The story of Freud's involvement with cocaine and how it affected research long after he died... The book tells of a number of drug related tragedies Freud was involved in including the death of Ernest Fleischl and that of the less well known Otto Gross who was a good analyst, a cocaine addict and has advanced ideas about sex which led him to founding an orgiastic commune in Italy. Freud devotees will be unhappy with the book because it depicts their hero as all too human but it is a balanced view!

Contains all of Freud's "cocaine papers," his letters, notes, dreams, and recollections on the subject, together with the most pertinent writings from the 19th century to the present on Freud and cocaine. Bibliography: p. 399-400. Includes index.

Examines the history of cocaine from its first medical uses to the worldwide issues it presents today.

The story of Freud's involvement with cocaine and how it affected research long after he died... The book tells of a number of drug related tragedies Freud was involved in including the death of Ernest Fleischl and that of the less well known Otto Gross who was a good analyst, a cocaine addict and has advanced ideas about sex which led him to founding an orgiastic commune in Italy. Freud devotees will be unhappy with the book because it depicts their hero as all too human but it is a balanced view!

This book depicts how Freud’s cocaine and Benjamin’s hashish illustrate two critiques of modernity and two messianic emancipations through the pleasures of intoxicating discourse. Freud discovered the “libido” and “unconscious” in the industrial mimetic scheme of cocaine, whereas Benjamin found an inspiration for his critique of phantasmagoria and its variant psychoanalysis in hashish’s mimesis. In addition, as part of the history of colonialism, both drugs generated two distinct colonial discourses and, consequently, two different understandings of the emancipatory powers of pleasure, the unconscious, and dreams. After all, great ideas don't liberate; they intoxicate.

A wide array of writers pen their thoughts on cocaine, including Irvine Welsh, Bret Easton Ellis, William S. Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Conan Doyle, and many others. Original.