(1) His great book Mimesis, published in Berne in 1946 but written while Auerbach was a wartime exile teaching Romance languages in Istanbul, was meant to be a testament to the diversity and concreteness of the reality represented in western literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf; but reading the 1951 essay one senses that, for Auerbach, the great book he wrote was an elegy for a period when people could interpret texts philologically, concretely, sensitively, and intuitively, using erudition and an excellent command of several languages to support the kind of understanding that Goethe advocated for his understanding of Islamic literature.
(2) Discovery of the fact that a subject identifies in an obvious way with another is at first only the awareness of a present process: involuntary mimesis, obedience to early 'identifying designations' or simple imitation deliberately carried out.
(3) In an attempt to underline the need to refer to an imaginary setting, in which the analytical relationship is acted out, the Authors have considered the possible relations between the concept of projective identification, as defined by Klein and further developed by Bion, and the idea of "Mimesis", which is inevitably involved in every story, and which confronts the imaginary at the very moment in which it is produced.
(4) She has also always played on mimesis and obvious sight gags: the willy as marrow, cucumber, milk bottle or beer can; breasts as fried eggs, melons or light bulbs; the vagina as a kebab, a bucket or a pair of false teeth.