School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemThe Jew's two noses: Freud, cocaine, addiction( 2001)Recently there have been a number of authorities who - from the inside of psychoanalysis itself - have suggested that the most forceful threat to psychoanalysis as a clinical practice is the present efflorescence and dominance of drug-based psychotherapies. Indeed, the astonishing public success of a physician such as Oliver Sacks - whose entire career would have been impossible without his illegal pharmaceutical experimentation upon uniformed patients in the guise of authentic Hippocratic care - can stand as a particularly chilling index of just such a crisis: the case study, a genre which Freud is often said to have invented, and to which he certainly gave the decisive impetus, has become in Sacks’ hands an unreflective celebration of the radiant sovereign power that legal access to, and distribution rights over, synthesized psychoactive substances can bequeath to the duly-authorised representatives of the pharmaco-medical institution. Sacks aside, John Forrester characterizes this shift thus ;the introduction of the psychotropic drugs in the 1950s, a new generation of tranquilizers shortly after (Librium, Valium), the anti-depressants of the 1960s and 1970s, and the mood-altering drugs of the 1980s, has entailed a significant shift in the practice of psychiatry. Yes, the new psychiatry went hand in hand with a shift of theoretical focus from psychological and psychoanalytical theories to neurological and psychopharmacological concerns’. His analysis has been echoed by other major psychoanalytic theorist-practitioners, such as Bruce Fink, Elie Ragland and Elisabeth Roudinesco, all of whom naturally deplore this situation, even if their condemnations take different forms, and identify different causes.