In 1904, Freud delivered a lecture before the Wiener medizinisches Doktorenkollegium entitled “On Psychotherapy” (1905a, pp. 257–270) In this address Freud tried to elucidate some of the pitfalls of treating patients with the method of psychotherapy. He made it clear that while the therapist may expect the patient to make him a present of his secrets, the therapist needs to allow time to take its course. He cannot drag the secret of a depression out of his patient (ibid., p. 262).
These secrets are intimately connected with the conflicts that exist in and between people. Freud focused on the clash of opposing desires and feelings to explain the emergence of clinical symptoms. As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, “On Opposites,” the development of language can serve to mask and unmask many of these conflicting elements. Freud himself deployed a military metaphor, a battlefield, to show how the mind is often at war with and within itself.
The first Lubavitcher Rebbe, Schneur Zalman of Liadi (the “Alter Rebbe”) also believed that the “animal soul” (Nefesh B’hamit), which has to do with physical pleasures, especially pride and self-inflation, and the “godly soul” (Nefesh Elokit), which has to do with transcendent experience, were at war with each other. He compared the physical body to a “small city,” and said the two souls were like two kings, each trying to capture the city and dominate the populace (Tanya, op. cit., ch. 9, p. 37).1
The effects of this warfare tend to surface as a state of despondency, confusion, hopelessness, helplessness, sorrow, worry, and worthlessness. Whatever they are doing people exclaim they cannot carry on. Even worse, they tend to suffer a plethora of physical complaints, including fatigue, headaches, heartaches, in other words, severe malaise.
This constellation of symptoms encompasses some of the reasons why the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, the Rashab, consulted Freud in 1903. He felt he was nothing and had accomplished nothing. Clearly this was not the case. But he kept repeating, “Where am I? Where do I turn? What should I say?” (Y. Y. Schneersohn, op. cit., p. 42).
Freud asked the Rashab to give a detailed account of his daily routine, how and why he did what he did. The Rebbe elaborated the substantial demands that the head (the intellect) makes on the heart (the emotions, desires) in the Chassidic Weltanschauung or worldview. Freud correctly realized that for the Rebbe the basic connections between his head and his heart had been broken and needed to be repaired. His diagnosis was that “His head grasps what his heart cannot endure.” Or, from another angle, the Rashab suffered deep despair because his feelings could not cope with what his mind perceived.
In the Tanya (Teachings) the Alter Rebbe distinguished four different manifestations of a low, downtrodden, depressed state of mind. First he described “lowness of spirit,” what he called nemichat ruach. This condition commonly occurs when a person is unable to achieve what he would like to do. The contemporary dancer and choreographer, Michael Clark, has eloquently described the gloom of nemichat ruach: “Frankly, nothing’s ever good enough, that’s what drives me insane. I just keep scrapping and redoing it [the dance routine]. It’s part of the training as a dancer, you’re never good enough” (Jobey, 2013, p. 24).
Second, there is “contriteness of heart,” or in Hebrew, lev nishbar. The experience is akin to an unfathomable dread, especially when an individual becomes aware of his personal or spiritual inadequacies and failings. Lev nishbar also describes a profound sadness when confronted by the realization that one is not fighting strongly enough against the evil impulse (the yetzer harah). The latter includes all the destructive wishes that interfere with the relationship between man and man, and man and God (Tanya, op. cit., chs. 29 & 30).
Then there is atzvut which signifies “sadness or melancholy.” It is the closest to what we can recognize as a clinical depression. Indeed, atzvut is often translated as “black depression.” The term literally means constricted. The Chassidic commentator, Levy Weinberg, points out that atzvut is a numbness that squeezes one’s heart (emotional center) and blocks out all feelings. In consequence the heart is as “dull as a stone” and is “flat without vitality” (1987, p. 407). Atzvut projects despondency and deadness. It is an emanation of the shade (dark, demonic, evil) side of the self. In Hebrew related words convey sorrow, suffering, edginess, irritability, and nervous tension (ibid., p. 406).2
Besides atzvut, there is a fourth degree of depression known in Chassidus (chassidic thought) as merrirut hanefesh, which translates as “bitterness of the soul.” This is state of deep remorse and fury about one’s human or spiritual failings. It is a condition that does not necessarily lead to melancholia or the implosion of the self. It is a challenge to transform one’s life. The bitterness and accompanying anger are all essential components of the process that can enable a person to extricate himself from despondency.
