Psychology and Other Stories

by C. P. Boyko

  Freud had high hopes for cocaine. It relieved hunger, so he thought it might work as an anti-nauseant. His sister, in fact, had found it useful in dispelling seasickness. One researcher had found it effective in forestalling asthma attacks. It might have some application in the treatment of diabetes. In America there were numerous reported cases of using it to ease the withdrawal pains of morphine addiction. And, of course, it made people feel good. As Freud pointed out, there was no shortage of tranquilizers capable of calming frazzled nerves, but as yet nothing one could prescribe to “increase the reduced functioning of the nerve centers.” Perhaps here was a potential cure for melancholia—that is, for depression.

  But Freud’s hopes were never quite fulfilled. The fame that should have been his was snatched away by a colleague, Carl Köller, who discovered the potential of using cocaine as a local anesthetic in eye operations. This application, in fact, soon came to be recognized as nearly the only legitimate use of an unpredictable and often dangerous drug. Within a year, reports of addiction and toxic side effects had begun to appear in the medical literature. Freud, whose name was associated with the drug thanks to his popularizing articles, was denounced for having unleashed “the third scourge of humanity,” after alcohol and morphine. (In fact, one of his own good friends, Ernst Fleischl, who had, in the course of treating a phantom pain in his amputated thumb, become addicted to morphine, subsequently became, in the course of being treated for morphine addiction by Freud, addicted to cocaine.)

  Freud defended himself, somewhat belatedly, in 1887 by saying that no one without an innate weakness was susceptible to “cocainism”; that is, no normal, healthy person could possibly succumb to addiction. He also blamed the needle: by mouth cocaine was harmless, under the skin sometimes dangerous.

  This last argument, however, was a bald contradiction of what he’d written in an earlier paper. In 1885 he’d gone out of his way to reassure those harboring “unjustified fears” that “even subcutaneous injections—such as I have used with success in cases of long-standing sciatica—are quite harmless. I have no hesitation in recommending the administration of cocaine for withdrawal cures in subcutaneous injections of 0.03 - 0.05g per dose, without any fear of increasing the dose.” But two years later, he considered it “advisable to abandon so far as possible subcutaneous injection of cocaine in the treatment of internal and nervous disorders.” He further covered his tracks by removing from his list of published works the incriminating 1885 article. And even fifteen years later, in The Interpretation of Dreams, he was still absolving himself: “These injections in the dream reminded me once more of my unfortunate friend who had poisoned himself with cocaine. I had advised him to use the drug internally only, while morphia was being withdrawn; but he had at once given himself cocaine injections.” Apparently Freud’s conscience wasn’t quite clear; no wonder he was having troubling dreams.

  But in 1887, three years after he had first experimented with cocaine, three years after he had written his first “song of praise to this magical substance,” maybe Freud hoped no one would catch the change of heart; maybe he wasn’t aware of it himself. His enthusiasm, in any case, had suffered a blow; his interest began to flag. With this last, limp attempt at saving face, Freud put the whole mess behind him. “The Cocaine Episode,” as his biographer Ernest Jones disparagingly called it, was at an end.

  The problem with this story, thought Devon, as he stood up and rubbed his hands together in the cold garage, was that Freud was again—or still—using cocaine as late as 1895. He admitted as much quite guilelessly in The Interpretation of Dreams, where he submitted one of his own dreams to analysis:

  What I saw in her throat: a white patch and turbinal bones with scabs on them. The scabs on the turbinal bones recalled a worry about my own state of health. I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time to reduce some troublesome nasal swellings, and I had heard a few days earlier that one of my women patients who had followed my example had developed an extensive necrosis of the nasal mucous membrane. I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885, [sic] and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me. The misuse of that drug had hastened the death of a dear friend of mine. This had been before 1895, i.e., the date of the dream.

  Or was this guileless? To what exactly was Freud admitting? The “at that time” seemed to imply that the “frequent use” was, at the time of writing, a thing of the past; in other words, sometime between 1895 and 1898 or 1899, when he wrote the book and analyzed the old dream, he had given up the habit. And the phrase “to reduce some troublesome nasal swellings” suggested that his use of the drug had had, at least in his opinion, a clinical justification. But did this particular method of application preclude all others? Was he, through this limited confession, implicitly denying that he had used it in any other way, or for any other reason?

  And he was worried about his state of health. It could not have been the nasal swellings themselves that worried him so much as the possible side effects of their treatment. He must have been afraid that he, too, like the patient who had “followed his example,” was going to end up with an “extensive necrosis of the nasal mucous membrane”—in other words, a dead, blown-out nose.

  But this didn’t prove much more than that in 1895 he had begun to worry that putting the stuff up his nose might not be good for him in the long run. This bad dream might only have persuaded him to go back to taking the drug by mouth. Or it might not have changed anything at all. The only word that Devon had on the matter was, of course, Freud’s. And Freud did not always tell the strict truth—as he’d first demonstrated in 1887, then again in another passage from The Interpretation of Dreams:

  Injections of that sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly. This sentence in the dream reminded me once more of my dead friend who had so hastily resorted to cocaine injections. As I have said, I had never contemplated the drug being given by injection.

