This page includes comments on 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/9780190921576.003.0006
In “Swann’s medical philosophy,” Richard Moran is writing about a certain pessimism or detachment that can be found in some of Proust’s characters, including Swann. Swann feels a painful jealousy about whether Forcheville was with Odette one afternoon. He comes to a “positive, almost medical” stance towards his jealousy, a stance in which he focuses more on his psychological state (i.e., his jealous feelings) than on the logical object of his curiosity (i.e., whether Forcheville was there). Philosophically, this change in focus is a change in Swann’s notion of satisfaction. Originally, Swann wanted logical satisfaction of his curiosity. He moves towards understanding satisfaction in terms of his mental state.
Moran wants to say that this pessimism was in the air in early 20th century. He wants to say that the philosophers of the time bought into the pessimism in an uncritical, plodding way. In contrast, Proust, according to Moran, had some characters buy into this pessimism (Swann being the poster child), but showed other characters (in particular, the Narrator, i.e., Marcel) move beyond it to a more wise and integrated stance, a stance of generosity
Moran wants to point to some examples, some thinkers of the age who can exemplify this plodding pessimism. He lands on two: Schopenhauer and Freud. But there is a gaping difference in Moran’s treatment of these two. Moran looks at Schopenhauer’s normative—but Freud’s positive—theory. The Schopenhauer part is easy. Schopenhauer gave the Buddhist / Stoic advice that our best bet was to attenuate our desires.
But Freud’s positive theory does not assert that people do adopt Swann’s medical philosophy. Freud understand people as being driven by powerful exogenous drives, and he understood the best way to understand human behavior was to see how these drives were twisted, deformed, and redirected both by the people themselves and by the civilizing pressures of living in a society.
From a clinical perspective, Freudian theory has no difficulty with Swann’s medical philosophy. Swann’s strategy would be classified in Freudian theory as a defense or coping mechanism. It would be classified simply as one of the many ways people can come up with to deal with or respond to these powerful and painful drives. It would be classified along with other strategies such as repression, disavowal, projection, sublimation, etc. etc.
It is true that Freud did not spend a lot of effort on explicating this particular coping mechanism. But the reason was that, as a clinician, Freud was focused on the problems of his day, viz., hysteria or neurosis. The problem of neurosis is the problem of being too-much in one’s head. A neurotic person spends their time and energy in internal perseverations. The clinical aim of psychoanalysis was to get people out of their heads and into the world.
Thus, Freud’s clinical problem was exactly the opposite of what Moran is claiming. For Swann, there was some psychic benefit to moving away from the real world of logical satisfaction. But for Freud’s patients, the psychic benefits were to be found by moving towards logical satisfaction.
Medical philosophy real-world striving neurosis
Swann found the middle position here (real-world striving) so painful that he found it beneficial to move to the left into the medical philosophy. Freud’s patients faced a different problem. They were stuck in the right-hand position of neurosis. Neurotics are “inhibited in their actions: with them the thought is a complete substitute for the deed” (SE 13, 161). The goal was to get the patients to withdraw their projections, to see people in a more prosaic way, and ultimately to direct their drive energies onto everyday real-world objects. Treatment aimed to “win back [for the patient] some degree of capacity for work and enjoyment” (SE12, 119).
To the extent that Swann was spending his time and energy fantasizing about revenge over Forcheville and Odette, he would have been a candidate for psychoanalytic treatment. The goal of treatment would have been to get him to be able to spend more of his time and energy actually resolving his curiosity, rather than fantasizing about it.
Although Freud tried to remain neutral, we can see an implicit normative stance in his writings. 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
There are many examples in Freud’s writing of drives directed onto real-world objects.
i) “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).
ii) “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).
iii) A man “does not venture to satisfy [perverse sexual aims] with a woman he respects” (SE 11, 185).
Problems occurred whenever people turned away from reality. For example, Freud did not object to masturbation per se. It could, however, lead to problems to the extent 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).
