Identification

The student formulation Jiang endorses is that the dream says Dante is Virgil, which makes the siren scene a warning about identification with the guide.

Jiang accepts the reading that Dante's bond with Virgil has gone too far and treats the dream as a clarion call about dangerous overidentification with the father-guide.

The first mechanisms Jiang accepts are participatory and narrative: viewers enter the painting, imagine themselves inside it, and try to fill in the story of the depicted figures.

One student says Dante feels present not as a spirit inhabiting him but as an interpretive mirror for his own sense of exile from mainstream social and work life.

Jiang defines forgiveness as an act of imagination in which you picture yourself as the other person and recognize that you might have acted similarly under those conditions.

The continuing ability of readers to identify with Odysseus, understand Achilles, and predict Achilles' behavior is offered as evidence that the Iliad is eternal and immortal.

Catharsis creates a reciprocal identification in which the tragic character lives in the spectator and the spectator lives in the character.

A reader's ability to imagine Achilles as themselves is treated as evidence that Homer drew on archetypes existing within infinite and eternal consciousness.