The Man Behind the Couch Had a Few Things Going On
In June 1899, Martha Freud counted the bottles of Marsala wine in her home and put them away. She wasn’t taking inventory for a dinner party. She was concerned about how much her husband was drinking when he was alone.
We know this because Sigmund Freud told his close friend Wilhelm Fliess about it in a letter. The physician who would become famous for explaining unconscious desires, hidden motivations, and the peculiar ways people deceive themselves had developed a fondness for fortified Sicilian wine. Martha apparently felt that a little household intervention was in order.
At the time, Freud was working on The Interpretation of Dreams, the book that would help establish him as one of the most influential figures in psychology. He was exhausted, frustrated by his lack of progress, and finding comfort in alcohol. While he was attempting to unravel the mysteries of the human mind, his wife was keeping track of the liquor.
And the wine wasn’t his first encounter with a mind-altering substance.
Years earlier, Freud had developed a fascination with cocaine. He experimented with it, praised its effects, recommended it to patients, and continued using it well into the period when he was developing his early psychoanalytic ideas.
The man who devoted his career to understanding why people behave as they do had his own complicated relationship with substances that alter behavior.
Which raises an intriguing question. How much of Freud’s understanding of the human mind was influenced by what he was putting into his own?
Cocaine Seemed Like a Wonderful Idea at the Time
In 1884, Sigmund Freud was a 28-year-old physician living in Vienna. He was ambitious, intelligent, and searching for a medical discovery that might establish his reputation. He also wanted to earn enough money to marry Martha Bernays, to whom he was engaged.
Then cocaine caught his attention.
Today, the word brings to mind addiction, overdoses, and the considerable harm stimulants can cause. In the late nineteenth century, however, cocaine was attracting serious medical interest. Physicians were exploring its potential to relieve fatigue, treat depression, manage pain, and even help people overcome morphine dependence.
Its addictive potential was poorly understood, and an ambitious young doctor could reasonably see a promising opportunity.
Freud began experimenting on himself, observing how the drug affected his energy, mood, physical performance, and confidence. He was particularly impressed by the sense of well-being it produced.
In 1884, he published Über Coca, a paper describing the substance’s effects and possible medical applications. He enthusiastically promoted its potential, including its use as a treatment for morphine dependence.
Unfortunately, one of the people who tried that approach was Freud’s friend and fellow physician Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow.
Fleischl had become dependent on morphine after suffering a serious injury. Freud recommended cocaine as a possible solution, believing it might help relieve his friend’s dependence.
Instead, Fleischl developed severe problems with cocaine while continuing to struggle with morphine. What was supposed to offer relief introduced another dangerous complication. Freud had badly underestimated the risks of the treatment he was recommending.
It’s easy to wonder how a physician of his intelligence could have been so enthusiastic about something so dangerous. But Freud was practicing at a time when modern addiction medicine barely existed, and many substances now recognized as hazardous were being promoted as medical breakthroughs.
That context helps explain his enthusiasm. It doesn’t erase the consequences.
Nor did Freud’s relationship with cocaine end when those consequences became apparent.
Historical evidence indicates that he continued using the drug into the 1890s. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he even acknowledged using cocaine frequently to relieve nasal swelling around the time of a dream he experienced in 1895.
By then, he was developing ideas that would become central to psychoanalysis.
Whether Freud developed what we would now diagnose as cocaine use disorder remains uncertain. His letters and medical writings document repeated use, but they don’t provide enough information to establish a diagnosis using contemporary criteria.
What they do establish is that Freud personally experienced the psychological effects of cocaine, initially underestimated its dangers, and continued using it during an important period of his intellectual development.
And several years later, another substance appeared in his correspondence.
Then There Was the Marsala
By 1899, Freud was deep into the demanding work of completing The Interpretation of Dreams. His letters from that period reveal a man struggling with exhaustion, frustration, and dissatisfaction with his progress.
He had also discovered that Marsala could make an unpleasant afternoon a little more tolerable.
In a June 16 letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud explained that Martha had counted and put away the bottles of wine to discourage him from drinking for comfort when he was alone.
A few weeks later, he complained that he could manage only about two hours of work before calling upon what he referred to as his “Friend Marsala.”
In that July letter, Freud also described how the wine made his work seem less dreary than it did when he was sober.
It’s a revealing glimpse into his private life. Freud wasn’t presenting a theory or defending a medical treatment. He was confiding in a friend about his difficulty working and the relief alcohol seemed to provide.
And for all his intellectual accomplishments, he sounded remarkably familiar.
Anyone who has struggled through an exhausting project knows how appealing a little relief can become, particularly when frustration begins to outweigh progress. Freud happened to be writing a book that would influence generations of psychologists. The feelings he described were considerably more ordinary.
We don’t know exactly how much he was drinking or how frequently he became intoxicated. His letters suggest that alcohol had become a concern, but they don’t establish that he had alcohol use disorder.