Unlike in conventional psychiatry, the Tanya emphasizes that bitterness (merrirut hanefesh) is one of two depressive states where a person is not necessarily stuck or blocked. The other is remorse (lev nishbar). Nishbar also means broken, so lev nishbar can be freely translated as brokenhearted. In this state a person may be sad, but also be someone who has chosen to face his personal losses and shortcomings. Consequently, both bitterness and remorse can be seen as calls to action.3
The term that described the Rashab was nemichat ruach, an expression which is analogous to low self-esteem. This term also denotes humility. A person suffering from lowness in spirit realizes that he has a long way to go to reach his goals. For Chassidim this is not self-pathology but rather an expression of humbleness. Ultimately these contrary conceptions of depressive or doleful feelings teach us that there are two main kinds of depression. One is rooted in physical and emotional states beclouded by mixtures of good and evil. This parallels the psychoanalytic concepts of envy and narcissism. It is close to our psychological understanding of depression—related to guilt, shame, and conflicts over need and dependency. The other kind of depression is spiritually inspired, and according to the Tanya, is not depression at all but rather like an emotional hiccup, a lowness about one’s spiritual failings, a momentary sadness, which can then be used as an effective weapon against despair.
Freud’s formulations of lowness of spirit and black depression are not dissimilar to his understanding of melancholia. A person rejects someone or something he has loved or liked (the “cathected object”) and identifies with its negative representation (the “rejecting object”). As a result, he suffers severe self-reproach because he feels hostile toward someone or something that he had previously liked, and consequently feels overwhelmed with guilt. But to overcome the guilt, the person may try to merge with or become attached to his prior foci (Freud, 1917e, pp. 243–258; see also Gay, op. cit., pp. 372–377). This makes matters even worse. Then the subject dislikes or hates himself all the more, for taking into himself (introjecting) and becoming part of loved objects which have turned bad.
How can a person overcome this poisonous situation? In Freud’s view he needs to disconnect the hated or “rejecting object” from its attachment with his ego (or his “self” or “soul”). Needless to say this is not easily done. But in order to minimize the risks of endless ruminations and self-denigrations, the hating or “rejecting self” has to become conscious of its anger toward the original source of hurt. The awareness of such anger, akin to bitterness (merrirut), will break the cycle.
Freud called anger at the lost love object “hate.” He long realized that “aggression” was an essential component of an ostensibly loving relationship, and that all such relationships were ambivalent (ibid., p. 372). Interestingly, the Matabele tribes of Zimbabwe do not have separate words for “love” and “hate.” They use one word which signifies love/hate or hate/love. Which emotion predominates depends on the inflection of the voice of the speaker.4
Freud’s seminal paper on “Mourning and Melancholia” was written during the First World War. Hence he was acutely aware of the power of aggression in human relationships. He also saw the extent to which the melancholic directs sadistic rage for others back toward himself with unmitigated severity.
In the Tanya the Alter Rebbe advised that to overcome the self-abasement and self-punishment that occurs during a relentless bout of lowness of spirit (nemichat ruach), a person has to redirect his aggression into soul-searching and use it as a weapon against his evil inclination. Then, when he gets angry with his anger, he will be able to overcome his “stuckness” and constricting preoccupations. But not only that, the redirection will transform low spirits into joy, a joy that would not have been possible without the preceding depression (Weinberg, op. cit., p. 411).
