In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

18 1 Identification Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division. Identification is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives Identification, in fact, is ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone’s removal. It behaves like a derivative of the first, oral phase of the organization of the libido, in which the object that we long for and prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way annihilated as such. The cannibal, as we know, has remained at this standpoint; he has a devouring affection for his enemies and only devours people of whom he is fond. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego According to Jack Selzer’s delightful early history, Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village, Burke’s friends at the Dial probablyintroducedhimtoSigmundFreud’sworksometimeintheearly1920s. The impact was profound and sustained: Burke loved Freud. In the 1939 essay “Freud—and the Analysis of Poetry,” for instance, Burke writes: “the reading of Freud I find suggestive almost to the point of bewilderment. Accordingly, what I would most like to do would be simply to take representative excerpts from his work, copy them out, and write glosses upon them” (Philosophy 258). I’m not the first to observe that Burke spent much of his career, in fact, tweaking , applying, and extending Freud’s ideas. Ellen Quandahl, David Blakesley, and others have demonstrated that Burke, in Freud’s footsteps, set out to expose human motivations by analyzing language, and that he lifted several of his own key terms, such as “identification” and “motive,” from The Interpretation of Dreams. As Roderick Hart and Suzanne Daughton bluntly put it, Burke “was Freudian to his core” (262). 18 i d e n t i f i c at i o n Davis Text 1••-000.indd 18 8/30/10 11:53:42 AM 19 And yet, anyone who has studied Freud’s work on identification (or anyone who has seen the film All About Eve, for that matter) will already have detected the telltale signs of a simmering rivalry. Although Burke never denounced Freud and loved him to the end, his anxiety of influence did take a parricidal turn that expressed itself—in part and interestingly enough—in Burke’s own theory of identification, which he himself described as “post-Freudian” (“Methodological Repression” 407–8).1 Burke based his theory of identification on Freud’s, and the overlap is readily discernable.2 According to the more or less “official” interpretation, Freud maintains a clean distinction between desire and the purely secondary motivation of identification: boy wants momma, daddy has momma, so boy wants to be daddy, identifies with him, takes him as the ideal model (GP 47). Burke agreed with Freud that humans are motivated by desire at least as much as by reason, but he ditched the Oedipal narrative, arguing that the most fundamentalhumandesireissocialratherthansexual ,andthatidentificationisaresponse to that desire. By all appearances then, the disagreement is in the details, since both Freud and Burke describe identification as a social act that partially unifies discrete individuals, a mode of “symbolic action” (as Burke would say) that resides squarely within the representational arena (or the dramatistic frame). What gets deep-sixed in Burke’s articulated revision, however, are Freud’s less “official” reflections on an immediate, affective identification with the other (the “m/other”), who is not (yet) a discrete object or image or form. This “primary identification,” as Freud sometimes calls it, precedes the very distinction between ego and model, and inasmuch as it is precisely not compensatory to division , it remains stubbornly on the motion side of Burke’s action/motion loci. Burke had studied at least two of the works in which Freud explicitly addressed the problem of a nonrepresentational identification (Group Psychology and The Ego and the Id), so it may be telling that he never directly challenges it—or even mentions it. In any case, here we’ll be digging up something of what Burke buried, since he covers over a more radically generalized rhetoricity, an affectability or persuadability that precedes and exceeds symbolic intervention. Dramatizing Identification In A Rhetoric of Motives, published in 1950, Burke follows Aristotle’s lead in suggesting that rhetoric’s “basic function” is persuasive, but he also argues that persuasion’s very condition of possibility...

Share