The Nose Knows

[LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU]

Craig Clark writes:
" Apparently a substantial body                    
of Freud's extant-but-unpublished writings, admittedly from the
latter part of his career, are dedicated to the premise that one of
the best ways to treat neurosis was to administer large amounts of
cocaine to the nasal passages of the neurotic. Revisionist Freud
biographer E.M. Thornton, from whose "The Freudian Fallacy: Freud and
Cocaine" I draw this information, suggests that the evidence is
unassailable: Freud was at this point in his career suffering from
cocaine poisoning, and those "early" experiments with the "wonder
drug" didn't stop when he said they did..."

I haven't read Thornton's book, but thought the cocaine stuff was from the 
early days.  In any event, one of Freud'
s closest early friends was a guy named Fleiss, who had grand theories about
the connections between noses and sexuality, later subsumed into symbolic
qualities by Papa Freud.  But the connection had also been made, more than
a century before, by Sterne in TRISTRAM SHANDY.

There are times that I think P finds Freud at least suggestive, particularly
in his portraits of Blicero, Katje, and Greta, and in the musings of Edwin
Treacle.  But he is certainly no "traditional" Freudian.

Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)