13. Sigmund Freud loved the cigars he is so often pictured with
Freud began smoking about the age of 24, enjoying at first the newly popular cigarettes. He switched to cigars shortly after, and for the rest of his life, he smoked them heavily. He was known to regularly consume about twenty per day, an extraordinarily large number. He once told a nephew, “Smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, I can only feel sorry for you”. Freud began hosting weekly meetings of colleagues in his Vienna home, which his son Martin later recalled as being “so thick with smoke it seemed a wonder that human beings had been able to live in it for hours”.
Freud attributed cigars an ability to help him in his work. Late in life, he claimed that cigars provided him, “a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control”. Toward the end of his life, after he had been beset with several cancers which he steadfastly denied had been caused by his smoking, he defended the practice and his friends continued to send him his favorite cigars, which were often difficult to obtain in Vienna. He also began to consider the possibility that smoking, as well as other behaviors, were what he called “secondary substitutes” to lost childhood addictions of an emotional or physical nature.