Blakesly encapsulates the ideas of the "new pragmatists" (e.g. James, Gunn, Rorty, etc.) as accepting some idea of practicality while rejecting positivism and embracing the the "view that the speaking subject, the philosopher, always already encrypted by history and culture," insight that philosophies may "work" in spite of inherent structural or conceptual contradictions ... despite the acknowledged absence of transcendental signifieds and metaphysical present" (72). Burke describes Freud's "method" as primarily an "essentializing strategy":

"This essentializing strategy is linked with a normal ideal science: to "explain the complex in terms of the simple. This ideal almost allows one to select one or another motive from a cluster and interpret the others in terms of it. The naieve proponent of economic determinism, for instance, would select the quarrel at the office as the essential motive, and would treat the quarrel with familiars and the sexual impotence as mere results of this. Now, I don't see how you can possibly explain the complex in terms of the simple without having your very success used as a charge against you. When you get through, all that your opponent need say is: 'But you have explained the complex in terms of the simple-and the simple is precisely what the complex is not'" (262).

It seems obvious to me what is "dialectical" about Freud's way of theorizing the psychological. What Burke seems to be describing here is an inversion of ground and fore, which in terms of the "old pragmatism" perhaps allows valuable insights because it encourages perspective by incongruity. However, as Attitudes Toward History suggests, Burke seems dissatisfied with this method because it assumes a an autonomous, completely saavy critic who , by virtue of his superior knowledge evades the comic frame.

I find Burke's perspective on Freud more comfortable than those expressed by some postmodern or critical literary theorists. Because Freud's theories are sexist by today's standards, and because he must make assumptions in order for his dialectic to "work," they don't seem to want to give Freud his due as a theorist In hindsight, however, within his historical frame Freud was "doing dialectics" that were pragmatic in the "old" utilitarian sense. Don't get me wrong, I'm no Freudian, but I can appreciate (I think in the same way that Burke does) the work involved in such dialectics. It was work that hadn't really been done before and doing it so publically opened up lines of inquiry perhaps contributed to the very movements that now despise him.