Notes on Freud and Cocaine
Sometimes cocaine use is just cocaine use, and sometimes it is a prelude to the development of psychoanalysis...
You’ve probably heard that Sigmund Freud used cocaine and that he prescribed it to people as treatment, but odds are that you likely don’t have a good sense of the extent and duration of his use or how he employed it in his clinical practice or scientific experiments.
You may also be familiar with this famous quote from a letter to Martha Bernays, his future wife:
“Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are froward you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.” (June 2, 1884)
(“Froward” is often misquoted online as “forward.” Froward is an outdated word meaning contrary, willful, or disobedient, with the intended meaning here of “if you defy me,” used playfully.)
You may also have seen a version of this letter circulating on social media, which I used to think was fake, but it’s real:
“So yesterday I gave my lecture. I spoke quite well despite my lack of preparation and without any hesitation, which I attribute to the cocaine I’d taken beforehand. I talked to them about my discoveries in cerebral anatomy, a lot of very complicated things that the audience certainly didn’t understand, but it was enough for them to have the impression that I did.” [Letter to Martha Bernays, source]
(Freud pulling a Karl Friston here!)
That was the extent of my own familiarity with Freud and cocaine until recently when I started reading more about it and discovered that this historical episode has numerous fascinating details. Freud was experimenting with cocaine before its medical uses were well-characterized, and he could’ve been the person who developed modern local anesthesia; he saw the local anesthetic potential in cocaine before Koller did (the person who got the credit for introducing cocaine as a local anesthetic) but didn’t follow through with it. Freud treated a close friend with morphine addiction with cocaine, with initially promising results but later disaster, and got accused of unleashing a scourge on humanity. He used cocaine on himself both as self-experimentation and to use it to lift him out of bouts of depression and was amazed enough to call it a “magical substance.” Freud’s colleague hypothesized a “nasal reflex neurosis,” treated by cocaine in the nose. There were scandalous psychoanalytic interpretations: a patient having recurrent bleeding from a surgery-gone-wrong-involving-cocaine is said by Freud to be “hysterical” and bleeding “out of longing.” And his own dream involving cocaine becomes fodder for his psychoanalytic interpretation. And of course, the question that has generated much head-scratching among scholars: what, if anything, do Freud’s experiments with cocaine have to do with psychoanalysis?
Let’s start with the basics.