Swann’s medical philosophy
In “Swann’s medical philosophy,” Moran starts with the distinction between appetites and hopes. With an appetite, for example thirst, satisfaction comes when the feeling of thirst ceases. With a hope or desire, satisfaction comes in getting the thing hoped for or desired. If your desire is to know whether Forcheville was with Odette that afternoon, then satisfaction comes with knowing whether he was.
So much so good, but Moran wants to rope Freud into this corral. I challenge all aspects of his discussion (pp 147 to 152) of Freud (including his paraphrasing, writing, citations, and conclusions).
His conclusions appear to be that Freud’s only uses psychological as opposed to logical satisfaction. Freud
has a “purely psychological conception of desire and satisfaction” (147);
takes a “purely internal perspective on both desire itself and the satisfaction of desire, seeing them both as strictly internal conditions” (149); and
“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” (150).
Lear says this is a common misinterpretation of Freud, to think psyche comes first and world second. Psyche is given equal billing because that was the nature of the illness Freud was treating in clinic.
“What neurotics are guided by is not common objective reality but psychical reality” (SE 18, 80).
“Neurotics are above all inhibited in their actions: with them the thought is a complete substitute for the deed. (SE 13, 161)”
Treatment aims to “win back [for the patient] some degree of capacity for work and enjoyment” (SE12, 119).
What does a healthy life look like in Freud’s model? "[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." (SE 7, 223).
Moran claims that Freud’s model is aligned with young Marcel (148), but Charlie Morel is more like it.
“Men are … creatures among whose drive endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. … [T]heir neighbour is for them … someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, … to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. (SE 21, 111)
What does Moran mean?
What does Moran mean when he says that Freud’s approach is “purely psychological” and that Freud “has no use for any logical relation between desire and its object?”
It’s too strong to say Freud has no use for any logical relation between desire and its object. Any time a person follows the reality principle, they are using the logical relation. We just saw how I can satisfy my aggressive drive on my neighbor. There is no shortage of additional examples:
“One of [Anna O’s] essential character traits was sympathetic kindness. Even during her illness she herself was greatly assisted by being able to look after a number of poor, sick people, for she was thus able to satisfy a powerful drive” (SE 2, 21)
“A child who breaks crockery knows quite well that he is doing something naughty for which grown-ups will scold him, and if he is not restrained by that knowledge, he probably has a grudge against his parents that he wants to satisfy; he wants to show naughtiness” (SE 17, 153).
A man “does not venture to satisfy [the perverse components of his sexual aims] with a woman he respects.” (SE 11, 185)
[Masturbation could cause injury if it led to] the laying down of a psychical pattern according to which there is no necessity for trying to alter the external world in order to satisfy a great need. (SE 12, 251-2]
When Moran says that Freud’s conception is entirely psychological—and he has no use for logical satisfaction—it appears that Moran is referring to one specific Freudian thought experiment. This is the thought experiment in which Freud imagines what it is like to be a newborn baby: a baby before the baby has learned the logical relations of the world. At birth, the newborn does not know even what will satisfy thirst in the real world. Will gnawing on this table do it? Will eating mud do it?
We know that a glass of water will be great for thirst. But the baby doesn’t know that. The baby has to learn it through trial and error. And even our knowledge as adults is limited. There is more we can learn. Can a cup of coffee quench my thirst? “Doesn’t caffeine dehydrate?”
We can see Moran’s logic falling apart here when, at the end of his discussion of Freud, he returns to the difference between appetites and aspirations.
Moran first says, “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” (151).
Moran’s reasoning there is faulty. In Freud’s model, the drink of water and the aspiration to be a great writer are understood in the same way. Over time, the individual learns both that water will quench thirst, and that attending salons will provide interesting anecdotes for stories.
To be thirsty is both to be in discomfort and to desire water. When you go and get a drink of water, you both get psychological satisfaction (because your mental state improves) and logical satisfaction (because water is logically related to the desire for water).
To feel an unfulfilled aspiration (to become a great writer) is also both to be in discomfort and to desire the end result of being a great writer. When you go to salons and get interesting anecdotes, you both get psychological satisfaction (you are less bummed about your lack of writing progress) and logical satisfaction (because getting interesting anecdotes is logically related to becoming a great writer).
Moran next says, “The Narrator’s relation to these aspirations is not as the instrumental means to assuage or eliminate some internal condition.”
When the Narrator goes to salons, he does so primarily because doing so is logically related to becoming a great writer. He may or may not also be aware that, as he goes to the salons, his psychological state improves. To the extent he recognizes the morale boost, that could become part of the reason he continues to go to salons.
This is an important feature of Freudian theory: actions are multi-valenced and overdetermined. It is not assumed that there is one reason for actions. There may be six or seven reasons, each of which is sufficient on its own.
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.
In the Freudian model, one of the ways to respond to a drive is to modify its aim. Sublimation is a clear example. An aggressive drive could be sublimated in that instead of fighting my neighbor, I watch boxing or football.
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.
In Freud’s model, the drives are exogenous. Freud said that Schopenhauer’s “unconscious ‘Will’ is equivalent to the mental drives of psychoanalysis” (SE 17, 144). (cf. Lear, Love and its place in nature). Buddhism or Stoicism isn’t really a personal option in Freud’s model; or it is at any rate not possible for the young. We humans are literally the playthings of the human sex drive. There is this Force in the universe—viz., the human sex drive—and humans are the tools that this Force uses to perpetuate itself.
“One may say man is concrete sexual desire; for his origin is an act of copulation and his wish of wishes is an act of copulation, and this tendency alone perpetuates and holds together his whole phenomenal existence” (SE 19, 221).
Note that this quotation is Schopenhauer’s. It is reprinted in the Standard Edition because of its importance to Freud’s work.