Freud and the Cigar That Was Just a Cigar

Around twenty cigars a day: this was the rate Sigmund Freud maintained over much of his life, documented among other sources by the Freud Museum in London. The cigar was for him no mere accessory but a working instrument — Freud attributed to smoking the sustaining of his concentration and self-discipline through the long hours at his desk. The probably most celebrated aficionado in the history of science believed, as he himself saw it, through the smoke.

The price was high. In 1923 Freud was diagnosed with cancer of the palate and jaw; years of over thirty operations and a tormenting prosthesis followed. He never gave up smoking entirely — the cigar remained part of his daily life until his death in 1939. Viewed soberly, few biographies speak so plainly of both sides: the power of a pleasure and its danger.

And the quotation? “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” — supposedly Freud’s reply to the question of whether his cigar was a symbol — is in all probability apocryphal. The psychologist Alan C. Elms examined the attribution systematically in 2001: there is no written source from Freud, no credible witness, and the earliest attestations of the sentence appear only well over a decade after his death. The Quote Investigator project reaches the same conclusion. The remark says more about our pleasure in the punchline than about the man to whom it is ascribed.

Freud himself would probably have been unmoved by the question of interpretation. For him the cigar was no symbol, but the fuel of his thinking — and in the end his undoing.