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The Cocaine Episode is one of the most curious chapters of Ernest Jones' biography of Freud (13). It may be summarized as follows.
At the age of twenty-eight Freud was casting about for some discovery which would establish his reputation. He came across a paper by Aschenbrandt who had used cocaine to revive exhausted soldiers. He procured a sample and began to investigate its effects. Jones' account, which is based partly on unpublished correspondence, creates the impression that these investigations were mainly original. Freud decided to use cocaine to cure his friend, von Fleischl-Marxow, of his morphine addiction. 'The occasion of it was a report he had read in the Detroit Medical Gazette of its use for this purpose.' Freud completed his first paper on cocaine on June 18, 1884, and it appeared in July of that year.
Jones gives an adequate description of the sections of this paper dealing with the history and preparations of cocaine and Freud's experiments on himself. Jones' description of the clinical part of the paper, however, is extremely brief. In the last paragraph of this paper, Freud expressed the hope that ways would be found to use the ability of cocaine to anesthetize tissues. He suggested to an ophthalmologist, Königstein, that he investigate its action in diseases of the eye. Freud then left for his vacation only to discover after his return that another man, Koller, had found that cocaine was a useful agent for producing anesthesia in eye surgery (1). Jones' discussion of this is somewhat equivocal. He states that Freud was more interested in treating diseases than in discovering an anesthetic for surgical purposes, but he also quotes an incident which Sachs described sixty years later. According to Sachs, Freud demonstrated before a group of physicians including Koller that pain is abolished by the topical application of cocaine.