Gronbeck (2006), "Rushing, Frentz, and the Matter of Psychological Rhetorical Criticism"

Writing in the 1980s and 1990s, Rushing and Frenz brought psychoanalysis to the range of rhetorical perspectives. They celebrated the idea of working across layers of human discourse. Gronbeck (2006) argues that psychological criticism contributes three areas to rhetorical studies:

1. Study of the submerged

We think of symbolic codes as a manifest representation of psychology below the surface. These codes can become embedded in the submerged. Codes are then used in public discourse as references to hidden psychological realms like anxiety, paranoia, joy, and other frames of consciousness.

2. Study of the overarching

Submerged states are individual and ritualized by the community. Psychoanalysis can therefore identify common psychological states by examining their emergence in public discourse.

3. Study of epistemological alternatives (transmodernism)

Rushing and Frentz (1995) propose a concept called "transmodernism." Modernism privileges duality which leads to hierarchies and oppression. Postmodernism completely fragments the self. Transmodernism uses the unconscious to unify human subjectivity, fragmenting the scientific problems of modernism and stabilizing postmodernism's slippery ego.