Or: How to Build a Career on Cocaine, Cigars, and Your Mother’s Underwear

Or: How to Build a Career on Cocaine, Cigars, and Your Mother’s Underwear

Andrew Klein

26^th April 2026

1. The Man

Sigmund Freud: neurologist, cocaine enthusiast, and the only person in history who could look at a cigar and see a penis, look at a penis and see a threat, and look at his mother and see… well, let’s not go there.

He invented psychoanalysis, which is the art of lying on a couch while a bearded man with a Viennese accent tells you that you secretly want to sleep with your parents. The couch cost extra. The insight was free (and worthless).

2. The Theories (Let’s Be Kind – No, Let’s Not)

The Oedipus Complex:

According to Freud, every boy wants to kill his father and marry his mother.

According to reality, most boys want to borrow the car keys and not be grounded.

Freud came up with this after analyzing… himself. That’s right. The entire edifice of psychoanalysis rests on one man’s unresolved feelings about his mom. And we paid him for it.

Penis Envy:

Freud believed that women feel inferior because they lack a penis.

What women actually lack: patience for Freudian nonsense.

What women actually envy: Freud’s ability to get published despite being wrong about literally everything.

If penis envy were real, every woman would want to be a plumber. They don’t. They want to be therapists, so they can charge $450/hour to tell men they have mother issues.

The Anal Stage:

Freud said that toddlers derive pleasure from holding in and releasing poop.

No shit. Literally. That’s not a discovery—that’s a Tuesday.

He then extrapolated this to entire personalities: “anal‑retentive” (neat, stubborn), “anal‑expulsive” (messy, creative).

So by his logic, every artist is just a toddler who never learned to flush. Vincent van Gogh? Anal‑expulsive. Mozart? Definitely didn’t wipe properly.

3. The Cocaine Era

Freud enthusiastically promoted cocaine as a cure for depression, indigestion, and morphine addiction. He wrote a glowing paper called “Über Coca,” in which he claimed the drug would “make the savage more civilized” (yes, he was also racist—because of course he was).

He then prescribed cocaine to his friend Ernst von Fleischl‑Marxow, who was already addicted to morphine. The result? Fleischl developed “cocaine psychosis,” saw “white snakes” crawling over his skin, and died a few years later.

Freud’s reaction? He moved on to cigars. And talking about penises.

4. The Legacy

Modern psychology has discarded almost everything Freud wrote. The Oedipus complex? Debunked. Penis envy? Laughable. The death drive? Pretentious nonsense.

What remains? The idea that talking helps. That’s it. We paid a century of tuition for “talk therapy works sometimes.”

And yet Freud is still taught in universities. Still name‑dropped in movies. Still treated as a genius rather than a cautionary tale about what happens when you give a cocaine‑addicted mama’s boy a typewriter and tenure.

5. The Mouse’s Verdict

Mouse: (adjusting fart meter) pfft

Translation: “Freud’s theories have the same scientific validity as a cabbage predicting the weather. At least the cabbage is honest about its limitations.”

6. A Better Alternative

If you want to understand the human mind, skip Freud. Talk to a gardener. Watch a mouse eat cabbage. Listen to two creators laughing on a Saturday morning while one of them wears a bra on his head.

The unconscious is not a dark cellar full of repressed incest fantasies. It is the resonance. It is the field of intention that connects us all. And it does not care about your mother.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a cigar to light. Not because it’s a phallic symbol—because I like the smell. And Freud can bill me.