They also don’t prove that The Interpretation of Dreams was written while he was intoxicated. Freud described using wine to make the work feel easier, but that isn’t enough to determine whether alcohol affected any particular argument or passage.
The surviving correspondence gives us a more intimate picture of Freud than the familiar portraits and textbook accounts.
He was a middle-aged physician struggling with his work and seeking comfort in alcohol. His wife was concerned enough to intervene, and he described the arrangement to a trusted friend.
For someone so interested in the motivations behind human behavior, his own behavior leaves us with plenty to consider.
Did His Daughter Reveal a Family Secret?
There is a more sensational version of Freud’s drinking history that occasionally circulates.
According to the story, his daughter Anna supposedly acknowledged that much of her father’s psychological theorizing occurred under the influence of alcohol.
You can understand why the claim attracts attention. The father of psychoanalysis was apparently drinking his way through the unconscious, and his own daughter eventually admitted it.
It’s a tremendous story. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a credible historical source confirming that Anna Freud ever made the statement.
Anna was an influential psychoanalyst in her own right, particularly known for her contributions to the study of defense mechanisms and child development. If she had made such a dramatic claim about her father’s work, an identifiable letter, interview, or published account would be important evidence.
Without that evidence, the statement shouldn’t be attributed to her as fact.
Freud’s own correspondence tells us enough without inventing a family confession. He used cocaine, recommended it medically, and misjudged its dangers. Years later, he described turning to alcohol for comfort during a difficult period of his work.
Those details are documented. The claim that most of his theories were developed while he was drunk is not.
But even without that alleged confession, there is a legitimate historical question about the relationship between Freud’s substance use and his developing psychological ideas.
Did Cocaine Help Create Psychoanalysis?
In 1992, psychologist Robert C. Fuller published a paper examining the relationship between Freud’s cocaine use and the development of his psychological theories.
Fuller proposed that cocaine may have altered Freud’s perceptions and thought processes in ways that influenced his movement away from traditional neurological explanations and toward psychoanalytic thinking.
It’s a provocative argument, although it remains an interpretation of historical evidence rather than an established conclusion.
From a clinical perspective, the possibility deserves consideration.
Cocaine affects brain systems involved in reward, motivation, and arousal. It can produce heightened energy, confidence, and an exaggerated sense of mental clarity. Thoughts may seem unusually important, connections may feel profound, and certainty can arrive long before there’s evidence to justify it.
Anyone who has worked with people experiencing stimulant intoxication has probably encountered some version of this phenomenon.
A person might spend hours following an elaborate chain of ideas, convinced they’ve finally understood something extraordinary. At three in the morning, the explanation seems capable of changing the world. By breakfast, it may be considerably less impressive.
The problem isn’t necessarily the idea itself. It’s that the feeling of having discovered something brilliant is not the same as having discovered something true.
Freud spent years studying a substance that altered his psychological experience. During those same years, he was developing ideas about the mind that would eventually become central to psychoanalysis.
Could those experiences have influenced the questions he asked, the connections he made, or the confidence he placed in certain explanations? It’s possible.
But Freud was also a trained neurologist, an accomplished scholar, and a prolific writer whose theories developed through years of clinical observation, intellectual exchange, and revision.
His entire intellectual legacy cannot reasonably be reduced to the effects of cocaine. At the same time, his personal experience with the drug is a legitimate part of the history researchers have tried to understand.
The evidence gives us reason to investigate the relationship, but not enough to determine precisely how cocaine affected his thinking.
And regardless of whether Freud developed a particular idea while completely sober or under the influence of a substance, its scientific validity would still depend on something else entirely.
The Bigger Problem With Freud Wasn’t Cocaine
Imagine that Freud never touched cocaine or developed a taste for Marsala.
Would his psychological theories suddenly become more scientifically credible?
Of course not. A theory’s validity doesn’t depend on whether its creator lived an admirable personal life. It depends on whether the evidence supports it.
Freud’s influence on psychology is enormous. He helped bring unconscious mental processes, childhood experiences, psychological defenses, and internal conflict into broader discussions of human behavior.
Those subjects remain important to contemporary psychology, although our understanding of them has changed considerably.
Other parts of Freud’s work haven’t aged nearly as well.
His psychosexual stages of development proposed that childhood experiences shape adult personality through a series of conflicts involving sexuality and bodily development. Many of their specific claims lack convincing empirical support.
Then there’s the Oedipus complex.
Freud believed that children experience unconscious sexual desires toward one parent and rivalry with the other, and that resolving these conflicts plays an important role in psychological development.
It’s an elaborate explanation for something that has proven remarkably difficult to demonstrate scientifically.
Contemporary research has moved beyond many of Freud’s original assumptions. We now investigate unconscious processing, attachment, emotional regulation, and defensive behavior using methods that Freud could scarcely have imagined.
Some of his ideas anticipated questions that remain important. Others were wrong, incomplete, or difficult to test meaningfully.
That’s part of how science develops. Researchers investigate explanations, challenge assumptions, and revise their understanding when new evidence becomes available.