It is instructive to consider the depressions that Freud suffered in the light of these four categories: lowness of spirits, remorse or grief, melancholia, and bitterness. In his paper on “Psychical (or Mental) Treatment” Freud noted that:
It is a matter of common knowledge that extraordinary changes occur in the facial expression, in the circulation, in the excretions and in the state of tension of the voluntary muscles under the influence of fear, rage and mental pain … less well known is that … persistent affective [emotional] states of a distressing or “depressive” nature (as they are called), such as sorrow, worry or grief, reduce the state of nourishment of the whole body, cause the hair to turn white, the fat to disappear and the walls of the blood-vessels to undergo morbid changes. (1890a, op. cit., p. 287)5
Freud himself was afflicted by many similar physical ailments. These included recurrent cardiac arrhythmias, shortness of breath, chronic indigestion, headaches (especially before visiting his mother), and fainting spells (related to conflicts with colleagues). In one such episode after giving up smoking his beloved cigars for three weeks he wrote to his friend, Wilhelm Fliess:
Then suddenly there came a severe cardiac oppression, greater than I had before giving up smoking. I had violent arrhythmias, with constant tension, pressure and burning in the heart area, burning pains down my left arm, some dyspnea—suspiciously moderate, as though organic—all occurring in attacks lasting continuously for two-thirds of the day, accompanied by depression which took the form of visions of death and departure, in place of the normal frenzy of activity. (Krüll, op. cit., p. 15; my emphasis)6
Freud’s physician, Max Schur, has pointed out that his letter to Fliess contained a lot of “faults and slips,” and that these were expressions of Freud’s extremely ambivalent feelings toward his illness and, indeed, toward himself. In the same letter Freud remarked: “It is embarrassing for a medical man, who spends all the hours of the day struggling to gain an understanding of the neuroses, not to know whether he is suffering from a reasonable or a hypochondriacal depression” (1950a, op. cit., p. 82).
In addition Freud suffered off and on from a generalized malaise characterized by fatigue, weakness, irritation, dejection, indigestion, and flatulence which, in his time, was known as “neurasthenia.” Nowadays this diagnosis has fallen into disuse, but it is clearly related to the contemporary condition called “chronic fatigue syndrome.” In a letter of 10 February 1886 to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, he noted that he and his half-brother Emanuel and sister Rosa all had “a nicely developed tendency towards neurasthenia.”7
He wondered why this happened, whether it had tangible causes or, as we can see from his comments to Fliess, whether it was “hypochondriacal,” that is, originated in internal, usually unconscious, emotional conflicts. The answer, as we have seen in the previous chapters, was that he was assailed from all angles, intrapsychically and interpersonally, by intense family, social, and professional pressures. I refer to the intermittent friction between Freud and his parents, his half-brothers, his wife, and his wife’s parents; his loathing of religious observance and fear of anti-Semitism; as well as the complications of maintaining a practice while establishing a new discipline. Freud responded with ferocious ambition which led to an array of mental and physical symptoms when frustrated. To a large extent he deployed his prodigious intellect and capacity for hard work to overcome severe self-doubts. But when these “solutions” did not suffice, he felt in such “low spirits” that he thought he might never emerge from his malaise.
The second category of depression from which Freud suffered was loss and remorse. Nonetheless, he appeared to overcome his upset after his nursemaid, Resi Wittek, was suddenly banished from the family, or when his mother, Amalie, came down with tuberculosis, and had to spend long periods away in the Carpathian Mountains, or after his teacher, Ernst Brücke, advised him against pursuing the academic career he craved. Nor was Freud grief stricken when his father, Jacob, passed away, an event which Freud called “the most decisive loss of a man’s life” (Gay, op. cit., p. 89).
But there were two losses which did shake Freud to the depths of his heart. The first occurred in January 1920, when his daughter Sophie, on whom he had doted since she was little girl, with “her curled hair and wreaths of forget-me-nots on her head,” suddenly succumbed to the virulent influenza that had been sweeping across Europe in the wake of the war. Freud commiserated with her husband, Max: “It is a senseless brutal act of fate which has taken our Sophie from us, something that one cannot wrack one’s brain about, a blow under which we have to bow our heads, poor helpless human beings that we are” (Clark, op. cit., p. 401).
