Cocaine papers by Sigmund Freud (1975-12-24)

“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…. ” – Sigmund Freud, in a letter to his fiancee, Martha Bernays (June 2, 1884) In July 1884, the young and ambitious Dr. Sigmund Freud published Über Coca,a paper in which he enthusiastically reported on the therapeutic uses of coca and its alkaloid, cocaine. Freud hoped that the drug would cure a friend’s morphine addiction and that the paper itself would bring him fame. COCAINE PAPERS, which traces the history of cocaine in the nineteenth century, includes a wealth of previously unpublished and unavailable writing both by and about Freud. The many personal letters from Freud to Martha Bernays, Carl Koller, and others, and the early dream analyses, reveal an historically significant course from the experimentation with cocaine to Freud’s authorship of his masterpiece, The Interpretation ofDreams. Dr. Robert Byck insightfully edits and introduces this collection in which Freud’s publications and letters, annotated by Anna Freud, are supplemented with articles by other investigators and with biographical commentary by Ernest Jones, Siegfried Bernfeld, and Hortense Koller Becker. Richard Woodley offers a survey of “Illicit Cocaine in America”; and David Misto’s “Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud” focuses on the cocaine connection in the early careers of two brilliant investigators.