Freud’s Cocaine Dreams and Memories

Abstract

Freud’s initial appreciation of colonial history of the coca plant and colonialism morphed gradually into his unconscious representation of cocaine. This was marked by Freud’s analytical shift from hysteria and sexual neuroses to dream and infantile memory analysis in which his cocaine cravings configured not only his dream work but also his dream analysis. By tracing the associative relationship between cocaine and his infantile memories, Freud would arrive at the Oedipal conflict. Early childhood as the locus of the Oedipal conflict also became the locus of his etiology of mental disorders. Benjamin’s hashish mimesis in contrast to Freud’s cocaine mimesis posited a different notion of the unconscious and more importantly of the concept of the child and the child’s fantasies. For Benjamin the child at play and the child’s mimetic imagination were hardly pathogenic, but rather offered imaginative resources for rethinking Marxist revolutionary tactics.