Freud said further to a friend, Kata Levy, a Hungarian former analysand: “I don’t know whether cheerfulness will ever call on us again. My poor wife has been hit too hard.” But he added that he had too much work “… to mourn my Sophie properly” (Gay, op. cit., p. 392).
An even worse loss occurred three years later when Sophie’s youngest son, Heinele, died aged four from miliary tuberculosis. The boy had been visiting Vienna. The whole family adored him. Freud anguished, “[The boy] … was an enchanting fellow, I have hardly ever loved a human being, certainly never a child, a much as him” (ibid., p. 421). Freud complained that life had lost all meaning for him and confessed that for the first time in his life he felt terribly depressed. Although he rarely cried, this time he wept profusely. The loss of little Heinele in June 1923 was one of the most painful events in his life. It left him with a broken heart (ibid., p. 422; see also E. Freud, L. Freud, & Grubrich-Simitis, op. cit., p. 27).
Freud’s recollections about his grandson were remarkable because he had suffered from recurrent depressions since childhood. Perhaps he meant that this bout was the most severe, for it must have been exacerbated by distant memories of the deaths of his brother Julius and his uncle Julius in the spring of 1858. Although very young at the time, it is likely that these events affected him directly, and indirectly through his mother, Amalie. She became emotionally unavailable to him when her infant son and favorite sibling both fell sick and passed away within a month of each other. These losses were compounded when his nursemaid was summarily dismissed and his mother herself spent long periods away recovering from TB. Too often important women in his infancy and childhood suddenly vanished.
So from mourning we move to melancholia. Again one can see how Freud used his own experience to make significant discoveries about unconscious processes. That was his genius! In this instance the presumed rage with abandoning women leads love to turn to hate, hate to guilt, and guilt to anguish and despair. For Freud a further implication was that men are more reliable than women, but all attachments (since his father was often on the road) are dangerous.
The effect is continuous warfare in zones of the interior between angels and demons, Eros and Thanatos, the impulse of love and the impetus to hate. From infancy to adulthood these battles engage the darkest recesses of the self and of the soul: envy, greed, jealousy, and narcissism. They raise elemental issues about life and death, despair and repair, and are fought over thoughts (conscious, preconscious, and unconscious), words (SHaD and SHaDe, the good breast and the bad breast), and actions (destructive or constructive). As with sex, Freud opened these areas for consideration. His followers did more. Analysts are still struggling with the consequences of trying to understand what most people do not want to accept.
Experientially, deep depression is much more intense than low spirits. To use a contemporary metaphor the former is hard programmed. The conflicting impulses have become part of the very structure of the self. In contrast low spirits reflect the program, but not necessarily the structure. So it is easier to change the program through changes in cognition. That being said, both states are hard to shift because both involve powerful projective and introjective processes that create distorted realities. The former tend to be violent evacuations, such as described by the nineteenth-century English philosopher, Francis Bacon, who saw: “… the ejaculation or irradiation [of the mind] emitteth some malign and poisonous spirit, which can take hold of the spirit of another” (1890, p. 64). The purpose of these “ejaculations! are twofold. One is defensive, to get rid of disturbing ideas or feelings. The other is offensive, to control others’ insides, to attack and damage them out of envy and greed. Then the outside world, whether people, places, or things can become very dangerous and threatening. And also one’s own inner world may be split into different territories, riddled with grudges, full of anger and guilt, anxiety, and shame.
The added name given to the terrible mood that follows such feelings is “endogenous.” Why? Because it is a blackness that comes from within, and appears to be of unknown origin, as compared to lowness of spirits which can often be traced to specific events or ideas, and, therefore, is seen as “reactive.” The truth is that both states are reactive. But the antecedents of a severe depression lie deeper, more repressed, and therefore harder to understand. These are the nasty bits of anger and rage which Freud realized could become critical elements attacking a person from the inside of the self. They are invariably part of an oppressive superego.
