Here are my criticisms of Moran’s discussion of Freud in Moran’s article “Swann’s medical philosophy.” These are the emails on account of which Moran said he was no longer willing to talk to me.
Initial comments on the “principle of constancy”
1) You write, "One of the fundamental principles of Freud’s metapsychology, early and late, goes by various names over the course of his writing."
My comment: The principle of constancy is certainly fundamental in the sense of philosophically basic or primitive. But "fundamental" might connote that it's important, that a lot of Freud rides on it, and there I don't think it is is fundamental. Freud himself lays out the most important aspects of his metapsychology: (i) topological (think of the mind as an apparatus) (ii) dynamic (modeling behavior as the result of opposing forces) and (iii) economic (trying also to tease out magnitudes of the varying forces).
2) Project for a Scientific Psychology. [In this email, it was a placeholder. But in a subsequent email, I provided this information:
The Project that we have was a document sketched on a train after a visit with Fleiss, and then back filled. It was sent to Fleiss in 1896 and then, evidently, Freud forgot about it. There is no mention of it in Freud's papers after 1896.
After Fleiss's death, Fleiss's wife--who was hostile towards Freud and vice versa--sold it to a book dealer on the condition that it not be sold to Freud (knowing he would destroy it). The dealer sold it to Mari Bonaparte. When she told Freud she had acquired the Fleiss papers,
When Bonaparte mentioned the documents to Freud, he was:
"indignant about the story of the sale and characteristically gave his advice in the form of a Jewish anecdote. It was the one about how to cook a peacock. “You first bury it in the earth for a week and then dig it up again.” “And then?” “Then you throw it away!” He offered to recompense Mme. Bonaparte [and] ... insisted that [the documents] should be destroyed." (Jones biography. Volume 1, Chapter 7. ]
3) As for "Instincts and their Vicissitudes,"
a) It's now "Drives and their vicissitudes". (as of the Revised Standard Edition, 2024, ed Solms, M.) I'll just call it "Vicissitudes"
b) You write, "In later works such as [Vicissitudes], he refers to the ‘principle of constancy’ or the ‘pleasure principle’, ..."
My comment: I think this sentence may suggest to the reader that they will might find the term "principle of constancy" in Vicissitudes. or that it is a term Freud refers to a lot. There are precisely two occurrences of "principle of constancy" in the SE:
[Here I provide quotes from Freud in “Beyond the pleasure principle” and “ego and the id.” I also note where Freud uses the term “Nirvana Principle]
c) You write "It is in [Vicissitudes] that Freud [expresses] how the organism ... begin[s] to form a conception of the distinction between the ‘inner world’ and the ‘outer world’.
My comment: this suggests to the reader that in Vicissitudes, they will find the term "inner world" and "outer world." They won't. In the whole of the SE:
(i) The term "outer world" occurs exactly once, in "Civilization and its discontents:" [I provide the quote]
(ii) the term "inner world" never occurs.
Round 2 of comments on SMP discussion of Vicissitudes
My custom and practice is just to tell potential interviewees my realest and most critical comments. Williamson, in A very short introduction to philosophical method) says that that is what a discussant is supposed to do. On a few occasions, after giving potential interviewees my real comments, they suddenly cancel. One said their mother was sick. Another said they had to take a flight that day. Another insinuated that it was necessary to cancel me. Here goes ...
1 Quick question: is footnote 20 placed correctly? That is, is Bersani good on an influx of stimuli being a problem for the organism?
2. Second order comment from me (a comment about my comments)
Williamson (again in Very short introduction to philosophical method) says that philosophers have similarities to lawyers. They are trying to argue. They are advocating for a position. Sometimes they even argue a position they don't actually believe in--but they believe should have a fair hearing. It seems to be part of the culture of philosophy. So that when you write here about Freud, I have the sense that you are not being fair to Freud. (There's another question why that gets my back up. It is curious that I can feel myself getting angry about the reputation of a person who has been dead for over 100 years. Somehow I feel myself aligned with Freud. He is within the circle of "me and mine," and I am angered if I feel he is being disrespected.)
