Freud’s model

In Moran’s paper, he contrasts Proust, on the one hand, to Freud and Schopenhauer on the other. And there is no doubt that Freud shared much with Schopenhauer. In fact, some of the best-known parts of Freud’s theory can be found in Schopenhauer:

(1) the importance of dreams.

(2) the theory of repression

(3) the importance of the unconscious

(4) the importance of the sex drive.

Click <here> for citations to Freud which establish these four points.

Two prominent features of Freud’s model are: (1) the importance of unconscious mental events (i.e., “mental” does not equal “conscious”) and (2) the importance of the sex drive. Both of

When you think of Freud’s model, the core features are the emphasis unconscious mental events (i.e., “mental” does not equal “conscious”)

pleasure principle and reality principle

Freud thought that a newborn baby could not distinguish between perceptual and non-perceptual mental content. When it became hungry, it first tried to hallucinate the nourishment. Such a direct, unmediated attempt at satisfaction is the pleasure principle. The baby quickly realizes that hallucination doesn’t provide relief. But it realizes there is a way of getting nourishment, but it is not achievable by mental effort. It comes to realize there is a an external world out there, and it needs to learn its rules if it wants to get nourishment reliably. This is the reality principle.

“Let us bear in mind the great practical importance of distinguishing perceptions from ideas, however intensely recalled. Our whole relation to the external world, to reality, depends on our ability to do so. We have put forward the fiction that we did not always possess this ability and that at the beginning of our mental life we did in fact hallucinate the satisfying object when we felt the need for it. But in such a situation satisfaction did not occur, and this failure must very soon have moved us to create some contrivance with the help of which it was possible to distinguish such wishful perceptions from a real fulfilment and to avoid them for the future. In other words, we gave up hallucinatory satisfaction of our wishes at a very early period and set up a kind of ‘reality-testing’.

Human life then consists in being pushed this direction or that direction by different drives. It is a fully empirical matter what in the real world will relieve the distress. What satisfies my sex drive need not satisfy yours, and what satisfies my sex drive now need not either be available or satisfying in the future. The drives themselves can undergo various vicissitudes over the course of our life: sublimation and repression are examples. Here too, each person is unique.

The object of a drive is the thing in regard to which or through which the drive is able to achieve its aim. It is what is most variable about a drive and is not originally connected with it, but becomes assigned to it only in consequence of being peculiarly fitted to make satisfaction possible. The object … may be changed any number of times in the course of the vicissitudes which the drive undergoes during its existence; and highly important parts are played by this displacement of drive.

Psychological versus logical satisfaction

Citing Watson and Russell, Moran presents two alternative philosophical notions of satisfaction. Psychological satisfaction is satisfaction as a state of mind. When I feel thirsty and I go looking for water, I’m looking for psychological satisfaction: eliminating that awful thirsty feeling. I do understand that water works by resolving the underlying dehydration, but my aim is getting rid of the thirst.

Logical satisfaction is satisfaction in the real world. When my grandmother is sick, I’m sad about that, and I want her to recover. When she does recover, it’s true I will feel relief, but my aim is not that relief.

Moran’s claims about Freud’s model

Moran claims that Freud’s model has a “purely psychological conception of desire and satisfaction” (147, 151), and “has no use for any logical relation between desire and its object” (150).

If we are talking about thirst, Freud’s model works fine. But the reason Freud’s model works for thirst is that you can describe thirst without logical satisfaction. There’s no logical satisfaction in Freud’s model, but that’s not a limitation in the case of thirst. But if we are talking about an aspiration—like grandmother feeling better—however, that requires both logical and psychological satisfaction. Freud’s model can’t handle the conceptual demands of that case.

“As applied to the experience of thirst, one may indeed pursue a drink of water as instrumental to a self-referring end … But as applied to desires or aspirations generally, such as [the hope that his grandmother will recover], we cannot understand his situation or the risk of disappointment without the distinction between the logical and the psychological senses of satisfaction. 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.”

As we saw above, one feature of Freud’s model is that there is no a priori relation between a drive and its real world object. Rather, people have to try to learn what objects will satisfy which vicissitudes of which drives, and this is different for each person and varies of time. Moran sees this empirical relation between drive and object to be a problem with Freud’s model.

