A possible warning?
After reading “Freud – And the Analysis of Poetry” I can’t help but wonder if this essay is really an attempt by Burke to offer a warning about rhetoric. It seems that Burke is offering a critique against what he calls “an essentializing mode of interpretation and a mode that stresses proportion of ingredients” (261). In other words, Burke seems to disfavor any attempt to “explain the complex in terms of the simple,” which “almost vows one to select one or another motive from a cluster and interpret the others in terms of it” (262).
What I think Burke means by his critique, is that we need to be skeptical of all forms of rhetoric or analysis, even if put forth by so called experts, which seek to reduce understandings to specific repetitive motivations, like linking everything people do to sexual desires or sexual neurosis. As Burke points out: “A writer deprived of Freud’s clinical experience would be a fool to question the value of his category as a way of analyzing the motives of the class of neurotics Freud encountered” (263). In other words, not having a lot of background in Freud or in clinical physiology I am tempted to consider what Freud has to say as a valid and official interpretation of human behavior (Kind of like taking Dr. Phil’s analysis of people as gospel and trying to understand my own reality through his interpretation of others – which could be happening in our “The TV said so” culture of acceptance).
But, I think Burke is telling us that we must remain skeptical of Freud’s analysis and all forms of rhetoric, and look at other possible motivations for the actions of people in order to formulate a fuller description. It’s almost as if Burke is telling us that we need to examine the entire motivational cluster surrounding literature and rhetoric in an attempt to discover multiple interpretations. I also think Burke is warning us against any essentialist rhetoric, because it may be making a very complex situation seem simple and thus may be persuading us into some form of “evil” action because the “evil” was hidden in simplicity.
Or I may simple be analyzing Burke’s analysis of Freud to much like the “essentializing mode of interpretation.”
What Burke's Saying?
My roommate once told me that Burke would like to get rid of all manipulative rhetoric, and I think that to the extent that psychoanalysis can be seen as manipulative and/or limiting, I'd agree with you about the warning that interpretation can become limiting (we don't want to be over-educated chickens, after all), but I think more than that, Burke sees in psychoanalysis a new way of interpreting human action, that leads to more possibilities, and that is anything but manipulative.
I agree
I agree with your comment. I think the link between psychoanalysis and dreams does give us another way of interpreting human action. Maybe one way to look at this is to think or consider that when we examine a “cluster” we need to spend the amount of time Freud does on psychoanalysis on every part of the “cluster?”
I agree with your assertion
I agree with your assertion that the link between psychoanalisis and dreams enables us to interpret human acction in a different way. Freud proposed a new paradigm that, like any other paradigm, carries a certain terministic screen. Is Burke suggesting that phsychoanalysis can offer us new ways of finding places of ambiguity?
Dreams
I think that part of this may revolve around the idea of ambiguity, but I’m not sure from what angle at the point. Dreams themselves are filled with ambiguities and by using psychoanalysis to study the ambiguity of dreams would, I think, be very appealing to Burke as a way to analyze some of the resources contributing the ambiguity of dreams.