we have called creatural would not be conceivable … But by now it has freed itself from serving the concept of a Christian universal order; indeed, it no longer serves any concept of order whatever.
Auerbach traces the secular emancipation of creatural realism from its Christian theological substrate, marking the shift from realism as figural vehicle of salvation to realism as an autonomous end in itself.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
a serious representation of contemporary everyday social reality against the background of a constant historical movement … the historical background of the events they represent appears completely immobile
Auerbach diagnoses German literary realism’s failure to achieve the French model, attributing it to an absence of the dynamic historical movement that is constitutive of genuine modern realism.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
the rule of style promulgated by classical aesthetics which excluded any material realism from serious tragic works was already giving way in the eighteenth century
Auerbach charts the pre-history of modern realism in eighteenth-century relaxations of classicist style doctrine, identifying Diderot and Rousseau as transitional figures whose approaches still fell short of tragic realism.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
In this sense Spanish realism is … the constant endeavor to poeticize and sublimate reality is still more clearly noticeable than in Shakespeare
Auerbach notes the distinctive character of Spanish Golden Age realism — its sublimating impulse and democratized honor code — as a parallel but divergent tradition from French and English realism.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside
About this time … the Scandinavian countries and above all Russia enter the limelight of European public attention with realistic works of literature.
Auerbach extends his map of European realism to include Ibsen and Russian literature, noting their influence on Central European naturalism while distinguishing them from the French paradigmatic model.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside
People can adduce such counterexamples only if they have lost sight of the concept of realism as I meant it … I call the realism that is alien to antiquity serious, problematic, or tragic
In a methodological defense, Auerbach clarifies his conception against classical philological objections, reaffirming that his term ‘realism’ denotes a specific mode of serious problematization, not a general category of verisimilitude.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside