My Freudian Cocaine Fantasia: Altering Consciousness, Theorizing Desire

ABSTRACT

This paper speculates that Freud’s use of cocaine during the formative years of his theorizing shaped a particular conception of the nature of desire. One can draw correspondences between the phenomenology of cocaine intoxication and certain aspects of Freud’s ideas about desire: desire as appetitive, solipsistic, focused on discharge, defined by a quality of “drivenness,” subordinating of pleasure. Although relational reconsiderations have expanded our conception of desire, many contemporary people remain stringently Freudian in our experience of desire, as I use some clinical material to substantiate. In this sense we are all heirs to Freud’s cocaine consciousness.

In an imaginative leap, I link the wide cultural currency attained by psychoanalysis to its consilience with the logic of a coincident expanding capitalist economy—a mode of political economy that has now brought us to the brink of environmental destruction. I conclude that the future of civilization will depend on our ability to find other ways to live our desire.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven Botticelli

Steven Botticelli, Ph.D., is on the faculty of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, where he has served as co-chair of the Independent track. He is a contributing editor for Studies in Gender and Sexuality and the Division/Review and co-editor (with Adrienne Harris) of First Do No Harm: The Paradoxical Encounters of Psychoanalysis, Warmaking and Resistance (Routledge, 2010).