This situation contrasts with lowness of spirits where the internal criticisms are also exacting, but not as violent. They tend to be related to the “ego-ideal,” the part of the self which demands that a person be more and do more with his life. Still, as the dancer, Michael Clark, pointed out, it can make you crazy, because “Nothing is ever good enough.”8
Bitterness is the fourth kind of depressive malaise. It is the counterpoint to a constricting, shriveling, death-like descent into nothingness. Bitterness bursts with acid and acrimony. It is a vitality that demands revenge for real or imagined hurts. Freud himself was no stranger to bitter recriminations, especially when confronted with threats to his ideas or authority. These corroded his former friendships with Josef Breuer and Wilhelm Fliess. They also undermined his professional relations with Wilhelm Stekel, Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung, all of whom were members of Freud’s inner circle.
Stekel was a founder member of the Wednesday Society which became the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, as well as a founder and co-editor (along with Adler) of the journal, Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, where many of the basic concepts of psychoanalysis were first presented. Although initially an adherent of Freud, Stekel developed his own ideas about symbolism in dreams, psychic conflict, and technique, many of which conflicted with Freud’s. He also was a major supporter of Adler in the bitter battle for influence and power in the society.
As the friction between them escalated, Freud became ever more dismissive of Stekel as a wayward character full of “moronic petty jealousies.” In private he called Stekel an impudent liar, an “uneducable individual” … an intolerable “swine” (Gay, op. cit., p. 214). During this struggle Stekel compared himself to Freud saying that a dwarf on the shoulders of a giant could see farther than the giant. Freud retorted, “That may be true, but a louse on the head of an astronomer does not” (Clark, op. cit., pp. 314–315).
Eventually Stekel resigned from the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, but refused to give up editorship of the Zentralblatt. Freud was incensed but the American publisher of the journal, Trigant Burrow, backed Stekel (ibid., p. 315). Freud licked his wounds then started a new publication: the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, now known in English as the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.9 This vignette again demonstrates how a bitter dispute can become a call to action.
Adler, like Stekel, was initially welcomed into the psychoanalytic circles, before he was spewed out as a dangerous heretic. It was not just that his ideas clashed with Freud’s, but his dress (“sloppy”), personal mannerisms (“tactless”), and therapeutic style were also totally different. Even worse, Adler disparaged Freud’s emphasis on unconscious libidinal processes. He preferred to focus on conscious feelings of inferiority (“the inferiority complex”) and discrepancies in power in social relations.
Freud was furious with what he saw as Adler‘s political manipulations within the Psychoanalytical Society. He wrote to Jung in 1910:
[He] is a very decent and highly intelligent man, but he is paranoid … He is always claiming priority, putting new names on everything, complaining that he is disappearing under my shadow, and forcing me into the unwelcome role of the aging despot who prevents young men from getting ahead. They are also rude to me personally [referring to Adler and Stekel]. I’d gladly get rid of them both. (Clark, op. cit., p. 307)
Freud was despondent that Adler would remain a thorn in his side. Then he and his supporters found a way to precipitate a showdown with Adler by inviting him to explain his views at a meeting of the Vienna Society in 1911. These clearly deviated from the “right path,” and Adler resigned from the society. He too was bitter about what happened, but felt encouraged to found his own school of “individual psychology” (ibid., pp. 308–309).