So many of my comments below may seem beside the point to you. That is, your response may be simply to say, "yes, well, I am within the bounds of acceptable paraphrase conventions. And I am trying to make a claim here. I am not trying to be 'impartial'."
That said, here are my comments:
3. You write, "He begins with the ‘biological’ postulate ... "
Comment 1: I would not agree that he begins with this. What he begins with--what occurs prior to this postulate is 2 and a half pages of text explaining how he understands what he is about to say feel jarring, but it is all provisional and all done with an eye to making simplifying assumptions which will help what he is about to do. Here is my paraphrase of the first of those pages:
"Even at the stage of description, we are going to have to bring in some abstract ideas to the material. These abstract ideas are initially pulled in from somewhere or the other, and they are imposed on the material. Only after repetition and working on them by a community will we come to have a less jarring understanding about their meaning. Here I am talking about things I sense, but I acknowledge what I write here is not something I clearly recognize and can demonstrate. Let's talk about this concept of a "drive." It is admittedly obscure but seems indispensable. Let's try to give it content by approaching it from different angles."
Then just prior to the quotation you will provide, he says (my paraphrase): "In addition to imposing concepts (like the concept of a drive), we also have to make use of some postulates. We have already been using one, let's try to state it expressly."
Then, in his words, "This postulate is of a biological nature and makes use of the concept of 'purpose' (or perhaps of expediency) and runs as follows:"
You completely miss all of this when you write, "He begins with a biological postulate" I don't think it's "fair."
4. Continuing your sentence. You write: "He begins with the ‘biological’ postulate that "the nervous system is an apparatus which has the function of getting rid of [beseitigen] the stimuli that reach it, or of reducing them to the lowest possible level; or which, if it were feasible, would maintain itself in an altogether unstimulated condition” (4)
My comment: Perhaps the crux of the issue here (and Laplanche and Pontalis--as well as Solms--point to this) is the difference between (i) Nirvana and (2) homeostasis. I think that even in this quote you provide, we can see Freud realizing that we don't want stimuli to go to zero. But we do want to be in a position where we aren't being provoked or hassled from the outside.
The first entry for "homeostasis" in the OED has ‘homeostasis’ as designating the "stability of the organism." We are talking about the psychic equivalent of not running a fever.
Remembering that Freud was a clinician, we can see that what he was concerned with was with people getting into psychic difficulty such that they could no longer operate normally. The goal was to get hysterics back to "normal unhappiness." Here is a quote from "Heredity and the etiology of neurosis". This is 1896 (early!), and the article is about why he is breaking from Charcot. He wants to emphasize sexuality, and he writes about the problems being disturbances from equilibrium.
"Enforced abstinence, unconsummated genital excitation (excitation which is not relieved by a sexual act), coition which is imperfect or interrupted (which does not end in gratification), sexual efforts which exceed the subject’s psychical capacity, etc. - all these agents, which occur only too frequently in modern life, seem to agree in the fact that they disturb the equilibrium of the psychical and somatic functions in sexual acts, and that they prevent the psychical participation necessary in order to free the nervous economy from sexual tension."
I think interrupted coitus is a great example--great because it captures Freud's clinical bearing and his emphasis on sexuality--of what Freud is thinking of when he is thinking of a person being overstimulated and wanting get back to a undisturbed state.
5 You write, "Adapting from Helmholtz, Freud will call this the ‘principle of constancy’."
My comment: I think a fair conclusion is that Freud himself did not favor the term "principle of constancy." He used it twice as far as I can tell. But Strachey certainly liked it. You see it all over the place in the SE footnotes. This is the common criticism of Strachey: viz., whereas Freud wrote to laypeople, without jargon, Strachey created a lot of scientific sounding terms like "cathect," "ego" (instead of I). Here we see Strachey foregrounding "principle of constancy," where Freud usually just referred to the pleasure principle.
Aside 1: Bettelheim said Strachey was taking Freud's essentially humanistic approach, and trying to scientize it. (Ironically, this scientization on Strachey's part probably helped psychoanalysis gain a footing, at least in the U.S. As you know, it was the AMA's endorsement which carried the flag for psychoanalysis as far as the 1980s.)
