The paper at issue is called “Swann’s medical philosophy.” It can be downloaded from his website. It is also part of a volume edited by Katherine Elkins. There are two parts of the article that are relevant.

Main part: development of characters in Proust

Basically, what Moran does in the article is distinguish between two different meanings of the word “satisfaction.” This is not a deep philosophical point. Moran is a very deep thinker, but this point is just that “satisfaction” has different meanings, and the two of interest for Moran are:

(1) “satisfaction” can refer to a state of mind. viz., the state of mind of contentment or homeostasis.

1834 Is it not the way of men to dwell with satisfaction on their good deeds, particularly, when for some reason or other, their conscience smites them? J. H. Newman, Parochial Sermons vol. I. vi. 88

(2) it can refer to an action, viz., the action of gratifying a desire or need.

a1616 If for this night he intreat you to his bed, give him promise of satisfaction. W. Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (1623) iii. i. 265

Moran uses this distinction to try to elaborate some character development in Proust. This is the part I suggested to Moran that we talk about!

Second part: Proust versus Freud.

Basically, I didn’t pay much attention to this part when I first read the article. I think it simply didn’t interest me much. I didn’t really understand what he was saying. I may also have had the suspicion he didn’t know what he was talking about. I am currently not really interested in Freud, but I have been in the past, and Moran’s discussion of Freud just seemed to be off. It didn’t pique my interest.

Narrative

How (according to Moran) I became too emotional or too manic or whatever his reason was for canceling me.

I first proposed talking about Proust, and not talking about Freud at all. I guess, to dispense with Freud, I said that I didn’t think the listeners would find a discussion of Freud interesting. On reflection, I am not sure that’s true. Many of my listeners (all 3 of them) are in fact psychoanalytically conversant and interested in it. I think I just said that as an excuse.

But Moran replied that he thought that if the listeners weren’t interested in Freud, perhaps we should just cancel the podcast because, to his mind, that was the most important part or the essential part of the paper.

So despite the podcast being only a few days (weekend days) away, I started reading the Freud section of the paper

It turned out to have a lot of problems. There were so many problems that I couldn’t even summarize for myself what he was saying. So I started going through it sentence by sentence and sending Moran my comments.

I feel like such a fool now because while I was writing all this, I had the fantasy that Moran would be so grateful that I was showing him all these problems!!

[Does that sound like I’m delusional? I was critical of Lear—I wrote a critical letter to the editor about his work—and he was as gracious as could be. I understood that Moran was writing a book on this subject, and since he was the one saying he thought the Freud part was the essence, I thought the best thing I could do would be to alert him to all the problems. My sense has been that the better the scholar the more they actually welcome the criticism. In addition to Lear, I would put all of the following firmly in that camp: Alex Byrne, Timothy Williamson, Owen Flanagan, Peter Singer, Martha Nussbaum, and Daniel Dennett. For those six, they were crystal clear that they wanted the very best criticisms I had. Each of those six actually emphasized that.

I incorrectly assumed that Moran would be the same way. Just to be cautious however, I told him in advance that my criticisms would be harsh, that I felt that was the right thing to do, and that some prior potential guests had canceled when they heard my harshest criticisms. (Suddenly they have to go out of town or whatever) I told him I really hoped that wouldn’t happen to him.

I also stressed over and over that he did not need to read the emails for the podcast. I was just sending him my thoughts in case they were of interest to him. There was no requirement or expectation that he do so for our talk.

The big problems with Moran’s discussion of Freud

1) He focuses on the principle of constancy, but that’s a red herring. It is not important relative to the two different types of satisfaction.

2) His paraphrases are extremely tendentious. (Note that Moran wrote the SEP entry on metaphor and paraphrase, so I was surprised by this).

3) I was never clear on this, but it seems to me that he thinks that in the current world there is too much emphasis on satisfaction as a state. And I think the reason he wanted to discuss Freud was because he was thinking of Freud as being the theorist who caused or contributed to that current emphasis. I think this is completely backwards. If he wanted to capture an influential psychologist from that period, one that really did lead to the current zeitgeist, he should have focused on Wundt.

4) He is sloppy. He says Freud said things in the Vicissitudes article that Freud did not in fact say: either in that article or ever.

5) MOST IMPORTANT He simply doesn’t understand Freud’s theory. He tries to say that Freud focuses on one notion of satisfaction, but I think Moran is simply wrong. Now I know he wouldn’t take what I said as having any influence, so I looked at a source who I thought Moran would take seriously. I went to the trouble of finding where Jonathan Lear talked about the very issues at stake.

6) There are other problems too:

a) Freud’s “Project for a scientific psychology” is, indeed, an interesting thing to look at, but it is not valid if you are trying to summarize Freud’s project. It is plainly not valid for that purpose. There is no debate there.

b) Freud really is saying the opposite of what Moran is saying Freud says. Freud’s whole clinical project was designed to get people to act in the world more. To get out of their daydreams, their obsessive attempts to find purely mental satisfaction. He wanted people to take their drives and act in the world, achieve the act-oriented satisfaction Moran claims he is interested in.

c) He reaches the strange result of a comparison of Proust with Freud. He thinks Proust noted subtleties that were beyond Freud. This is a weird result because Proust and Freud were working in different genres. Freud was creating models: attempts at simplification, attempts at finding some rough rules that would be valid across people and circumstances. Proust was writing literature, showing how things develop over time. Why would it be surprising or interesting that Proust showed greater subtlety?

d) I love intellectual history. That’s why I love Charles Taylor. But all Moran does is claim that Freud was not as subtle as Proust. Moran never shows why, even if that is true, we should care. My best guess is that he thinks it is obvious that if Freud said it, it must have been influential later on. That is far from obvious. Why wouldn’t it be more natural to conclude the opposite. That today’s thinking is constructed in opposition to Freud’s thought?