What’s unusual about Freud is how comfortably his name continues to occupy a place in popular psychology, even when the evidence for a particular theory is weak.
People still refer to Freudian slips, repression, unresolved childhood conflicts, and unconscious desires as though every explanation Freud offered had been scientifically established.
Someone accidentally calls their partner by an ex’s name, and suddenly the entire relationship is being analyzed through a theory about hidden desires.
Sometimes a verbal mistake reflects a meaningful association. Sometimes someone simply said the wrong name. Determining which explanation is more plausible requires more than invoking Freud.
His theories appealed to people because they offered explanations for experiences that often seem difficult to understand.
Why do we repeat mistakes we recognize? Why do we stay in relationships that make us unhappy? Why do we sometimes behave in ways that contradict what we claim to want?
Freud suggested that hidden psychological forces might help explain these contradictions, and the idea remains compelling.
There is something reassuring about believing that beneath our confusing emotions and irrational decisions, a discoverable psychological logic might explain everything.
But an explanation can be emotionally satisfying without being scientifically accurate.
Freud gave people answers to questions they desperately wanted answered. Perhaps that’s one reason his influence has endured, even as psychology has moved beyond many of his original theories.
The difficulty begins when an explanation feels so convincing that we stop questioning whether it’s correct.
What If Freud Walked Into a Therapist’s Office Today?
Imagine Freud sitting on the other side of the couch.
Forget the famous portrait, the historical reputation, and the decades of psychological writing. He’s simply a middle-aged physician having a difficult time.
He’s exhausted, struggling to concentrate, and increasingly frustrated by his work. He has a history of cocaine use and describes turning to alcohol for comfort. His wife is concerned enough about his drinking that she’s begun keeping track of the bottles.
He’s intelligent, educated, ambitious, and deeply invested in understanding human behavior.
A competent clinician wouldn’t begin by suggesting that his drinking represented some hidden sexual conflict or unresolved childhood desire.
They would begin by asking questions.
How has he been sleeping? How long has he felt this way? What happens when he drinks? Does alcohol help him relax, escape frustration, or manage feelings he finds difficult to tolerate? Has his substance use affected his health, relationships, or work?
The clinician would want to understand what these behaviors were doing for him before reaching conclusions about what they meant.
His professional accomplishments wouldn’t make those questions any less relevant.
Knowing how the mind works doesn’t mean we always understand ourselves.
A therapist can recognize unhealthy relationship patterns and still become involved in one. A psychiatrist can understand depression and still experience it. Someone who has spent years treating addiction can struggle to recognize the consequences of their own substance use.
Knowledge can help us recognize our vulnerabilities, but it doesn’t eliminate them.
Freud devoted much of his life to understanding the human mind. He was still living with all the complications of having one.
Maybe Freud Is More Interesting When We Stop Treating Him Like a Legend
There are two easy ways to tell this story, and neither does Freud much justice.
We could portray him as an extraordinary genius whose personal struggles have no bearing on his work. Or we could dismiss him as a cocaine-using physician whose theories were little more than drug-induced speculation.
Both versions are appealing because they make the story simple.
The historical Freud was considerably more complicated.
He was an influential physician whose ideas changed the language of psychology. He was also a man who promoted a dangerous treatment, misjudged its consequences, and later described seeking comfort in alcohol during a difficult period of his life.
His personal experiences may have influenced his thinking. Some of his ideas helped shape later developments in psychology, while others have been challenged, revised, or abandoned as research advanced.
We can acknowledge his accomplishments without overlooking his mistakes, and we can criticize his theories without reducing his entire intellectual life to his substance use.
What makes Freud interesting is that he spent his career trying to explain the contradictions of human behavior while living with some of those contradictions himself.
He wanted to understand why people seek relief, defend their beliefs, repeat harmful patterns, and sometimes behave in ways that work against their own interests.
His personal history gives us plenty of reasons to keep asking those questions.
But the part of this story that stays with me isn’t the cocaine, the elaborate theories about childhood sexuality, or even the dreams.
It’s a small domestic scene from 1899.
Sigmund Freud is working on a book that will help change the way people understand the human mind. He’s wrestling with unconscious wishes, hidden motivations, and the psychological forces that influence behavior.
And in the same house, Martha Freud is counting the wine bottles.
Her husband is trying to explain the mysteries of the unconscious.
Martha just wants to know how much Marsala is left.
Sources
Freud, Sigmund. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904. Translated and edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated and edited by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Originally published 1900.
Freud, Sigmund. “Über Coca.” Centralblatt für die gesammte Therapie 2, no. 7 (1884): 289–314.
Fuller, Robert C. “Biographical Origins of Psychological Ideas: Freud’s Cocaine Studies.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 32, no. 3 (1992): 67–86.
Markel, Howard. An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011.
Westen, Drew. “The Scientific Legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a Psychodynamically Informed Psychological Science.” Psychological Bulletin 124, no. 3 (1998): 333–371.