  Devon went into the house, moving almost on tiptoe. He looked at his digital watch: it was 10:56. For a moment he could not make these numbers mean anything; he wasn’t even sure if it was morning or night. Then, gradually, the bricks of his life fell back into place around him. Barb was on the phones tonight, and Devon was home alone with Clyde. He crept on stiff legs past Clyde’s open bedroom door but did not look into the darkened room, the only dark room allowed in the house. He closed the bathroom door softly behind him. He held his breath, thinking he had heard Clyde’s voice. When no sound came, he went to the medicine cabinet and looked in the mirror.

  Which was it: still or again? Did Freud use cocaine regularly for ten years, or did he at some point quit, then resume the habit? But even this by no means exhausted the possibilities. What was really meant by “regularly,” after all, or “habit,” or, for that matter, “quit”? How often had Freud taken cocaine? Once a week? Once a month? Three times a day? How much did his use vary over the years? How many times did he “quit”? Once? Once a week?

  His mind was off again, racing pleasurably.

  There was, unfortunately, very little concrete evidence to go on. During his engagement, which lasted four years, Freud wrote to his fiancée, Martha, almost daily. Aside from the published articles, these letters seemed to be the main source of information about Freud’s cocaine use—indeed, about much of his private or inner life at all; but even today, a hundred years after they had been written, most of them remained unpublished. Jones, in researching his sycophantic The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, had been given complete access to the letters; a few years later Freud’s own son had edited a sparse, one-volume selection of them, which, not surprisingly (they spanned something like fifty years, and Freud had been a prolific letter-writer) featured some sizeable gaps: like the maddening three-year gap between letters 107 and 108, dated July 13, 1891 and June 7, 1894. Between what Jones had chosen to reveal and what Ernst Freud had permitted to see the light of day, Devon could glean very little that was definite. It was like connecti
ng the dots, but the spaces between the dots were astronomical.

  The first mention of cocaine appeared in a letter to Martha dated April 21, 1884, when Freud was still awaiting his first shipment:

  I am toying now with a project and a hope which I will tell you about; perhaps nothing will come of this, either. It is a therapeutic experiment. I have been reading about cocaine, the effective ingredient of coca leaves, which some Indian tribes chew in order to make themselves resistant to privation and fatigue. A German has tested this stuff on soldiers and reported that it has really rendered them strong and capable of endurance. I have now ordered some of it and for obvious reasons am going to try it out on cases of heart disease, then on nervous exhaustion, particularly in the awful condition following withdrawal of morphine (as in the case of Dr. Fleischl). There may be any number of other people experimenting on it already; perhaps it won’t work. But I am certainly going to try it and, as you know, if one tries something often enough and goes on wanting it, one day it may succeed. We need no more than one stroke of luck of this kind to consider setting up house.

  Unfortunately, the very next letter in the Letters of Sigmund Freud was dated more than a month later—May 29—and contained no mention of his cocaine studies. The entire month of May, when he had actually begun to experiment with the drug, was missing.

  The next reference to cocaine appeared only in June, when Freud assured Martha, whom he was about to visit, that he wouldn’t be tired, “because I shall be travelling under the influence of coca, in order to curb my terrible impatience.”

  Then there was nothing, nothing at all for nearly a year. On May 17, 1885, he wrote:

  When the letter came I was suffering from migraine, the third attack this week, by the way, although I am otherwise in excellent health. I took some cocaine, watched the migraine vanish at once, went on writing my paper as well as a letter to Prof. Mendel, but I was so wound up that I had to go on working and writing and couldn’t get to sleep before four in the morning.

  Then in January of 1886 he wrote from Paris:

  Charcot invited me (as well as Richetti) to come to his house tomorrow evening after dinner. You can probably imagine my apprehension mixed with curiosity and satisfaction. White tie and white gloves, even a fresh shirt, a careful brushing of my last remaining hair, and so on. A little cocaine, to untie my tongue.

  The next day he reported:

  We drove there in a carriage the expenses of which we shared. R. was terribly nervous, I quite calm with the help of a small dose of cocaine, although his success was assured and I had reasons to fear making a blunder.

  Devon noted that Freud had written “11 P.M.” above the date of this first Paris letter, and in it he apologized for having so exhausted himself working and writing that he could barely hold the pen. The same thing had also happened the night before: “Last night,” he wrote, “I went on writing the outline of my anatomical paper till I just couldn’t keep my eyes open.” Did this mean he was no longer taking cocaine in the evenings, that he had learned to avoid getting “wound up” too late in the day? He was evidently using the drug in Paris as a social lubricant—to combat shyness, to calm himself in company, to loosen his tongue—but not, perhaps, as an aid in his academic work.

  Two weeks later, still in Paris, Freud wrote to Martha:

  It is now 6 P.M. and at 9:30 I am going to Charcot’s, not without the fear of having a most unamusing evening. Needless to say, I have fewer preparations to make than for the first time, but I have felt so out of sorts all day that I haven’t done any work.

