Rhetoric and psychoanalysis have a long history of entanglement. As Patrick Mahoney wrote, it would be “hard to exaggerate the historical and intrinsic significance of rhetoric for psychoanalysis”; Aristotle's Rhetoric could even be said to constitute “the first major psychological treatise in the West.”1 Diego Enrique Londoño, drawing on Juan Rigoli, has documented the influence of rhetoric on eighteenth and nineteenth century alienism,2 while Michael Billig, Risto Fried, and others have sought these links in Freud and later theorists.3 Although Jacques Lacan gets most of the credit, two pioneering women beat him to the punch in systematically introducing rhetorical concepts (especially metaphor): Gertrude Buck and Ella Freeman Sharpe.4 Rhetoricians, in turn, have enriched their craft through psychoanalytic thinking—first with Sigmund Freud (most notably in Kenneth Burke), then Carl Jung,5 with a great deal of later work inspired by Lacan,6 although authors like Heinz Kohut and D. W. Winnicott also make occasional appearances.7Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric is the latest effort to find resonances between rhetoric and psychoanalysis to the mutual benefit of both disciplines. The book is quite short and by necessity focuses on a few key thinkers—Burke represents rhetoric, while Freud and Lacan epitomize the psychoanalytic tradition. Although Adleman and Vanderwees find some connections that are sure to be of interest to psychoanalytically inclined rhetoricians, they unfortunately do so while almost entirely omitting decades of significant work forging these links. Todd McGowan's blurb declaring the book “a miracle” for describing connections between rhetoric and psychoanalysis that “now seem clear and self-evident, but only because [Adleman and Vanderwees] have written this pathbreaking work” is sustainable only if one discounts the work cited above, plus many dozens of articles and books published by graduate students and junior rhetorical scholars. Lundberg's Lacan in Public, which undertakes a much more comprehensive study of the connections between rhetoric and psychoanalysis, is cited only to support a minor claim about Quintilian; if one were to ask a rhetorician working with psychoanalysis today to recommend a single volume on the topic, Lacan in Public might very well be the choice, whatever the rhetorician's opinion of the book. While it is always easy to lodge criticisms based on the omission of one's idiosyncratic favorites, the absences in Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric may set limits on the execution of its ambition. Rather than a continuation of scholarship on its overall topic, this book is a commentary on Lacan, Burke, and Freud narrowly, which does not diminish its contributions to that end but does make plain a missed opportunity to accomplish a larger goal.8Adleman and Vanderwees begin with a brief account of the “missed encounters” of psychoanalysis and rhetoric. Their central premise is that the two disciplines, “when closely scrutinized, often appear, uncannily, as each other's doppelgangers” due to their inquiries into human motives and their “perennial struggles with legitimacy” (1). This “peripheral status” as “third-class” denizens of “the republic of knowledge” is a major theme in the book (27). The authors claim that rhetoric disproportionately focuses attention on “pragmatic compositional concerns” while “almost none is allocated to bringing rhetorical theory to bear on . . . persuasion, influence, identifications, and propaganda” (9). This misconception is perhaps a product of the authors’ thin engagement with contemporary journals in the field (including this one), many of which do precisely this and few of which are cited. The phrase “new rhetoric” in the book's title might suggest some engagement with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca and Chaïm Perelman, but their work is not discussed—a particularly surprising choice because Lacan's own essay “Metaphor of the Subject” (which is cited) was written in direct response to Perelman. This is in line with a greater emphasis on the influence of psychoanalysis on rhetoric, rather than the converse or cross-pollination. Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric therefore repeats the “missed encounters” it identifies rather than benefiting from this “unending conversation.”Despite the decision not to deeply commit to the literature about the intersection of its two primary fields of interest, Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric makes a number of contributions to rhetorical scholarship. The first four chapters of the book engage with Burke fairly extensively. Chapter 1 explores the resonances between Burke and Freud, while Chapter 2 focuses closely on the concepts of symbolic action and attitude. The equation of attitude with Lacan's objet petit a, the “hallucinatory motor of desire” (45), is particularly interesting as an approach to the perennial problem of the relation between rhetoric and desire. Chapter 3 deals with identification as a concept in Freud and Burke with special reference to Burke's “Rhetoric of Hitler's ‘Battle,’” perhaps a particularly timely work which can be appreciated differently through a more thorough exposition of Freud's conceptual influence on Burke. Chapter 4 applies Burke's thought to conspiracy theories, an area where others have already leveraged psychoanalysis to good effect.9The last three chapters are somewhat more theoretical and, while the thread of Burke's thought persists, they lean toward Freud and Lacan. Chapter 5, about the origins of Freud's free association, is primarily of historical interest (and could perhaps benefit from engaging work on the pre-Freudian influence of rhetoric in psychology). Chapter 6 engages listening from rhetorical and psychoanalytic perspectives. Chapter 7 is less a Lacanian theory of rhetoric than an engagement with Lacan's own rhetoric and its implications for theory. It ends with a fine aphorism, borrowed from Simone Weil, about how the wall dividing rhetoric and psychoanalysis might also be the medium of communication between them.Taken as a whole, Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric is a worthwhile exposition of its specific foci, even though many other potential symbioses are left unexplored in this short text. For scholars of rhetoric whose familiarity with psychoanalysis is limited, but for whom Kenneth Burke or the topics of each chapter are of interest, this book can serve as a valuable place to begin thinking about psychoanalysis's confluence with rhetoric. Those knowledgeable about psychoanalysis outside the rhetorical tradition will likely find it helpful as well, especially because its treatment of rhetoric is accessible to non-specialists and forgoes the opportunity to grind intradisciplinary theoretical axes. Rhetoricians more extensively versed in psychoanalysis, however, will find particular points of interest, but may be somewhat frustrated by the book's failure to intervene in any of the important conversations happening at an intersection that Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric may seem to inaugurate, but in fact is simply compelled to repeat.

ABSTRACT Stasis is a precondition for debate that can be understood as a proposition determining controversy in advance or a retroactively determined basis for judgment. This essay examines the affective conditions of possibility for stasis, arguing that the propositional model risks concealing a broader economy of desire that might help to explain why unexpected audiences cathect to certain positions. The example of support for Donald Trump from QAnon conspiracy theorists illustrates these affective connections and the importance of reexamining affect as a condition of possibility for debate.