Examples
Moran uses several examples: thirst; a few examples from Proust’s Search; and one example from Wittgenstein.
Limbic thirst obtains from our deep reptilian past. When we are thirsty, we are aware only of wanting to achieve mental satisfaction.
In Proust’s Search, Swann has a painful curiosity about whether Forcheville was with Odette one afternoon. When he is young, he wants logical satisfaction: to know the truth. When he gets older, however, he aims for psychological satisfaction, specifically he aims to attenuate his desires so as to gain relief from pain.
Young Marcel, like young Swann, also seeks logical satisfaction. For example, he wants to see his grandmother recover from her illness in the real world. As he gets older, Marcel comes to see the medical philosophy as an option, but he rejects it. He sees in it not only self-help, but also self-betrayal.
The Wittgenstein example is someone who wants to eat an apple. Eating the apple is real world satisfaction. Getting punched in the stomach would not constitute satisfaction, although it would remove the desire.
Mapping the psychological/logical distinction on to Schopenhauer and Freud
Moran attempts to map the psychological / logical distinction to Schopenhauer and Freud: specifically to Schopenhauer’s normative theory and Freud’s positive theory.
Schopenhauer’s normative theory is his advice that we should skip all the sound and fury; our best bet is to attenuate desire. This is Buddhism, Stoicism, and also Swann’s medical philosophy. The mapping thus works fine in the case of Schopenhauer.
It is when Moran attempts the mapping to Freud that problems arise. Moran’s claims are quite strong: Freud has a “purely psychological notion of desire and its satisfaction” (151), with “no use for any logical relation between desire and its object” (150).
I want to devote this page to a close analysis of Moran’s reasoning behind these strong conclusions. But it is helpful to get some context. Click <here> for the citations, but essentially, Freud’s entire career was devoted to getting people to strive more actively in the real world. The difference with Schopenhauer can be seen in this diagram:
Medical philosophy real-world striving neurosis
Schopenhauer was operating on the left-hand side of the diagram. He advised people to move left, away from real world striving.
But for Freud, Buddhism was a mere curiosity (click here). His concern was entirely different. He was on the right-hand side of the diagram, dealing with people (neurotics) who had turned away from reality pathologically. Freud’s goal was to move them to the left, which meant moving them back into real-world striving.
Moran’s argument re: Freud
Moran organizes his argument around a “principle of constancy” (PoC) which he understands as a fundamental Freudian principle which asserts that when disturbed by a drive or desire, people aim for mental satisfaction. Laplanche and Pontalis distinguish three separate meanings for this principle:
a principle of conservation of energy
The principle that people aim for the lowest level of stimulation possible
The principle that people aim for an equilibrium range of stimulation, i.e., homeostasis.
I discuss the first two meanings offline (click <here>). Quickly: The first relates to a very minor part of Freud’s overall theory. The second relates to what Freud eventually identifies as a death drive. But whereas Schopenhauer normatively advised us to attenuate drives, Freud’s model is positive, and the death drive does not by itself explain human behavior. The death drive is considered as an opposing force with the Life drive in determining behavior.
It is the third meaning which is helpful for showing how Freud’s model is entirely consistent with logical satisfaction.
Constancy as the principle that people aim for an equilibrium range of stimulation, i.e., homeostasis.
Freud recognized that it didn’t make much sense to describe people as aiming for no stimulation. Rather, people like a certain medium level of stimulation, neither too high nor too low.
Freud didn’t have the word “homeostasis,” but it is the word we now use to describe what Freud was postulating. Specifically, a person (whether thought of as a psychic entity or a physical one) subsists as a closed, self-equilibrating system. There is a middle range in which the person maintains its integrity. When outside that range, efforts are undertaken to return to it. L&P (343) say:
the principle of constancy amounts to an assertion that there exist comparatively closed systems (either the psychical apparatus or the organism as a whole) which tend to maintain and to restore their specific configuration and energy level despite all exchanges with the surrounding world. The idea of constancy taken in this sense [is] homoeostasis.
