ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author reads Freud's Cocaine Papers as a beginning of the Freudian adventure. An exploration of certain aspects of his subsequent trajectory—until the so-called 'birth' of psychoanalysis in 1900, with the Interpretation of Dreams—allows psychoanalysts to establish a relationship between these papers by Freud and concepts such as 'the sexual toxins', 'libido' and 'the actual neuroses'. The author introduces two observations which seem paradoxical: - Despite Freud's personal and professional encounter with drugs and addiction, this clinical problem has remained a relatively unexplored aspect of his work. Freud's Cocaine Papers make interesting reading in themselves, but especially within the context of his other work—that is, not as a 'side interest' of Freud, nor as an 'allotrion', which is the term he used to classify his interest in cocaine in a letter to Wittels. Freud argues that the value of cocaine for morphine addicts is negligible, because it would simply become a substitute for morphine.