Aside 2: One clear piece of evidence of Strachey's scientization was his decision to include Project for a Scientific Psychology in the SE. I recognize that, these days, your own papers are collected into volumes (such as The philosophical imagination) as your career progresses. Thus, today, there is less need for standard editions of a thinker's work. But think how you would feel if there were a standard collection of your work published, an edition published by an tendentious editor, and the editor included a draft you had worked on but eventually destroyed because you wanted to distance yourself from it?
6 You write, "Nervous stimuli from either without or within are disturbances in the condition of the organism, and the nervous system acts to preserve or bring it back to its previous state of quiescence or equilibrium."
Comment 1: IMO this sentence captures the dilemma of whether "constancy" is (a) deliverance / nirvana or (b) homeostasis. First of all, "quiescence" and "equilibrium" are not synonyms; quiescence connotes stillness or deliverance; equilibrum suggests homeostasis. Secondly, the reader wonders why you include both "preserve" and "bring it back to its previous state." It feels like you are connoting both (a) going back to the original state (of stillness) and (b) the more innocuous notion of preserving the previous state of homeostasis.
7). You write, "Freud invites us to “imagine ourselves in the situation of an almost entirely helpless living being, as yet unoriented in the world, which is receiving stimuli in its nervous substance.” The influx of stimuli is a problem for the organism which is easily overwhelmed and which perceives the stimulus as a threat to its integrity, its fragile ego-boundaries.
I adamantly disagree with this paraphrase.
Comment 1. Freud is asking us to take a huge leap and consider ourselves as something far different from what we are. He is not saying that we adults are such beings. He is saying, try to imagine what it would be like.
One of the problems with psychoanalysis is its being so genetic. Everything is seen through the lens of development, and Freud often asks us to consider a newborn baby, a baby so new, it doesn't know where it ends and its mother begins. You may not find this a useful starting point. (I don't find it useful). But he is not saying we are that baby. He is asking us to imagine a very early baby. He wants to see how the structures of the mind might come to be formed.
But it is wrong to suggest, as you do, that he is asking us to see ourselves as such a being. We have developed structures which make us much different than that being.
Comment 2. You yourself provide the emphasis on "problem." I think this is completely unwarranted. I also think the remainder of the sentence (easily overwhelmed, fragile ego boundaries) is completely in apposite. If you re-read the paragraph, you will find none of that. He provides a dispassionate account of what it might be like for that organism. It will receive stimuli, and how will it respond. This is a very common thought experiment for Freud.
8) You write, "the organism will have to either alter the world or alter its own internal state to ‘master the stimulus’ and return to equilibrium."
My comment 1. Note that Freud gives one option being to alter the world. He is not saying, with Schopenhauer, that the best option is to master the stimulus.
My comment 2: By foregrounding "master the stimulus," you have inadvertently grouped Freud with the behaviorists. It is the behaviorists who are the ones who view humans as substances in petri dishes who receive stimuli from without. Freud was early and he was grasping, and you may sometimes see things like this. But it is the behaviorists who ran with that part. There is one literature saying that Freud was following Brentano (his teacher!) with emphasizing action and intentionality. I think it is a violation to reduce him to stimulus-response.
Note that for developed humans, Freud is interested in drives not stimuli. Consider: "By a ‘drive’ is provisionally to be understood the psychical representative of an endosomatic, continuously flowing source of stimulation, as contrasted with a ‘stimulus’ [Reiz], which is set up by single excitations coming from without. The concept of drive is thus one of those lying on the frontier between the mental and the physical.
That last sentence shows, incidentally, that Freud was not as dualistic as your treatments suggest. When he did write in a dualistic way, he did so with humility. For example, in the 1920 preface to the Interpretation of Dreams, "That part of the theory ... which lies on the frontiers of biology and the foundations of which are contained in this little work is still faced with undiminished contradiction."
