Steel Mind Books

Sigmund Freud – Cocaine and its Psychic Effects

IMPORTANT: this is a digital e-book

You’ll receive it by e-mail immediately after purchase.
Includes 2 formats: EPUB and PDF.
You will receive it in ENGLISH, but you can also read it in one of the other five major languages: italian, french, german, spanish, and portuguese.

All editions are included in the same download: simply open the folder of your preferred language.

No physical shipment: instant reading, zero waiting.

€2,99 EUR

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Freud, Cocaine, and Modern Thought: An Investigation at the Crossroads of Medicine and the Psyche

This Premium Edition contains two additional previously unreleased chapters and exclusive original illustrations created for this release.

Details and Specifications

Format: Digital (Kindle / EPUB / PDF)
Pages: Approximately 150
Intended for: readers passionate about science, medicine, psychoanalysis, and the history of modern thought
Language: Italian
Publication year: 2025
Publisher: Steel Mind Books – Jason Steel

What you will find in this book

✔️ A clear, modern and readable version of the famous essay Über Coca
✔️ Chronological and scientific analysis of Freud's discoveries, from letters to clinical applications
✔️ Sections dedicated to the effects of cocaine on the body, mind and mood
✔️ A psychological investigation into the young Freud: his enthusiasms, his doubts, his rationalizations
✔️ Two Premium chapters: one on cocaine in Vienna at the time, the other on Freud as seen by Freud himself
✔️ A book that combines historical disclosure and psychoanalytic depth, without filters or revisionism

📘 Click to view the chapter index

Introduction: The essay Über Coca in the scientific context of the nineteenth century
The coca plant: origin, traditional uses, botanical composition
Isolation of cocaine: chemistry and initial studies
Immediate physiological effects of cocaine
Psychological and emotional effects
Therapeutic applications proposed by Freud
Freud's Self-Experimentation
Clinical use on patients
Letters (I): intense enthusiasm and first impressions
Letters (II): description of personal physical and psychological sensations
Letters (III): caution, first concerns
Letters (IV): Influence on friends, colleagues and therapeutic aspirations
Limitations and initial warnings in the original text
The Evolution of Freud's Thought: From Essay to Criticism
Modern Analysis: Conceptual Errors and Toxicology
Conclusion: Über Coca's legacy today

📗 Click to view Premium content

Cocaine in the Salons of Vienna: Myth, Fashion, and Bourgeois Morality
Freud, Dependence, and the Unconscious: A Retroactive Psychoanalytic Reading

Excerpt from the book

Cocaine enhances perception, stimulates physical activity, eliminates fatigue and enhances thinking.

Freud studied her as one studies love: with enthusiasm, with rationality, with a growing need to understand and justify what was already transforming him.

Why read it?

– Because it is a unique reading about a little-known, young, human, experimental Freud.
– Because it talks about science and desire, about medicine and morality, about addiction and fascination.
– Why the shadow of cocaine still crosses the boundaries between therapy and pleasure today

“It wasn't just a drug. It was a mirror. And Freud looked into it.”
— Steel Mind Books

Extended description

Über Coca is not just a historical document.

It is the portrait of a young Freud who searches, discovers, makes mistakes, gets enthusiastic and defends himself.
Through personal experiments, clinical observations, and private letters, he shows us a thought still in formation, fragile but visionary.

This edition is a lucid and accessible rewrite, finally making one of the most controversial texts of nineteenth-century medicine and psychology readable.

This is not a celebration of cocaine, but neither is it a moral condemnation of it.
It is an attempt to understand why Freud was so attracted to that substance, what it represented for him, and what consequences it had for his thinking — and his life.

Premium chapters expand the reflection:
on the one hand, the social role of cocaine in the intellectual Vienna of the time;
on the other, a psychoanalytic provocation: what would the mature Freud have said about himself as a cocaine addict?

A reading that unites body, psyche, history and destiny.