Freud himself remained unrepentant about the break. Years later he wrote of the “specific venomousness” of Adler and of his “uncontrolled craving for priority.” When Adler suddenly died from a cerebral hemorrhage at a scientific meeting in Aberdeen, Freud was triumphant. He remarked to the writer, Arnold Zweig: “For a Jew boy out of a Viennese suburb, death in Aberdeen is … [a just reward] for having contradicted psychoanalysis” (ibid., p. 311).10
But the biggest, the most bitter conflict was with Carl Jung, because Freud had laid so many hopes on him as the “heir apparent” of psychoanalysis. I have already discussed the incompatibility of their views on science and religion. This split deepened as Jung began to reinterpret Freud’s beliefs and, in particular, the preeminence of sexuality in his formulations. This made a titanic struggle between them inevitable, with Freud the older man, the commander-in-chief of the psychoanalytic movement, and Jung, his younger and very ambitious protégé. It is ironic that while Freud was said to “have sex on the brain,” his sex life seems to have ended after he produced six children. On the other hand, Jung, who purported to be a “man of the spirit”, had a long affair with Sabina Spielrein and other lovers. Evidently, Jung was no slouch on the couch. Freud himself touched upon the inconsistencies in Jung’s public views: “Anyone who promises mankind liberation from the hardship of sex will be hailed as a hero, let him talk whatever nonsense he chooses” (ibid., p. 335).
There was one specific moment when Freud’s engagement with Jung soured. He had traveled to Kreuzlingen, near Lake Constance, not an easy journey, to visit Ludwig Binswanger, a Swiss psychiatrist, who had become a close friend and was seriously ill. Jung lived relatively close by and could have easily arranged to meet him. But he did not. Freud felt snubbed and very hurt by this action, rather inaction, on the part of Jung. It greatly exacerbated the professional tensions that had been growing between them (ibid., p. 318). Two years later (1914) Freud published a polemic, “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement” with the aim of showing that the theories of Adler and Jung were incompatible with psychoanalysis (ibid., p. 334; quoted by Clark from Freud, 1914d, p. 4).
Freud suspected that part of the problem between them was that Jung related to him as his father who had been a pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church. When Jung was taken by the work of the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, Freud snarled to Ernest Jones: “So you see, he [has] found another Jew for his father complex” (ibid., p. 335).11
It was not long before the inevitable rupture occurred. Freud bitterly complained to James Putnam, the Boston neurologist who was his most influential supporter in the States:
I must protect myself against people who have called themselves my pupils for many years and who owe everything to my stimulus. Now I must accuse them and reject them. I am not a quarrelsome person [but] … I am not in favor of sloppy compromises, nor would I sacrifice anything for the sake of an unproductive reconciliation. (ibid., p. 334)12
In a letter to Freud Jung also bitterly complained about the way he felt treated. In response Freud proposed to terminate their relationship. Afterwards both men were very upset and Jung came close to suffering a nervous breakdown (Krüll, op. cit., p. 192). Jung’s letter of 18 December 1912 read:
I would … point out that your technique of treating your pupils like patients is a blunder. In that way you produce either slavish sons or impudent puppies (Adler-Stekel and the whole insolent gang now throwing their weight about in Vienna). I am objective enough to see through your little trick. You go around sniffing out all the symptomatic actions in your vicinity, thus reducing everyone to the levels of sons and daughters who blushingly admit the existence of their faults. Meanwhile, you remain on top as the father, sitting pretty. For sheer obsequiousness nobody dares to pluck the prophet by the beard and inquire for once what you would say to a patient with a tendency to analyze the analyst instead of himself. You would certainly ask him_ “Who’s got the neurosis?” You know, of course, how far a patient gets with self-analysis: not out of his neurosis—just llke you. If ever you should rid yourself entirely of your complexes and stop playing the father to your sons and instead of aiming continually at their weak spots took a good look at your own for a change, then I will mend my ways and at one stroke uproot the vice of being in two minds about you. (ibid., p. 192)
