Freud on Coca

So now we have it - Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, inventor of free association, transference and the Oedipus complex has quite a bit to say about that great evil. I’m taking about Cocaine. The Cocaine Papers is a collection of papers featuring Freud’s writing and thoughts on the subject, personal and professional. His conclusions;

Cocaine can increase alertness and libido, improve reaction time, depress hunger and serve as an anesthetic, but it is also, for some people at least, habit-forming, and that’s of course not all. We understand these days the impact of illicit drug use in the community including premature death, crime, mental health disorders, and other blood borne viruses, etc.

The publication of 'Cocaine Papers' presents the complete and authoritative versions of Freud's important texts, widely referred to as 'the cocaine papers.' Written between 1884 & 1887, they are a significant contribution to the fields of psychology, pharmacology, and social history.

The stories and accounts are often repeated, albeit sometimes, not always, from different perspectives. Freud was looking to make a name for himself and achieve fame and fortune so as to be able to marry his “beloved treasure,” Martha Bernays, and thought he had come upon the means for that with the then legal drug cocaine.

On April 21, 1884, a 28-year-old researcher in the field now called neuroscience sat down at the cluttered desk of his cramped room in Vienna General Hospital and composed a letter to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, telling her of his recent studies: “I have been reading about cocaine, the effective ingredient of coca leaves,” Sigmund Freud wrote, “which some Indian tribes chew in order to make themselves resistant to privation and fatigue.” And not too much later, less than a month later, Freud was writing to Bernays about the many self-experiments in which he had swallowed various quantities of the drug, finding it useful in relieving brief episodes of depression and anxiety. Later, he described how “a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I am just now busy collecting the literature” — in German, French and English — “for a song of praise to this magical substance.”

Included in this work are Freud’s ‘Cocaine Dreams,’ which show just how brilliant was his analytical mind. As with his early position on the causes of “Hysteria” (sexual abuse as cause) and was mostly right with regards to cocaine, but abandoned his position because of peer pressure.

We're Out of Miltown

Back in 2006 ABC’s All in the Mind program presented what they called “in the spirit of Sigmund Freud and his One hundred fiftieth birthday” an interview with Jonathan Metzl. In a sense, the presenter offered “we are psychoanalysing psychiatry itself.” The timing for this was of course also related to Metzl just having published Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder.

The premise of the book is that the biochemical revolution in psychiatry, which displaced Freudianism from its central role in treating mental illness in the United States. The ABC program opens with the vey fitting jingle, Mother's Little Helper, and introduction along the lines “You may remember this 1967 Rolling Stones hit "Mother's Little Helper", a tongue in cheek tribute to a housewife coping with whinging kids and a demanding husband with a little help from the minor tranquiliser Valium.”

Jonathan Metzl sees himself as someone who on one hand is a practitioner of psychiatry and on the other hand someone who studies the kind of cultural history of the ways that depression came to be seen and thought of in present day American society but also internationally. His book examines, for example, how pharmaceutical advertisements, representations of depression in film and media and medical writings are framed.

The book gives a historic account of psychiatric medications in medicine and popular culture starting in the 1950s, a time when Miltown (Meprobamate) became really the first of the modern psychiatric wonder drugs. Prior to the 1950s these kind of drugs weren't an established phenomenon. Metzl tells the story of initial scepticism among psychiatrists and drug companies because, interestingly, they would ask who would use medication when there is talk therapy. However, within two months the demand for Miltown in the United States was so great that there were like these famous signs in the windows of pharmacies saying 'We're out of Miltown.

So whilst the biological basis for depression was perhaps beginning to be addressed through medication Metzl suggests that the rhetoric by which these drugs came into being, again in popular representation, took a lot from Freud even if there was an implication that Freudianism was being overthrown. In the first chapter aptly called The Freud of Prozac, Metzl argues that the ways that these drugs were understood in the popular realm, biology owes a lot to Freud with regard to gender.

Metzl looks at these medications through the lens of what are the implications for gender He says even though we think of Valium as being the 'mother's little helper' for the popularity of the Rolling Stones’ song and in part because of the fact that according to some studies up to 70% of prescriptions for Valium in the United States were written to white middle class women. He goes on, Miltown set the stage for Valium by creating a set of connections between the anxieties of motherhood, or more aptly the anxieties that people who were creating a certain kind of public rhetoric had about the role of mothers in society, and treatment with psychiatric drugs.

Metzl discusses the cultural history of the ways that depression came to be seen and thought of. We saw that for women, overwhelmingly, depression came to be described in popular articles in relation to the women's roles as mothers, or being married, or menstruation.. For men, there was almost nothing about men getting depressed and it impacting their roles as fathers, or as boyfriends, or as anything that might imply emotions or inner-lives. Depression related to aggression, athletics, sports and, to a little bit lesser extent, work. And so we would see articles about famous athletes who got depressed and couldn't win races, or hit the ball, or something and then they would take Prozac and they would start winning again.

However, Metzl never gives an alternative to the Freudian father/superego, mother/unconscious, and his interpretations of women are filtered through this distorting lens. Hence, his sometimes absorbing and adroit presentation of examples is hamstrung by an interpretive paradigm that is no broader than that which he seeks to question.

Science inflicting wounds on humanities’ pride

Jack Dikian

February 2012

Our fragile pride

Sigmund Freud said that science inflicted three wounds on humanities’ pride. The first when Copernicus showed that Earth wasn’t the centre of the Solar system, then Charles Darwin showing that man evolved from other animals and then Freud himself that mankind is not [always] in control of their own behaviour and emotions. That is, human nature began with animal nature - and so Darwin’s dangerous idea is alive and almost visible inside all of us.