Psychoanalytic Approaches to Rhetoric

Psychoanalytic approaches to rhetoric engage two pivotal commitments for the rhetorical traditions and rhetorical methods: a commitment to interpreting rhetorical discourse by the meanings at play in it and commitment to doing so with near exclusive reference to context. Psychoanalysis engages the rhetorical tradition by arguing that meaning does not exhaustively define a rhetorical situation and by arguing that that the grounds for interpreting rhetorical action are not reducible to context. In a psychoanalytic approach to rhetoric, the manifest content of meaning is suspect because the conditions for the production of meaning are always somewhat counterfactual: subjects do not simply embrace the meaning of a particular discourse at face value, but instead, meaning negotiates a relationship to unconscious processes that operate in advance of and prefigure the coordinates of meaning. Thus, if meaning is understood to be about the subject’s conscious and intentional engagement with ideational contents, rhetorical action cannot be interpreted only on the grounds of manifest meaning, but must also be engaged on the grounds of the psychic processes that configure and make meanings possible.

Similarly, a contextual understanding of persuasion has interpretive limits because persuasion is also influenced by a set of transcontextual factors relating to the operation of the psyche, whether understood as a characteristic of a subject or a product of language—for example, the unconscious, desire, and the logic of the signs and symbols. Although present in any specific context, these transcontextual factors operate in advance and are the basic grounds of any given context. The goal that unites the varied psychoanalytic approach to rhetoric is to identify and theorize the function of these factors that suggest loci for rhetorical action in advance of meaning and not reducible to context. The specific character of these transcontextual factors varies according to the vision of psychoanalysis one takes up and could include but are not limited to the unconscious, the psyche, the logic of fantasy, the archetype, the logic signifier, desire, affect, or enjoyment. In almost any configuration of a psychoanalytic approach to rhetoric, one or more of these factors serves as a means for thinking about the production of meaning and as a basic orienting point for the logic that constitutes a rhetorical context.

Psychoanalytic approaches to rhetoric apply many of these concepts to unpacking a broad range of cultural artifacts and objects—from speeches to films to consumer culture—usually as a means of theorizing the underlying conditions of [Page 1345]collective or individual investment in a given text or cultural practice. The critical task for psychoanalysis, then, is not only to do the traditional work of criticism (i.e., to decide what a discourse means in a given context) but also to situate the articulation of a text, the meanings entailed, and its rhetorical function in a given context in light of the psyche, fantasy, archetypes, the function of the signifier, desire, affect, and so on. This entry introduces psychoanalytic approaches to rhetoric, paying specific attention to how such approaches underscore semiotic and affect-centered readings of human behavior and communication.

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