Burke's "Mind, Body, and the Unconscious"

"If man is the symbol-using animal, some motives must derive from his animality, some from his symbolicity, and some from mixtures of the two."

"The fact that a machine can be made to function like a participant in a human dialogue does not require us to treat the two kinds of behavior as identical. And in one notable respect a conditioned animal would be a better model than a computer for the reductive interpretation of man, since it suffers the pains and pleasures of hunger and satiety, along with other manifest forms of distress and gratification, though it's weak in the ways of smiling and laughing" (64). I find this quote particularly useful since autistic savants are often describes as "computers" and the behaviors of some autistics are described as "mechanistic." Problems with those kinds of metaphors.

"In Freud's sense an action is 'symbolic' when, as interpreted in terms of his particular 'terministic screen,' it reveals the presence of a neurotic motive involving ' repressions' due to the particular kind of 'Unconscious' which he postulates as a locus of motives" (64).