“In Freud’s model, t]he object of a drive is not originally connected with it at all. As an internal condition the drive is complete in itself and can be individuated and identified without reference to what it is directed upon (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. Here in Freud we can witness the construction of a purely psychological notion of desire and its satisfaction. 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.”

Freud’s model vis-a-vis psychological and logical satisfaction

With the thirst drive, Freud’s model captures my distress and the relief of the distress when I get the glass of water. What it does not capture is the phenomenological priority: the fact that my psychological discomfort was in the foreground, and the logical relation was a technical detail.

Can it capture Swann?

I was focused on my pain, not on the

I was only aware of the psychological disturbance. The logical relation between the water and the underlying thirst was upstaged by the pain of the thirst.

There are three cases which Moran is considering: (1) generic quenching of thirst, (2) SwannMoran is claiming that Freud’s model can capture two things the experience of not represent.

For the appetite, psychological satisfaction is primary and logical is collateral.

For the aspiration, logical is primary and psychological is collateral.

Is there a case that Freud’s model does not cover?

When I get the glass of water, I get both psychological and logical satisfaction for my appetite. Likewise, when grandmother recovers, I get both types of satisfaction for my aspiration. The difference between the two cases is that:

For water, my aim is the psychological satisfaction, and logical satisfaction is a technicality

For my grandmother, my aim is the logical satisfaction, and psychological satisfaction is a collateral benefit.

. For my grandmother, my aim is thelogical satisfaction is a technicality; it’s not what I was phenomenologically aware of. For grandmother on the other hand,

With thirst, when you get the glass of water, that provides both logical and psychological satisfaction. What distinguishes thirst from The difference between the two types of satisfaction is simply that, phenomenologically,

Freud’s model does not distinguish between thirst and aspiration. They are captured with the same model.

understands thirst and aspirations with

Consider thirst. I feel the distressing sensation of thirst. I am out of homeostasis, and I want to get back. I go and get a glass of water, and that returns me to homeostasis.

In Freud’s model, the human is always responding to drives and trying to get back to homeostasis. But that does not mean there is no place for logical satisfaction in the model.

It just means that each individual is different, and each situation is different, and people are always in the process of trying to determine what will provide logical satisfaction and what won’t. This is a feature of the model, not a bug.

2) Moran incorrectly believes that Freud’s model does capture aspirations. I aspire for my grandmother to recover.

If I am sad because my grandmother is sick, then I want to see her get better. Relief of my sadness would be a collateral benefit of her recovery.

That means that the thing in the world that will

2) Freud’s model absolutely can capture the difference between Swann and Marcel. The medical philosophy itself “works” for Swann, but it does not work for Marcel. When Swann adopts the medical philosophy, he achieves homeostasis. When Marcel adopts the medical philosophy, he finds he does not achieve homeostasis. He still wants more.

3) If

he difference is that what fits Swann’s drive

Moran says that “as an Originally, the object of a drive is not connected with it. a baby doesn’t know what will slake its thirst. Will gnawing on this chair do it? (The baby learns it won’t). How about drinking this glass of water. Will that work? (The baby learns it does). However, once the baby learns that, then from then on

No. Drinking a glass of water? Yes.

Will a glasA baby has to learn Just because a person has to learn what will be “fit” his drives (i.e., what will provide him psychological relief)what will logically satisfy his drives in the real world)

Freud’s model captures both psychological and logical satisfaction. Moran thinks it is a problem with Freud’s model that it is an empirical question as to what in the real world will fit a

1. Freud is proposing a model. Models by nature are simplifications. They aren’t supposed to capture every nuance (like a novel should). In fact, if a model captures all nuances, it is a failure as a model.

hat’s because you can represent thirst without

According to Moran, Freud’s model ican explain thirst (since for thirst, you only need the concept of

In other words, Moran is saying that Freud’s model accurately captures the experience of thirst.

I want her to feel better.

But when I want my grandmother to feel better, I want her to feel better in the real world. If she feels better, it is true my aim is not to get rid of my sadness. ; my aim is eliminating that awful thirsty feeling. My aim is psychological satisfaction. When I want my grandmother to feel better, my aim is not to eliminate that awful sadness. psychological satisfaction.

aiming for psychological satisfaction.

