Sigmund Freud and Cigars!

The following passage is from "Sigmund Freud, The Father of Psychoanalysis, Revered His Cigars and Defended His Right to Smoke Above All Else." It was written by Evan J. Elkin.

Elkin writes:

When Sigmund Freud's nephew Harry declined a cigar at age 17, his illustrious uncle started as if thunderstruck. He paused and then, weighing his words carefully, admonished Harry: 'My boy, smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, I can only feel sorry for you.' (Freud: A Life for Our Time. Peter Gay, 1989, Anchor Books/Doubleday.) For Freud, the decision not to smoke was surprising, even illogical. Indeed, one can hardly think of Freud, father of psychoanalysis, without thinking of cigars.

...Cigars were among other things a family affair. Freud began smoking when he was 24 years old, following in the footsteps of his father, who was himself a smoker right up to age 81.

...In his old age Freud was quoted as saying: '[cigars have] served me for precisely fifty years as protection and a weapon in the combat of life...I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control.' " (end of referenced text)

Please understand that I am not questioning Mr Elkin's reporting. Its likely, rather, that Dr Freud was as skilled as most smokers are in the art of deceiving himself and others.

Contrast that little promotion for smoking with the following facts concerning the final years of Freud's life found in The Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs by Edward M. Brecher and the Editors of Consumer Reports Magazine, 1972.

The full text (with sources noted) can be found at http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/cu/cu24.html

Here's Brecher's documented truth about Freud's relationship with tobacco:

Through the centuries since Columbus, countless millions of smokers the world over have tried to stop smoking. Some have succeeded, many have failed. One of those who failed was Dr. Sigmund Freud. The account of his failure that follows is drawn from the three-volume biography of Freud by Dr. Ernest Jones, himself a psychoanalyst and one of Freud's closest associates. In 1894, when Freud was thirty-eight, Dr. Jones reports, his best friend, Dr. Wilhelm Fleiss, informed Freud that his heart arrhythmia was due to smoking, and ordered him to stop. Freud tried to stop, or to cut down his cigar ration, but failed.

...More than fifteen years later, at the age of fifty-five, Freud was still smoking twenty cigars a day-and still struggling against his addiction. In a letter to Dr. Jones he remarked on "the sudden intolerance of [my heart] for tobacco."

Four years later he wrote to Dr. Karl Abraham that his passion for smoking hindered his psychoanalytic studies. Yet he kept on smoking.

In February 1923, at the age of sixty-seven, Freud noted sores on his right palate and jaw that failed to heal. They were cancers. An operation was performed-the first of thirty-three operations for cancer of the jaw and oral cavity which he endured during the sixteen remaining years of his life.

"I am still out of work and cannot swallow," he wrote shortly after this first operation. Smoking is accused as the etiology of this tissue rebellion." Yet he continued to smoke.

In addition to his series of cancers and cancer operations, all in the oral area, Freud now suffered attacks of "tobacco angina" whenever he smoked. He tried partially denicotinized cigars, but even these produced anginal pains and other heart symptoms. Yet he continued to smoke.

At seventy-three, Freud was ordered to retire to a sanitarium for his heart condition. He made an immediate recovery-"not through any therapeutic miracle," he wrote, "but through an act of autonomy."

This act of autonomy was, of course, a firm decision to stop smoking. And Freud did stop--for twenty-three days. Then he started smoking one cigar a day. Then two. Then three or four....

In 1936, at the age of seventy-nine, and in the midst of his endless series of mouth and jaw operations for cancer, Freud had more heart trouble. "It was evidently exacerbated by nicotine," Dr. Jones writes, "since it was relieved as soon as he stopped smoking." His jaw had by then been entirely removed and an artificial jaw substituted; he was in almost constant pain; often he could not speak and sometimes he could not chew or swallow. Yet at the age of cighty-one, Freud was still smoking what Dr. Jones, his close friend at this period, calls "an endless series of cigars."

Freud died of cancer in 1939, at the age of eighty-three. His efforts over a forty-five-year period to stop smoking, his repeated inability to stop, his suffering when he tried to stop, and the persistence of his craving and suffering even after fourteen continuous months of abstinence--a "torture...beyond human power to bear"--make him the tragic prototype of tobacco addiction.