[In "Freud—and the Analysis of Poetry"] Burke concludes his preliminary "placing" of psychoanalysis with a mysterious allusion to an event which, despite the assurance with which he states it, never took place. The critic, he suggests, cannot rely wholly upon symbolism for his understanding of literature. Another approach is necessary.

The important matter for our purposes is to suggest that the examination of a poetic work's internal organization would bring us nearer to a variant of the typically Freudian free-association method than to the purely symbolic method toward which he subsequently gravitated.

Freud, of course, never abandoned the psychoanalysis of neurotic patients by free-association, and there is no record that he ever contemplated doing so. On the contrary, he always regarded the analysis of the dream by this method as the "royal road to the unconscious." He never adopted a symbolism in which meanings were fixed and...