BklynMagus wrote:
>
>
> What doesn't make sense is treating a
> concrete act like a symbol. Life is not a text that needs to be analyzed and
> critiqued like some poem in a graduate seminar, ferreting out secret meanings.
But that is exactly what psychoanalysis does, which is why it is so popular among literary critics and so ignored by people actually engaged in trying to help people with mental illness.
Though probably (using Kenneth Burke's terminology) one difference between purposeful action and mere motion is that the former possesses symbolic force and the latter does not. Burke's definition of man [sic] is "a symbol using animal." All our activity is symbolic in so far as it is human.
Carrol