9 You write, "Here we see the mutual reinforcement of a developmental solipsism,
[yes developmental. that is the assumption of the way the human begins at birth. It is developmental, hence the human goes beyond it]
here the very idea of an external independent world is confronted as a problem
["problem" suggests the basic organism does not want it. But Freud's discussion is dispassionate. It represents a threat, yes, but also an opportunity. It is the challenge which, if development proceeds non-pathologically, will lead to a prosperous life]
since it reveals to us our ineliminable dependency
[I disagree. I don't know why you say it is ineliminable. If it is developmental, it is not ineliminable. In fact, I would argue the opposite is true. There is an optimism in psychotherapy generally (with the exception of Melanie Klein) in seeing that "normal" development leads to a good, conscientious, independent person.]
on what we do not control (Freud’s “primary narcissism”), and a metaphysical solipsism in the difficulty of conceiving of the relation of the ‘self’ to the ‘world’, once each has been defined by the exclusion of the other,
[I disagree. See my comments on dualism above]
and a practical solipsism (as in Swann’s ‘medical philosophy’) which takes a purely internal perspective on both desire itself and the satisfaction of desire, seeing them both as strictly internal conditions."
Comment 1. I think Freud wrote beautifully. Yet people take phrases out of context and reduce his work grossly. "Penis envy" is a good example. What did "primary narcissism" mean to Freud. This is a good description:
[quotes from Freud on what he meant by primary narcissism and other philosophers on Freud.]
Comment 2. What does a good life look like according to Freud? Again, he wrote beautifully on this. Again he does so in the context of a mother's love.
[Freud quote including that a child “is meant to grow up into a strong and capable person with vigorous sexual needs and to accomplish during his life all the things that human beings are urged to do by their drives."]
[aside on end point of analysis]
Constancy is a different issue than the 2 types of satisfaction.
Thus your issue is not really with constancy per se. Thought experiment: suppose Freud had proposed a Principle of Randomness, where the desired level of stimulation varied randomly every month. You would still say it was focused ultimately on satisfaction as state.
My main problem is: why Freud? I think you are suggesting that the current focus on satisfaction-as-state can be traced back to Freud. This is the intellectual thread of how we got here. Schopenhauer then Freud and eventually here we are.
But the current psychological zeitgeist is not descended from Freud. It is if anything anti-Freud. It is based on empirical study and behaviorism and derives not from Freud but from Wundt. A psychology history text ook will contrast Wundt to Brentano or Wundt to Stumpf.
Freud did folk psychology and depth psychology. The current zeitgeist of satisfaction is repelled by drives and forces like Eros. It is opposed to modelling the mind as a structure.
The basic thrust of Freud's work is actually opposite (I would argue) of satisfaction. The goal of treatment was to get the person to work and play. To spend more time in reality and less time in daydreaming.
Really the goal was an individual. Someone who did not need to conform. This is opposite the current zeitgeist with its emphasis on getting along. On adaptive coping mechanism and numbing.
Lear weighs in
I looked through Lear's work and found a place where he addresses, I think, our exact question. My interpretation is that he agrees with both of us: you about Freud having a weird starting point, viz., a psychological starting point; me about that starting point not being important for where he ends up. [Here I quote Lear Freud, pp. 148-150]
Lear goes on to suggest that the reason Freud started with the pleasure principle was that he was starting with clinical experience with adult neurotics. I think a summary of Lear's position is to say that in Freud's model, psychology is narratively prior--but not theoretically, structurally prior.
Line by line through the remainder of Moran’s discussion of Freud
Freud takes a purely psychological notion of ‘satisfaction’ to follow directly from this biological postulate. “The aim of an instinct is in every instance satisfaction, which can only be obtained by removing the state of stimulation at the source of the instinct. But although the ultimate aim of each instinct remains unchangeable, there may yet be different paths leading to the same ultimate aim”.
my comment: Isn't there tension between the first sentence ("purely psychological notion of satisfaction") and the third sentence ("different paths" which would include the path of reality, which would be a logical notion of satisfaction)?
