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This paper describes Freud's achievement in bringing cocaine to the attention of the medical world and his failure to think of its use as a local anesthetic in surgery. Freud was interested in the subjective effects of cocaine. He performed experiments with the dynamometer, and believed that the effect of cocaine is 'brought about by the creation of an improved over-all state of
well-being'. He experimented with cocaine on himself and advocated its use in the treatment of psychiatric conditions, especially morphinism, but became disappointed and disillusioned when it was insinuated that he had introduced 'the third scourge of humanity, cocaine'. He even found it necessary to write that 'the morphine withdrawal cure through cocaine is not something I experienced on my own body'.
Freud was reluctant to recommend use of cocaine by injection, and he strangely failed ever to refer directly to the one occasion when he did make such a recommendation. The later 'unconscious confession' or unconscious reference to that recommendation which appears in The Interpretation of Dreams seems to be a parapraxis.
The whole 'coca episode' is related to a number of dreams during Freud's self-analysis. He later became interested in Fliess's work on the cocainization of the nose, but turned from 'medicinal magic' to psychological therapy.