Swann’s medical philosophy
This is a follow-up to this podcast: https://philosophypodcasts.org/swann Or click <here>,
Three times Moran provides a description of Freud’s theory and then, based only on that description, concludes, QED, that Freud’s view of desire and its satisfaction is purely psychological
If you want to see each of the three occurrences, click <here>.
Description of Freud’s theory: A drive or desire is experienced as a stimulation or disturbance which prompts the individual to take action so as to return to equilibrium or homeostasis.
QED: Therefore (Moran concludes), Freud “has a purely psychological conception of desire and satisfaction. All that ‘satisfaction’ of a desire can ever accomplish is to temporarily bring the person back to their original state before the desire disturbed their equilibrium.” For Freud, “understanding of drives or desires has no use for any logical relation between desire and its object.”
Rebuttal to Moran: Freud’s theory is general: Desire is a state in which we are unsettled, disturbed, stimulated. That characterizes logical satisfaction. When young Swann is in a state of painful curiosity about Forcheville, he is in a state of disequilibrium. When, due to this stimulation, he goes and questions Odette, trying to glean the truth, he is responding to the stimulation, attempting to gain logical satisfaction in the real world.
When Swann is older and he adopts the medical philosophy, that is a different sort of response to the stimulation, but it accords fine in the model. Freud thus does not have a purely psychological conception of desire and its satisfaction. His view of desire and satisfaction is consistent with and captures the young man of action as well as the salon aesthete.
Freud used the term “vicissitudes” to refer to the various methods people can use to distort, distance, and redirect their drive energies. The medical philosophy involves both borrowing from the future (gaining relief now by realizing the pain won’t last) and lowering expectations (“budgeting” a certain amount of painful curiosity in dealings with Odette). Despite Moran’s belief that “it is Proust who has a wider and more critical perspective,” these are standard fare in Freud.
(Borrowing from the future: “Our usual word of comfort, which we dispense so liberally to our patients – ‘You’ll soon be all right again’” (RSE 7, 269).
Benefits of resignation: “They will be able to say without regret, ‘We leave Heaven to the angels and the sparrows’” (RSE 21, 47).
Freud’s catalogue of defense mechanisms also includes repression, sublimation, denial, acting out, introjection, and disavowal, among many others.
Moran gets Freud wrong
If anything, Freud’s clinical work was opposite Moran’s characterization. Freud treated neurotics, those who are “inhibited in their actions: with them the thought is a complete substitute for the deed” (SE 13, 161). His goal was to get them to “withdraw their projections,” and hence to “win back some degree of capacity for work and enjoyment” (SE12, 119). In short, he moved people out of their heads and into the real world of logical satisfaction.
There are other problems with Moran’s criticisms of Freud. I’ll discuss a few below, and others can be found <here>.
Moran errs when he claims Freud’s model encompasses appetites but not aspirations. A lifelong sense of unrealized potential (e.g., in becoming a great writer) counts as disequilibrium just as much as short-term thirst.
Freud did not say that his philosophy was the same as Schopenhauer’s. He said his audience might think that—and then he noted the differences.
You may perhaps shrug your shoulders and say: ‘That isn’t natural science, it’s Schopenhauer’s philosophy!’ But, ladies and gentlemen, …we are not asserting that death is the only aim of life; we are not overlooking the fact that there is life as well as death. We recognize two basic drives and give each of them its own aim. How the two of them are mingled in the process of living, how the death drive is made to serve the purposes of Eros, especially by being turned outwards as aggressiveness – these are tasks which are left to future investigation.
There are, of course, many Freudian debts to Schopenhauer. I collected Freud’s views on these debts <here>.
At one point, Moran seems to recognize that logical satisfaction is captured in Freud’s general model. He recognizes that one “path” toward equilibrium is logical satisfaction. But then Moran objects, saying that:
“The Narrator’s relation to these aspirations is not as the instrumental means to assuage or eliminate some internal condition. His desire can only be satisfied by the realization of those very objects. They are aimed at for their own sake as different kinds of good thing, and not as “different paths” to the more general aim of adjusting his internal state.”
Here Moran is confusing (a) Freud’s objective view. as social scientist, of a person’s behavior and (b) the phenomenological and intentional experience of that person. The model posits a person stimulated to act to return to equilibrium, but that does not mean that the person themself has adopted a detached, analytic perspective on their own behavior.
Moran says that Freud’s theory is positive (not normative), and Freud does attempt to present it that way. But we can see an implicit normative stance. For Freud, a good life consisted in real-world satisfaction of drives.
The energetic and successful man is one who succeeds by his efforts in turning his wishful phantasies into reality. (11, 50).
[A child is] meant to grow up into a strong and capable person with vigorous sexual needs and to accomplish during life all the things that human beings are urged to do by their drives
Principle of constancy
Moran organizes his argument around a “principle of constancy” (PoC) which he understands as a fundamental principle in Freud’s metapsychology. Again, this gets Freud wrong. Moran gets this from Laplanche and Pontalis, but they only say that it is fundamental for Freud’s economic theory. Freud’s economic theory is about measuring conflicting drives. In that context, the PoC refers only to a principle of conservation of energy. Overall, in Freud’s work, young people are pushed here and there by powerful drives, and these powerful drives are twisted and contorted in dramatic ways. The Freudian view of life is not a view of constancy. At best, people aim for homeostasis, which is to say that they do respond to their drive energies.
Laplanche and Pontalis refer to three distinct meanings of constancy in Freud’s work. We have discussed two to this point (constancy as homeostasis, and constancy as a principle of conservation of energy). The third is the most controversial. It is the idea of a death drive, a drive towards inertness. To the extent Freud posited such a drive, it was not a standalone drive but worked in opposition to a life drive, as noted in the quotation above.
Cite
Moran’s discussion of Freud is pp. 147 to 152 of:
Moran, Richard. 2023. “Swann’s medical philosophy.” In: Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives. Edited by: Katherine Elkins. Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190921576.003.00ation