The Freaky Truth About Sigmund Freud

In 2018, a woman named Kathy McVay attended a baseball game and got whacked between the eyes by a hot dog shot from a cannon. In her words, "It just came out of nowhere. And hard." If Sigmund Freud had been alive to analyze that, he probably would have called it a subconscious simulation of intercourse. Not because it made sense, but because his brain was pretty deep in the gutter.

Throughout his life Freud consistently bucked convention. Born in 1856 to a Jewish family, he rejected religion and placed his faith in science. He spent most of his life in Vienna, Austria, where prevailing attitudes toward Jews constrained his main career options to doctoring or lawyering. He opted for medicine but considered the prospect of practicing it "slightly repugnant," per PBS. So he converted his aversion into innovation. Freud trained to treat hysteria with hypnosis but eventually developed a new approach. He had patients relax and relate their thoughts in a stream of free associations. Between those interactions and his introspections, he invented psychoanalysis.

During the early 1900s Freud began rattling off ideas that rattled the public, including the theory that babies have carnal impulses. He also pushed pioneering notions about the subconscious and told his friends and family to take cocaine. Today many people dismiss Sigmund Freud as a creepy cokehead who pulled nonsense out of his associations. But he was a captivating cokehead with an outlandish life story.

Freud's interest in noses wasn't restricted to those of his patients. Around the same time he arranged for Fliess to rearrange Emma Eckstein's face, he also had work done on his own nose. As the New York Times described, Freud had chest pain and migraines, and his nose oozed "ample amounts of pus." He hoped Fliess could alleviate all of it by slicing into his sniffer. But the plan blew up in Freud's face like upside-down nostrils.

Freud's issues were nose-related. But surgery couldn't fix them because they stemmed from a nasal fixation. He had been hooked on cocaine for over a decade, and his body was beginning to buckle. Medical historian Howard Markel explained that Freud began dabbling in cocaine in 1884 in hopes of helping his pal Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow kick a morphine habit. Instead, Fleischl-Marxow kicked the bucket after developing a serious coke dependency in addition to his morphine addiction. Unfortunately, Freud didn't appreciate the danger because he held cocaine in high regard. He recommended it as medicine and praised it for improving his mood and aiding in his analyses.

During the mid-1890s Freud's health declined, and he had Wilhelm Fliess cauterize regions of his nasal cavity. To his dismay he found "thick, old pus in large clots" the next day. Even so, his drug use continued, and Fliess encouraged it. Freud's dependency grew and grew until he purportedly quit in 1896.

Maybe Freud saw wieners everywhere because he was one. If so, that could explain why he the screwed with the lives of Horace Frink and his wives, and arguably the life of Frink's daughter, who witnessed her dad's divorces and mental decline. Or maybe Freud was just a terrible therapist. Who knows? Emma Eckstein's nose, probably. But not all of Freud's patients had such traumatic experiences. His daughter Anna, for example, just had really weird ones.

As Psychology Today detailed, Freud psychoanalyzed Anna in 1918 and 1924 because she purportedly tickled her lady pickle too much. This particularly troubled Freud because he considered DIY lovemaking a masculine activity. Determined to make her more ladylike, Freud spent years discussing Anna's past. As it turned out, around age 6 she began having what she called "beating fantasies." She pictured herself as a man who'd been tied up by a knight. The fantasies reached their peak when the knight brutally beat the man for refusing to tell "family secrets."

Anna was 23 when she revealed these thoughts to her father. That's super weird — especially since Freud learned people's family secrets for a living and believed patient-therapist interactions were inherently erotic. Anna didn't seem bothered, though. She grew deeply attached to her daddy (to the point that it disturbed him) and later became a renowned psychoanalyst. Freud, meanwhile, updated his ideas on male envy after dissecting his daughter's fantasies.

It's easy to see Freud as a lewd dude who pursued taboo obsessions through sham psychology. But his original impetus was marriage. PBS pointed out that Freud initially wished to become a scientist. He wanted to do lab research, not search for the roots of neuroses. However, at age 26 he met Martha Bernays and became utterly smitten. Freud treated Martha like a queen (presumably Jocasta). He romanced her with roses, lavished with love letters, and wooed her with nose candy.

Freud fell for Martha around the same time he started tinkering with cocaine, and according to the Guardian, he excitedly sent her packets of the stuff. He even combined his two passions, Martha and coke, in an 1888 love note. Per NPR, he wrote: "When I come, I will kiss you quite red and feed you until you are plump. And if you are forward, you should 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."

Sadly, it wasn't all sunshine and snorting. Freud was a possessive partner who barred Martha from ice skating because he didn't want her locking arms with a male skater. He also didn't trust her around artists, who Freud feared could easily seduce her. Plus, he was broke. Lab work wasn't lucrative, and Freud couldn't provide for a wife. So he became a doctor in order to become Martha's husband.

Freud's life now sounds sort of sordid, but it didn't before the mid-1980s. Up to that point official biographies largely lionized the psychoanalyst and downplayed his downsides. But partly thanks to Freud's patient, protégé, and personal friend Princess Marie Bonaparte (above), people know the darker parts of his existence.

The New York Times described her as "an unlikely analyst." The great-grandniece of Napoleon, Bonaparte had an unfulfilling love life. She married a Greek prince who was in love with his own uncle, had string of disappointing mates, and wanted to mate with her equally eager son. She was the perfect patient for Freud, who discouraged bedroom-based mother-son bonding. But he encouraged her to become a psychoanalyst, and they became buddies.

In 1936 Bonaparte purchased a bunch of Freud's personal letters from a bookseller, per the New York Times. Those writings spanned 17 years, and when they were finally published in the 1980s, they revealed many of Freud's flaws. They proved he used cocaine for roughly a dozen years instead of three like people used to think. Freud confessed to falling asleep during sessions with patients. There's even evidence that he "borrowed" multiple theories from his physician Wilhelm Fliess.

Bonaparte didn't just save Freud's embarrassing admissions; she saved his life. As The Atlantic elaborated, in 1938 the Nazis took over Austria and started persecuting Jews. They detained Anna Freud and burned her father's books. Bonaparte lobbied for Anna's release and helped Freud's family escape.

During the 1930s Freud embarked on a jarring mental journey. Anna Freud recalled that he knew cancer would kill him. As his health dwindled he dwelled on Judaism. However, as author Mark Edmundson clarified, Freud remained an adamant atheist who considered religion a neurosis rooted in "longing for a father." But just like Oedipus, he was complex. Philosophy professor Richard Bernstein pointed out that Freud professed to identify with the "essence" of Jewishness despite disavowing Judaism.

Moved by multiple motivations, Freud wrote Moses and Monotheism. Published in 1939, the book portrayed Moses as an Egyptian who liberated Jews before they murdered him in the desert. Guided by repressed guilt, the Jews supposedly devoted themselves to Moses and merged him with God in their minds. As time progressed, unconscious remorse surfaced in the form of Christianity, recreating the death of Moses through Christ.

Freud littered the book with psychoanalitic suppositions. He called circumcision a "a symbolical substitute for castration" that Moses introduced to the Jews to assert fatherly dominance. He similarly argued that incest avoidance had no rational basis, but rather stemmed from allegiance to "the father" (Moses).

Some scholars see Moses and Monotheism as a partial response to Nazism. Notably, Freud redoubled his effort to finish the book after fleeing Vienna. Moreover, in the work he argued that adherence to illusory religious figures made Jews adept abstract thinkers and thus great intellectuals. He praised Jews at a time when they were under attack.