Biographical Origins of Psychological Ideas

Abstract

This article explores the biographical and experiential origins of psychological ideas by focusing on the role that Freud's personal use of cocaine played in his gradual abandonment of a positivistic neurological psychology and his simultaneous formulation of early psychoanalytic theory. Both phenomenological and pharmacological studies of the effects of cocaine will be used to demonstrate that Freud's use of cocaine altered his perceptual and cognitive structures in ways that made his "discovery" of psychoanalysis, if not inevitable, at least likely.