Freud and cocaine
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- | "And if you are forward, you shall see who is stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. In my last severe depression I took coca again, and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a ". --June 1884 letter from [[Sigmund Freud]] to his future bride [[Martha Bernays]] | + | "And if you are forward, you shall see who is stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has [[cocaine]] in his body. In my last severe [[depression]] I took coca again, and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a ". --June 1884 letter from [[Sigmund Freud]] to his future bride [[Martha Bernays]] |
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Revision as of 10:22, 27 November 2016
"And if you are forward, you shall see who is stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. In my last severe depression I took coca again, and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a ". --June 1884 letter from Sigmund Freud to his future bride Martha Bernays |
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Sigmund Freud was an early user and proponent of cocaine as a stimulant as well as analgesic. He wrote several articles on the antidepressant qualities of the drug and he was influenced by his friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess, who recommended cocaine for the treatment of the "nasal reflex neurosis." Fliess operated on Freud and a number of Freud's patients whom he believed to be suffering from the disorder, including Emma Eckstein, whose surgery proved disastrous.
Freud felt that cocaine would work as a panacea for many disorders and wrote a well-received paper, "On Coca," explaining its virtues. He prescribed it to his friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow to help him overcome a morphine addiction he had acquired while treating a disease of the nervous system. Freud also recommended it to many of his close family and friends. He narrowly missed out on obtaining scientific priority for discovering cocaine's anesthetic properties (of which Freud was aware but on which he had not written extensively), after Karl Koller, a colleague of Freud's in Vienna, presented a report to a medical society in 1884 outlining the ways in which cocaine could be used for delicate eye surgery. Freud was bruised by this, especially because this would turn out to be one of the few safe uses of cocaine, as reports of addiction and overdose began to filter in from many places in the world. Freud's medical reputation became somewhat tarnished because of this early ambition. Furthermore, Freud's friend Fleischl-Marxow developed an acute case of "cocaine psychosis" as a result of Freud's prescriptions and died a few years later. Freud felt great regret over these events, which later biographers have dubbed "The Cocaine Incident." However, he managed to move on, and even continued to use cocaine.
References
- A contribution to the knowledge of the effect of cocaine, Vienna Medical Weekly, January, 1885. In Byck, R. (ed.), Cocaine Papers: Sigmund Freud. New York, NY: Stonehill Publishing Co., 1974
See also