Our question is whether Moran is justified in concluding that Freud’s model is entirely psychological. Moran says that it’s the PoC that demonstrates this. We have now narrowed down constancy in Freud’s model to one meaning: that of homeostasis or equilibrium. Freud’s model is indeed an equilibrium model. People receive stimulation from their drives and from the outside world. They attempt to get back to that integral middle ground. Thus, our question reduces to this: is homeostasis the same as psychological satisfaction?
In his reasoning, Moran assumes that they are the same. He describes Freud’s model as an equilibrium model. Based simply on that description, Moran concludes that Freud’s model is views desire and its satisfaction as purely psychological.
Moran’s description of Freud’s model (paraphrase):
“In Freud’s model, a person respond to stimuli—either by altering the world or altering its own internal state—so as to return to equilibrium.”
Moran’s immediate conclusion based on that description (paraphrase):
“Therefore, Freud’s model takes a purely internal perspective on both desire and its satisfaction.”
Homeostasis or equilibrium is not the same as psychological satisfaction.
It might be helpful to think of homeostasis as a back-room or subliminal process: something that is more fundamental than either psychological or logical satisfaction and includes them both as special cases.
It might also be helpful to consider the examples that Moran uses in his paper, the examples I mentioned above. Each of those cases can be captured in an equilibrium model. It simply depends on how equilibrium is defined.
Thirst. With thirst, homeostasis obtains when I have relieved the painful sensation. Homeostasis in this case is equivalent to medical satisfaction.
Young Swann. Recall that young Swann suffers from an excruciating jealousy focused around an obsession regarding whether Forcheville was with Odette that afternoon. He is not concerned with alleviating his pain other than through learning the truth. In this case, equilibrium occurs when he knows the truth. Homeostasis is here logical satisfaction.
Older Swann. Having adopted the medical philosophy, homeostasis is now defined in terms of psychological satisfaction. Homeostasis obtains when his painful jealous subsides, regardless of how that occurs.
Desiring an apple. If you desire an apple, then homeostasis is defined in terms of your successfully eating one. Logical satisfaction. If you got punched in the stomach so as to lose your appetite, your desire was not satisfied.
Equilibrium in these models is based on the person reacting to a desire. But to say that the person reacts to the desire, that is not the same as saying that the person has taken a third party or medical view of their desire. It simply means that the person is urged to do something to respond to that desire. In the case of a person who has not adopted the medical philosophy, awareness of the stimuli simply amounts to some phenomenological awareness of it. This is an awareness of wanting to know about Forcheville, or wanting to eat the apple. We can model the desire and the resulting behavior as a self-regulating system, and to do so does not suggest that the person is at all aware that they could be understood as aiming for homeostasis, not to mention aiming for satisfaction of the psychological sort.
Two loose ends:
First, Moran says that for Freud:
There is no logical but only a causal relation between what a particular desire is, as an item of psychological reality, and what will ‘satisfy’ it, in the sense of quell it.
A baby has to learn what objects fit what desires. The first time the baby felt jealousy, it had no idea what this pain was. When we see Swann as a young adult, he is convinced that his jealous pain would be alleviated if only he could learn the truth about Forcheville and Odette. The aim of his desire is to know the truth, and, until he adopts the medical philosophy, there is a logical relationship between his desire and his satisfaction. Freud’s only point is that these have to be learned, and that the learning never stops. It is still possible to desire one’s aim logically.
Second, I said above that Freud’s model can accommodate both logical and psychological satisfaction. The question arises whether Freudian theory has a place for self-help strategies such as Swann’s medical philosophy. The answer is that it would come under the general topic of vicissitudes. Swann’s medical philosophy would be akin to the technique of sour grapes or perhaps disavowal. Much of Freudian theory relates to these vicissitudes, these modifications of the form, magnitude and direction of our drives. Sublimation, projection, introversion, and repression are examples of vicissitudes he discussed at length.e of