Psychology had been a concern for rhetoric since the time of Aristotle. Indeed, Aristotle has more care for psychology than most of his rhetorical descendants do. Most rhetorical system focus on reasoning, discourse structures, and style but have little to say about appealing to a variety of audiences, beyond the rather obvious advice to adjust style and learning to their capacities. Ironically, perhaps, the new approach to psychology in the eighteenth century does not focus attention on audiences at all. Instead, it treats all minds as essentially the same. This approach conforms to Locke’s influential idea of universal psychology, it is democratic and it is expedient for an expanded theory of communication. The scene of psychological rhetoric, in its textbooks, is
a mind, not a public.
So closely connected were rhetoric and psychology by the nineteenth century that the influential psychologist Alexander Bain taught rhetoric and wrote a textbook on written composition. Bain argues that figures of speech reflect the mental operations of comparison, contrast, and association and that the modes of discourse- description, narration, exposition, argument, and poetry- correspond to mental faculties. For Bain, invention and arrangement are more or less determined by the nature of the modes of discourse. That is, description presents an object whose parts must be presented in some convenient order, narrative is the presentation of a chronological sequence of actions, and so on. For argument, invention is compound of knowledge of the subject and syllogistic reasoning. As for style, clearness is still the standard, except, of course, for imaginative literature.
Psychology changed radically at the close of the 19th century, largely through the work of Sigmund Freud. The patient’s speech is at the heart of psychoanalysis, but Freud and his followers were interested in what was hidden is speech, in its source in nonverbal experiences and unconscious drives- not in its persuasive effects. Psychoanalysis pointed to mental realms apparently beyond the reach of verbal persuasion, and so rhetoric continued to rely for the structure of its appeals upon the older faculty psychology of Bain.
But if science, self, and society all escaped the domain of the rhetorical- at least for a time-they have been returning in recent times. In the late 19th century, philosopher and one-time rhetoric teacher Friedrich Nietzsche challenged the self-satisfied assumptions on which scientific knowledge appeared to its defenders to rest. What we are pleased to call Truth, says Nietzsche, is a social arrangement, not a glimpse of ultimate reality. Rhetoric and Psychology written by Cristina Nuta for FamousWhy.com
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by Cristina Nuta -