The ‘ultimate aim’ is the discharge of stimulus, which makes for the affinity between the ‘principle of constancy’ and the later ‘pleasure principle’, since such quenching or reduction of tension will often be experienced as pleasurable.
The principle of constancy has as much of an affinity with the reality principle as it does with the with the pleasure principle. The person wants to get to equilibrium, but the person can use either hallucination or getting what they want in the real world. The goal of homeostasis doesn't by itself attach to pleasure/primary process any more than it does to reality and secondary process.
While Schopenhauer’s internal conception of desire provides no room for a conception of the satisfaction of desire apart from the quelling of the psychological state of desire, Freud takes it as a matter of scientific principle that understanding of drives or desires has no use for any logical relation between desire and its object, and hence, as with Russell’s theory, it will be a fully empirical question what object ‘satisfies’ (in the sense of eliminates) a particular drive or desire.
No. Clearly there has to be a logical relation between desire and its object. That is what secondary process thinking is all about. Secondary process thinking is about knowing how strategically (logically) to satisfy the drive in the real world. Secondary process logic is precisely about learning how to satisfy (in a logical) sense the drive. Hallucination doesn't get you very far in life!
“The object [Objekt] of an instinct is the thing in regard to which or through which the instinct is able to achieve its aim. It is what is most variable about an instinct and is not originally connected with it, but becomes assigned to it only in consequence of being peculiarly fitted to make satisfaction"
Yes. In other words, when you have thirst, there is nothing connected to it initially. One has to learn over time which of these will satisfy it: (a) drinking a glass of water (b) chewing on a table, or (c) hallucinating a breast. The baby has to learn that it turns out that one of those is peculiarly fitted to make satisfaction. The glass of water, it turns out, happens to do the trick. But originally, there is no reason to make the connection.
The object of a drive is not originally connected with it at all.
Correct, to use the reality principle, it takes learning; it takes trial and error to find out what actually fits well for what desire.
As an internal condition the drive is complete in itself and can be individuated and identified without reference to what it is directed upon.
Drives change through time (e.g., they can be sublimated). Do they change "as an internal condition"? I think they do: for example the sexual drive can come to be associated with danger or prohibition. This would change the valance of the drive--it would also change what objects in the real world will fit the drive. It is true that different objects satisfy a drive in different ways, and the person's experience changes over time. But that doesn't mean that you can specify a person's drive without reference to what will satisfy it. One person grows up to be a sadist. Another grows up to be a voyeur. At the point of a baby, we may not know what will satisfy the drive, and many things might. But you wouldn't be able to specify a sadomasochist's sex drive without referring to their sadomasochism.
It may be argued that Freud’s notion of ‘Trieb’ is not at all the same as the ordinary notion of ‘desire’, and Freud himself does not use the term interchangeably with terms like ‘Wunsch’ or ‘Verlangen’. This is true enough, but does not, I feel, affect the main point, once Freud helps himself to the notion of the ‘aim’ of a ‘Trieb’ and its ‘satisfaction’, and aligns both of these with his ‘Principle of Constancy’.
The principle of constancy does not rule out logical satisfaction of drives. After all, it is precisely the logical satisfaction of those drives which is one of the ways a person can achieve constancy.
(some actual state of affairs). Indeed, on this picture the ‘object’ of the drive, say the apple that is desired, really functions simply as the external mechanism for the reduction or elimination of the drive itself.
That sentence is correct if you take out the words "really" and "simply." Yes. The glass of water functions as the external mechanism that slakes the thirst. Babies have to learn this. They have to learn that there are many objects that can reduce thirst, some really well fitted (like water) and others less so (like toothpaste). People don't get glasses of water without their being some reason to get that water. But just because the glass of water benefits the person by slaking their thirst, that doesn't mean that the only sort of satisfaction here is psychological. There is also the strategic satisfaction of satisfying the thirst.
In addition, drives are not "reduced" or eliminated. Consider for example: "We can divide the life of each drive into a series of separate successive waves, ... whose relation to one another is comparable to that of successive eruptions of lava. We can then perhaps picture the first, original eruption of the drive as proceeding in an unchanged form and undergoing no development at all. The next wave would be modified from the outset – being turned, for instance, from active to passive – and would then, with this new characteristic, be added to the earlier wave, and so on."
