Freud & The Cocaine Episode in Context

This essay was originally posted on January 5, 2015

Coca in Context: From The Andes to Paris & Atlanta

An early documentation of the use of the medicinal properties of the coca plant came from the Spanish friar, Vincente de Valverde, reporting on the importance of the coca tree to the Incas:

"...coca, which is the leaf of a small tree that resembles the sumac found in our own Castile, is one thing that the Indians are ne'er without in their mouths, that they say sustains them and gives them refreshment, so that, even under the sun they feel not the heat, and it is worth its weight in gold in these parts, accounting for the major portion of the tithes."¹

It was not long until quantities of the medicinal plant were being exported from South America to Europe and the United States, where Western "medicine men" began making coca infused beverages and tonics. Historian Howard Markel points to an 1817 article published Gentleman's Magazine to illustrate the European fascination with coca:

"[The Indians] masticate Coca and undergo the greatest fatigue without any injury to health or bodily vigor. They want neither butcher nor baker, nor brewer, no distiller, nor fuel, nor culinary utensils."²

According to Markel, the article called for immediate scientific research to uncover the wisdom of the power of Coca.

By the mid-nineteenth century, coca leaves were being analyzed for their chemical structure. In Germany, Albert Niemann earned his doctorate by developing a method for extracting the coca alkaloid from the leaf in 1860.³  As academics and pharmaceutical laboratories were investigating the chemical properties of coca, medicine men of a different sort were developing tonics and a variety of coca-infused beverages. One of the most popular and successful of these libations was Vin Mariani, a coca wine developed by the French chemist Angelo Mariani. By the turn of the century, Vin Mariani had become the choice intoxicant of many celebrities and artists. Mariani published a collection of celebrity endorsements for his wine in a book entitled Portraits from Album Mariani.⁴

In 1859 the influential Italian neurologist and fiction writer, Paolo Mantegazza, published an influential paper On the Hygenic and Medicinal Virtues of Coca.⁵  Sigmund Freud was an avid reader of Mantegazza's fiction.⁶

The Myth of Freud's Iceberg Model

Originally published on February 29, 2012

The 1933 illustration Freud used to depict the psyche.

About ten years ago I was heading to teach a class in introductory psychology at a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. As I walked passed the social sciences office I encountered a box of books marked "free". Little did I know that the box contained an out of print gem, Robert C. Bolles' The Story of Psychology: A Thematic History.