  Later in the same letter he suddenly admitted:

  The bit of cocaine I have just taken is making me talkative, my little woman. I will go on writing and comment on your criticism of my wretched self …

  And two pages later:

  Oh, how I run on! I really wanted to say something quite different. Here I am, making silly confessions to you, my sweet darling, and really without any reason whatever unless it is the cocaine that makes me talk so much.

  The letter included a postscript, time-stamped, as it were, 12:30 A.M.:

  Thank God it’s over and I can tell you at once how right I was. It was so boring I nearly burst; only the bit of cocaine prevented me from doing so.

  But in his first article on the subject Freud had written:

  The effect of a moderate dose of coca fades away so gradually that, in normal circumstances, it is difficult to define its duration. If one works intensively while under the influence of coca, after from three to five hours there is a decline in the feeling of well-being, and a further dose of coca is necessary in order to ward off fatigue.

  So, if he had taken that first bit of coke at 6:00, when he was writing the letter, it would have more or less worn off by the time he reached Charcot’s at 9:30, three and a half hours later; in any case, it certainly couldn’t have staved off boredom for the entire evening. Unless he was now taking immoderate doses, one had to assume he had taken a further dose before going to Charcot’s. And when he returned to his room after midnight, he sat down to write a letter to Martha. He must have realized he was going to be awake all night.

  Devon again had to pass Clyde’s bedroom on his way back to the garage. This time he looked in, a solicitous but unworried smile on his face. Usually Clyde lay on his back with his head propped up by two or three pillows, staring dolefully out the door, waiting for sleep as though for a visitor (or, Devon sometimes thought, for death). But the room was dark and Devon could see nothing. He lingered there in the doorway for a moment, his smile frozen, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Clyde had not been sleeping well since his return from the hospital, and Barb had asked Devon to keep an eye on him.

  A grunt emerged at last from the darkness. “What is it?,” Clyde muttered.

  “How you feeling?”

  “Fine,” said Clyde.

  “Good,” said Devon, sincerely. It was good that Clyde was feeling fine. It was no holiday being shut up in the hospital, even if you had someone like Barb there to look out for you, to bring you books and illicit snacks. Devon would never forget the one and a half days he’d spent “under observation” in that hospital, eight months ago now, after what Barb and others gently referred to as his “breakdown” but which he preferred to call his crack-up. But that had been different.

  “Good,” he said again.

  Clyde said nothing.

  “Well, good night.”

  “Yeah, all right.”

  In the kitchen Devon gulped two glasses of cool, delicious water. He felt that he was on the verge of a major discovery. It was almost a physical sensation, this feeling that the world’s doors were unlocking themselves and waiting for him to step forward and open them.

  He did not need Barb’s sly, condescending look of approval to remind him that he had not felt this good in months. Only now that he was feeling good again, right again, could he admit to himself that he had gone through something like a period of depression. At the time, he’d sworn that there was nothing wrong with him; it was not him but life itself that was fucked up. But of course that was the tricky thing about depression: it so thoroughly blackened your view that everything you looked at, anything you turned your thoughts to, appeared black enough to be the cause of your unhappiness. It was all too easy when you were depressed to look at the world and say: No wonder I’m depressed—how fucking depressing it all is!

  Devon supposed one also had to guard against the opposite fallacy. Perhaps happiness bathed everything in a golden light, made anything you looked at seem the probable cause of your happiness. But no, his newfound optimism was not delusive or manic; it was simply normal. This was what it felt like to be alive and healthy. This was the way a well-fed cerebral cortex was supposed to feel. His depression had made him forget this feeling, made him forget that time could be relied on to unfold its promises. Depression was a sort of temporal cage: inside it, you simply could not imagine that anything would ever change or improve; you were chaine
d to the wheel of this one endless moment of misery. But when you were not depressed, the future lay spread out before you like a landscape of possibilities. When you knew with an overpowering, bodily certainty that the present moment was not an isolated prison cell but a vestibule opening onto a vast field where there was fresh air and room to run, you felt almost omnipotent.

  “Hey!,” Clyde called from his room.

  “Sorry!”

  Devon turned the light in the kitchen back on. Clyde needed the lights in all adjacent rooms and hallways to be on at all times, even while he slept. He also could not abide closed doors anywhere in the house (the bathroom door was his only grudging exception). He had, since his return from the hospital, become even more obstinate in these demands. As far as Devon could tell, Clyde did not fear anything imaginary, like monsters or ghosts, but rather feared broken communication. That was also why he refused to be left alone, why he needed to have someone in the house with him at all times: he needed to know that if he ever called for help, someone would hear him.

  “Sorry,” Devon said again, then returned to the garage and to Freud.

  There were very few direct references to cocaine in Freud’s published works. At least, the index volume of Winston’s battered old Standard Edition listed only a handful of page numbers under that word. There were the confessional dream analyses in The Interpretation of Dreams. There was a potted summary of “the cocaine episode” in his Autobiographical Study. Then, tucked away in the Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, there was this: