That's right. His was a philosophical/sociological theory that desire itself is imitative. We don't naturally want things, we learn to want them by watching others want them.

Mirror neurons is something I was not familiar with until recently.

"Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team at the University of Parma in Italy discovered mirror neurons in the 1990s.

They made the discovery somewhat accidentally while studying macaque monkeys. They had electrodes monitoring individual neurons in the monkeys' premotor cortex to study hand and mouth movements. The breakthrough came when they noticed that some neurons fired not only when a monkey performed an action (like grasping a peanut) but also when the monkey simply observed a human researcher performing the same action.”