Hans Kellner has said that the great rhetoric for our century was written in 1899, disguised as a book on dreams. Like Kellner Kenneth Burke recognizes that Freud's Interpretation of Dreams is at heart a re-writing of the tropes of antiquity. This paper maps the ways in which Burke appreciates Freud as a dialectician--as a theorist of language who articulated principles that are prior to dream life and enmeshed in all discursive thinking. While Burke criticizes Freud for making the sexual wish and oedipal narrative foundational principles, he unmistakably uses Freud's language theories: Burke takes over the central tropes of dreamwork, making them dialectical rather than psychoanalytic terms; he uses concepts that are central to Freud's description of social feeling--identfication and motive--as key terms; and he understands neuroses, symptom and dream formation as subsets of symbolic action overall.

Burke's re-writing of Freud, then, shows us not how to "psychoanalyze," but rather how language signifies and how identifies are formed within signification. I suggest that these notions are embedded in Burke's theory of the "transformation of substance," which is at the heart of the Grammar of Motives, and in the theory of "social mystery," which is at the heart of the Rhetoric of Motives. Finally, the rhetorical situation, for Burke, is not characterized by fully clear purposiveness. Burke shows that discourses are infused with desire and that we are moved by desire as well as by reason. While we actively produce meanings, we do not utterly control the meanings we produce, nor reason via those that persuade us. Nothing, Burke says in his analysis of Freud, could be more rational.