a tumult of visions

[Sigmund Freud's mentor] Jean-Martin Charcot was known for his sober and dispassionate nature, but his close associates also commented on his particular penchant for the bizarre, the supernatural, and grotesque. Meige recounted an anecdote from Charcot’s student days that highlights this latter characteristic and foreshadows Charcot’s interest in contorted deformities and exotic behaviors. Predating Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal by seven years, Charcot experimented in 1853 with smoking hashish: As soon as he was under the influence of the narcotic, a tumult of phantasmagoric visions flashed across his mind. The entire page was covered with drawings: prodigious dragons, grimacing monsters, incoherent personages who were superimposed on each other and who were intertwined and twisted in a fabulous whirlpool bringing to mind the apocalyptic conceptions of Van Bosh and Jacques Callot.

- "Charcot - Constructing Neurology" / Christopher Goetz, Michel Bonduelle, Toby Gelfand

"Woe to you, my Princess, when I come...you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body." (Sigmund Freud to Martha Bernays, 2 June 1884)

"where does addiction begin?"

"Edward Glover showed that anything could serve as a drug, and moreover Lacan was very explicit when he excluded drug addicts from the psychoanalytic scene, perhaps wrongly, given Freud's impressive though officially discarded texts on cocaine. But Glover showed that anything could serve as a drug, including, we could add, work, the "workaholic" syndrome, or athletic training, or piano practice, and anything that involves repetition, need, lack. I don't mean that a new characteristic of drugs as drugs is emerging - on the contrary, drugs respond to an internal appeal that is probably already present in all of us. One of my questions is: why are we equipped with receptors, as if built for drugs? In other words, we are all potentially subject to addiction, constructed as we are according to addictive qualities of attachment and need. What I find interesting are not only the abyssal nuances of desires, urges, or destructive jouissance, but also those of the seductiveness of technology and the often crushing ethos of work."