In class on Tuesday we discussed the notion of purposive forgetting which Burke describes as the only way of remembering (271). After I left class I was a little unsure as to what I initially thought he meant by this notion of forgetting. In particular, in class there was an argument put forth that one can't entirely forget something, such as experience/memories about one's mother (I apologize if I misstated this). Anyway, to help clarify this for myself, Burke isn't actually talking about a total collapse in memory, that one can't remember anything. Rather, is what he referring to only a temporal forgetting in the moment, so we can can make meaning out of a symbol at that time?

I apologize for the late posting, everyone--but at least this way you'll all have something to respond to tomorrow in class!

What struck me most about Burke's discussion of Freud was not his analysis of Freud (which, tangentially, I enjoyed thoroughly), but the way he spoke of psychoanalysis as necessarily being applied to the author (poet), as demonstrated by his analysis of Coleridge. This seems so different from the way texts and psychoanalysis are used today, at least based on my limited experience within lit and film courses for two reasons.

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":

On p. 267 in "Freud and the Analysis of Poetry," Burke discusses the idea of "crossing" that occurs between imagery and ideas. He writes, "What a [writer] can do is note the context of imagery and ideas in which an image takes place. He can also note, by such analysis, the kinds of evaluations surrounding the image of a crossing." In reading this, I saw Burke begin to note the importance of considering affect in discourse. Generally, in rhetoric, affect is considered from the aspect of the present affective components of a rhetorical situation, i.e. how is the speaker/auditor influenced by the environment, the emotions, the tenor of the message, etc. (there is a lot more I could list here, but for the present I'll limit it to these three). What I see Burke adding to rhetoric with the idea of "crossing" is the need to consider affect from a historical perspective and not just from a present perspective.

Burke on Freud

Burke compares Stekel’s dictionary of symbols use in dream analysis and Freud’s free-association technique. And although he admits the “lure” of the efficient model for dream analysis that Stekel’s work provides, he criticizes it for being an essentializing “short cut” that restricts an analyst’s range of speculation and understanding. He endorses with greater enthusiasm Freud’s free-association style which he characterizes as being more deductive than inductive. I am curious about Burke’s discussion of these two modes of dream analysis with regard to his definition of the bureaucratization of the imaginative in Attitudes toward History.

The term "purposive forgetting" is an intriguing term that reminds me a bit of what I've learned about repression, where parts of experience are shoved out of the way (crammed into the closet or pushed far under the bed, so to speak) so that we can handle life. In this case, though, the terms we know have been learned through experiences we have since, for the most part, forgotten. Why do we know what a "table" is? Because somewhere back there something happened that we made the connection between the thing and the sign/symbol. We haven't necessarily retained a memory of that moment of epiphany, however.

Although Burke departs from Freud or he demonstrates Freud’s flaws, depending on the context of his discourse, he acknowledges Freud’s merits in the fertile insights of his analyses. Several ideas that Burke pinpoints in his essay may help us to better understand rhetoric. While recognizing that the poetic and the neurotic acts have the symbolic as a commonality Burke states that they deviate, and that it is on this departure that criticism should focus (263). Poetry and neurosis have different basic categories, communication and the libido, respectively. Nonetheless, studies of literary texts, Burke proposes, could utilize Freud’s speculations about the libidinal. Moreover, Burke considers Freud’s psychoanalysis as a source of observations that can provide us with novel understanding of the poem as a dream, with a “glimpse into the ways in which we may, while overtly doing one thing, be covertly doing another” (268).

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).