One is satisfaction as a state of mind,

had among perceptions, memories, ideas, dpercewhen the newborn baby is hungry, it experiences that as distress, and the first thing it does is attempt to hallucinate the breast. When that isn’t satisfying, it real

It has two optionSchopenhauer anticipated two of Freud’s most well-known claims: (1) the existence of an unconscious and (2) the importance of the sex drive.

There are famous philosophers who may be cited as forerunners [of psychoanalytic theory] – above all the great thinker Schopenhauer, whose unconscious ‘Will’ is equivalent to the mental drives of psychoanalysis. It was this same thinker, moreover, who in words of unforgettable impressiveness [click <here>] admonished mankind of the importance, still so greatly underestimated by it, of its sexual craving. (17, 143-144)

Freud thus saw human life as the problem of managing exogenous drives. Anytime you wantsomething—whether it’s an appetite, desire, hope, or long-term aspiration—Freud would see it as a drive. It appears in your consciousness as a lack, as something that you want changed about the world. Thirst is experienced as a lack and you go look for water. Marcel had the long-term desire to be a great writer. Through much of his life he sensed the poignancy of unfulfilled artistic promise.

Freud was no Buddhist. He saw a full life as one when you did what your drives meant for you to do.

"[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." (7, 223).

We will see Moran misinterpret Freud, and when he does so he claims that Freud’s model fits an “easily overwhelmed” young Marcel (148). That’s not the experience of Freud, of course, who lived through WW1 and saw the rise of National Socialism.

“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. (21, 111)

Forces of nature channel through us in waves “like successive eruptions of lava” (14, 131)

the pleasure principle and the reality principle

The pleasure principle was the myth Freud used to understand the illness of neurosis, an illness constituted by a turn away from reality and into fantasy.

“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).

The energetic and successful man is one who succeeds by his efforts in turning his wishful phantasies into reality. Where this fails, as a result of the resistances of the external world and of the subject’s own weakness, he begins to turn away from reality and withdraws into his more satisfying world of fantasy (11, 50).

Today, if we wanted to model of a flight to fantasy, our mantra is “phenotype equals genotype plus environment.” For genotype, we would look to evolutionary psychology. For environment, we would look to culture.

But Freud didn’t do that. He created what he called a “fiction,” regarding the experience of a newborn baby. This baby has a stream of undifferentiated experience. We adults differentiate our mental experience: we divide the flow of experience into perceptions, memories, dreams, ideas, and fantasies. But the baby would not at first make these distinctions. In Freud’s fiction/myth/model, when the baby feels the painful drive of hunger, the baby first tries to “hallucinate” the breast.

“Let us bear in mind the great practical importance of distinguishing perceptions from ideas, however intensely recalled. Our whole relation to the external world, to reality, depends on our ability to do so. We have put forward the fiction that we did not always possess this ability and that at the beginning of our mental life we did in fact hallucinate the satisfying object when we felt the need for it. But in such a situation satisfaction did not occur, and this failure must very soon have moved us to create some contrivance with the help of which it was possible to distinguish such wishful perceptions from a real fulfilment and to avoid them for the future. In other words, we gave up hallucinatory satisfaction of our wishes at a very early period and set up a kind of ‘reality-testing’.

The pleasure principle refers to the attempt to achieve satisfaction directly, by hallucination. Once the infant starts to have a distinction between perception and ideas, the infant learns there is a better way of reaching satisfaction, viz., by reality. (In this case, the baby learns that if it cries, it may lure mom to feed it). Achieving satisfaction in the real world is the “reality principle.”

Moran’s two types of satisfaction

In “Swann’s medical philosophy,” Moran distinguishes between two types of satisfaction. One is psychological satisfaction. This is the satisfaction of a mental state, a feeling of contentment, or homeostasis. If you are thirsty, you are in an unpleasant state of mind. When you get a glass of water, you return to equilibrium. You have successfully managed your psychological state. With respect to your thirst, at least, you are satisfied.

On the other hand, if your grandmother is ill, you are in distress and you want her to feel better. In this event, it is not sufficient for you to manage your psychological state. You could take a benzodiazepine to manage your distress, but that is not enough for you. You really want to see the change in the world that you hope for. You want to see your Grandmother feel better. Moran refers to this as “logical” satisfaction. It’s logical because it is internal to the very structure of the desire or hope.

Moran’s strong claims about Freud’s model

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 ap

Lear says this is a common misinterpretation of Freud, to think psyche comes first and world second.

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. idea,