220 Ideals in the Modern World
“Why do we not get drunk?” Freud asks in a letter to his fi ancée,
Martha Bernays. Why don’t we follow the example of the masses
and achieve what ever level of anesthesia we can with the usual
means? We can consume alcohol until we no longer feel the pain of
being. (Keats speaks of “the feel of not to feel it.”) So why don’t we
get drunk? Freud answers directly: we fear the morning after. We
cannot bear the pain that comes as a result of our temporary plea-
sure. (Freud, one might say, will become a phi los o pher of the hang-
over, as well as a phi los o pher of intoxication.) We want to go to
work the next day— work being to Freud one of the fi rst blessings in
life. We do not want to exchange an intensity of pleasure—or at least
a striking absence of pain— for prolonged incapacity.
Freud was never drawn to alcohol, but for a while he did have a
drug of choice, cocaine. He gave it to his patients. He took it him-
self. He boasted to Martha that he was becoming a larger, stronger,
more virile being, fl ushed with the powers of this vital drug. But
coke did nothing for Freud’s patients except stimulate them to
some fresh heights and then drop them, hard. (“As high as we have
mounted in delight,” the poet says, “in our dejection do we sink as
low.” With cocaine, the dejection can be three times the ascent.) And
cocaine did nothing much for Freud, except to make him boast to
Martha and raise his ambition higher than it had previously soared.
So there would be no drug- joy for Sigmund Freud and no alcoholic
heights either—no Bacchus and no biting “mind of winter,” no head
full of snow.
What would there be instead? There would be—to stay with Ste-
vens another moment— “the diffi culty of what it is to be.” Freud
would affi rm the harsh world that exists when one eschews intoxi-
cants and faces up to the truth. And what is that truth? What is the
fundamental state of being? What is the actual state from which men
and women use intoxicants— and as we will see there are many in-
toxicants—to deliver themselves?