Freud hit upon one of the only applications that would bear fruit
and then gave it away to his opthalmologist friend Leopold
Konigstein, to whom he suggested investigating the drug as an
anaesthetic for the eye. When he returned from a visit to his
fiancée, Martha Bernays, he found that still another friend, Carl
Koller, “to whom I had also spoken about cocaine, had made the
decisive experiments" (Jones 50). He blamed this loss on Martha;
had he not left Vienna to see her, he would have shared in the
The local application that Freud pursued instead was the use
of cocaine as a cure for morphine addiction (widely hailed in the
American medical press); his intervention in the treatment of
Fleischl turned out badly. Koller’s fame rested on a "use
beneficial to humanity," while Freud was soon to be denounced by
a Berlin psychiatrist, Albrecht Erlenmeyer, for having introduced
the "third scourge of humanity." Erlenmeyer presented cocaine as
a dangerous and a poisonous drug that indeed led to addiction.
"The man who had tried to benefit humanity," Jones wrote, "was
now accused of unleashing evil on the world” (62).
Freud then sealed this chapter of his career: Über Coca and
a subsequent paper, “Remarks on the Craving for and Fear of
Cocaine,” were not included in the Standard Edition. He continued
to give cocaine a wide berth: when Theodore Reik suggested that
the protagonist of his psychoanalytic writings resembled the