Even here, Jung wrote of being in “two minds,” which indicated a part of himself which wanted to love and respect his mentor. But Freud was not open to this. Instead he “mourned” the loss of his close colleague, former friend and “heir,” by writing the fourth section of Totem and Taboo, which elucidates the primeval horde (the sons) who kill and eat their violent and jealous father. Given the juxtaposition of these bitter exchanges, it is likely that the “horde” refers to Jung (Krüll, op. cit., p. 193).13
After the break Jung established a new venture which he called “analytical psychology,” and which became internationally successful. He lectured widely and wrote many papers and books which elaborated now well-established concepts such as “archetypes,” “complexes,” “the collective unconscious,” and “synchronicity.” His “revenge” was that many of his ideas originated in his discussions with Freud, or for that matter, Sabina Spielrein, usually without crediting the source.14 Jung also became overtly anti-Semitic with well-documented remarks about the difference between “Aryan psychology” and “Jewish psychology.”15
Although shaken by Jung’s departure, Freud was also delighted. Months later, in a letter to Abraham he declaimed: “So we are at last rid of them, the brutal, sanctimonious Jung and his disciples … All my life I have been looking for friends who would not exploit and then betray me …” (Clark, op. cit., p. 336).16
Because his relationships with colleagues could, and often did, become strained, Freud expected “treason” and “betrayal.” Moreover, he tended to look on the dark side of things and held that evil outweighs goodness. To a large extent he used his prodigious intellect to help overcome such thoughts. But despairing moments continued to haunt him. With this in mind we can say that he created psychoanalysis to help cure his own low spirits and depression. In so doing he was generally successful.
Otherwise he used tobacco and cocaine to enhance his moods. A good cigar was a favorite pastime. He smoked upwards of twenty a day for years. There were occasional breaks of several months on doctors’ orders, but he always returned to his smokes, even when his mouth was half eaten by cancer. His daughter Anna recalls that although he was generous with her, Freud hardly bought anything for himself except cigars (Gay, op. cit., p. 393).17
In 1884 Freud read that exhausted Bavarian soldiers became strong and capable of long marches after taking coca. Freud was fascinated by the report and ordered some to see if it worked for “nervous exhaustion.” First he tried it on himself. In his monograph, “Über Coca”, he reported:
I took 0.05 g. of cocaïnum muriaticum in a 1% water solution when I was feeling slightly out of sorts with fatigue … it has a bitter taste, which yields afterwards to a series of very pleasant aromatic flavors … A few minutes after taking cocaine, one experiences a sudden exhilaration and feeling of lightness … The psychic effect in doses of 0.05–0.10 g. consists of exhilaration and lasting euphoria … One senses an increase of self-control and feels more vigorous and more capable of work. (Freud, 1884e, pp. 289–314)18
Freud was so pleased with the effects on himself that he was soon giving the coca to family, friends, colleagues, and patients. It seemed that he had found a magic potion to overcome life’s miseries as he enthusiastically addressed his fiancée, Martha in a letter of 2 June 1884:
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 forward, 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. In my last severe depression I took coca again and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I am just now busy collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance. (ibid., p. 59)
In an essay on the religious practices of South American Indians Freud was keen to mention that coca was “a gift from the gods, to satisfy the hungry, fortify the weary, and make the unfortunate forget their sorrows” (E. Jones, 1953, op. cit., p. 82 in Bakan, op. cit., p. 203). Consequently, he believed that cocaine could be useful in overcoming morphine addiction and introduced it to a close friend, Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow. He was a doctor who had become an addict after suffering excruciating nerve pain following an infection acquired while performing an autopsy. But Fleischl-Marxow developed a “cocaine psychosis” replete with “white snakes creeping over his skin.” Sadly, he never recovered from his pain or opiate addiction (Markel, 2011, pp. 74–79). Apparently Freud was so guilt-ridden by his friend’s descent into madness and his inability to help him that he kept a picture of him on the wall of his study for the rest of his life (ibid., p. 78).
Years later Freud confessed to Wilhelm Fliess that his consumption had gotten out of control. He found he needed more and more to have the same effect. He also started to smoke cigars again after a long period of abstinence (due to heart symptoms) (ibid., p. 174). Then, in 1896, with “superhuman” effort, he stopped using cocaine altogether (ibid., p. 226).