Social projection brings perceptions of self-other similarity.

Projection works regardless of whether the others are dead or alive.

We do not know whether the dead would want us to project on them.

My ancestor disagrees with your ancestor. —Hoca Camide, trying to leverage rhetoric

According to Chinese mythology, we die twice. First, there’s the end to our physical existence; then, there comes the time when the last person who knew us in this world comes to join us in the other. Yet, the dead have a way of asserting themselves, or rather, our mind-brains have ways of keeping the dead in play. Some individuals are remembered and talked about for millennia. Achilles’ mother told her son that eternal fame was an option for him; if he chose it, though, he’d have to die young in war.

And then there’s Odysseus, conjured back to life by Mr. Nolan and his film crew. Odysseus himself, in the epic and in the movie, does Nolan one better. He conjures the dead from Hades and talks to them. The mythologically naïve may assume that Odysseus actually had questions, and that the dead actually had answers. The psychologist, however, assumes that it was all in Odysseus’s head to begin with. Tiriseas, the blind seer, being dead, could only be an imaginary vehicle to bring Odysseus’s own thoughts to light.

This is not as irrational as it may sound. Odysseus, or someone in his shoes, may be aware that most of the contents of his mind are not........

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