Here in Freud we can witness the construction of a purely psychological notion of desire and its satisfaction.
same comments as above
With the detachment of desire from its object, and hence the construction of a notion of ‘satisfaction’ detached from the actual realization of the object (the state of affairs), the pursuit of an ‘object’ in Freud’s terms is undertaken not for the sake of that realizing that possibility but as a means to the end of reducing or extinguishing the drive or desire itself.
By experience, we know that to satisfy a thirst drive, hallucination is not productive. We use our secondary process knowledge to go out and get a glass of water. In doing so, we achieve both types of satisfaction. Logical satisfaction because we getting the glass of water was the real world aim we correctly predicted would satisfy the desire in a real-world specific way. And we also get psychological satisfaction because the thirst drive is attenuated. It is true that we don't get the glass of water "for its own sake." But that doesn't mean that the model is only concerned with the psychological state of satisfaction. It most clearly is concerned with how to satisfy the drive in the real world in the logical sense.
As applied to the experience of thirst, one may indeed pursue a drink of water as instrumental to a self-referring end, the aim of eliminating one’s thirst one way or another. But as applied to desires or aspirations generally, such as the Narrator’s desire for Gilberte’s attention, or his aspiration to be a great writer someday, we cannot understand his situation or the risk of disappointment without the distinction between the logical and the psychological senses of satisfaction.
There are various ways of trying to deal with thirst. Enteral methods include drinking (water? salt water? cold beer? hot coffee?) and eating (watermelon? cauliflower? a juicy steak?). There are other methods: a water capsule suppository, and IV drip line, eye drops, etc. Some will work and others won't. A baby would try additional methods: like chewing on the table. Or screaming at the top of their lungs.
Some methods will work others won't. Some methods will work for some people and others won't. And for each person, the dose (of water, cauliflower or saline) will differ. Too little won't work, but too much won't work either. Even for dthirst, therefore, we need the distinction between logical and psychological satisfaction. For the correct amount of cool water, it may feel that logical satisfaction is the same as psychological satisfaction. But they are different: one is an action (drinking) and the other is a state.
The Narrator’s relation to these aspirations is not as the instrumental means to assuage or eliminate some internal condition.
An aspiration is something we want, so to make the analogy correct, we would use quenching thirst as our substitute for "aspiration." I am not sure whether the sentence syntax is correct, but it seems the sentence still holds if we replace "aspiration" with "desire to quench." That is, it would be correct to say, "My relation to my desire to quench my thirst is not as the instrumental means to assuage or eliminate some internal condition." I think I need to understand the sentence better to see whether an aspiration is indeed different than a desire to quench.
His desire can only be satisfied by the realization of those very objects.
Just as my desire to quench can only be satisfied by the corresponding realization.
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.
I disagree. I think there is an internal state corresponding to feeling that you have not achieved your aspirations. Certainly, the Narrator is in that state much of the novel. Although sometimes he feels some relief by at least provisionally giving up on the goal. There is some relief by resigning himself to failure, some relief to dropping the aspiration.
If the Narrator’s relation to these desires were governed by the purely psychological conception of desire and satisfaction, then he would embrace the advice to be indifferent between actual satisfaction and the illusion of satisfaction of these desires, so long as it made the same difference to his internal state; and he would be indifferent between the satisfaction of his desire to be a great writer and his discouragement and eventual loss of that desire altogether.
But the desire for thirst likewise is not governed "purely" by the psychological conception of desire and satisfaction. It is also governed by knowledge of and availability of the potential real world strategies for logically satisfying the thirst.
But of course Proust makes it clear that his unnamed Narrator is not just as well off but rather is diminished with the loss of these desires and ambitions, and that he (the Narrator) arrives at this perspective on himself and on desire in general as reaction to discouragement and despair, not unlike Swann’s, and that he applies this perspective to himself for similar therapeutic purposes.
He'd be even more diminished if he lost the drive for thirst quenching.