Inside mimicry: the question of truth and falsehood as applied to psychic reality

The analytics of the phenomenon of mimicry and mimetic processes, carried out in humanitarian thought in the 20th century — in the works of Roger Caillois and Walter Benjamin, provides a basis for understanding mimicry in an anti-adaptive manner, as a conflicting relationship between internal and external. Psychoanalytic study of neurotic and psychotic structures also points to the significance of mimetic processes for the inner life of a person and connects them with the fundamental processes of introjection and projection that give rise to psychic reality. The analysis of these processes in the works of Sandor Ferenczi shows what forms the mimetic tendency takes in the formation of the psychotic’s and neurotic’s reality.

In mimicry we find a dual tendency to perceive and to avoid perception. On the basis of Wilfred Bion’s work, it is revealed that evasion of perception implies activity to isolate the object, which leads to the conclusion that this evasion is impossible in fact. Based on these studies, this article attempts to reveal the dramatic paradoxicality of mimicry, associated, on the one hand, with the tendency of redundancy and immersion in the context, and on the other hand, with the tendency to penetrate and control external objects.