That Time Freud Cured Sherlock Holmes' Cocaine Addiction

A review of the 1976 film about cocaine addiction and psychoanalysis: "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution."

Still in the grips of Covid fatigue, I’m mostly just lying around being brain dead and watching movies. One film I just watched with my best friend Jordan (who has forreal logged over 4,000 movies on Letterboxd) was such a delight that I wanted to tell you all about it. This movie really had my mind spinning around ideas about addiction, recovery, and psychoanalysis.

“The Seven-Per-Cent Solution" (1976).

THE STORY IS TRUE… only the facts have been made up.

Billed as “Sherlock Holmes meets Sigmund Freud,” the Oscar-nominated British-American crime/mystery/adventure film, directed by Herbert Ross and written by Nicholas Meyer, has an astounding premise: To treat his friend's cocaine-induced delusions, Dr. Watson (Robert Duval) lures his bff Sherlock Holmes (Nicol Williamson) to meet Sigmund Freud (Alan Arkin) for intense rounds of psychoanalysis and hypnosis in Vienna. Once in Vienna, one of Freud’s patients, also addicted to cocaine, gets abducted and Holmes’s recovery from cocaine rapidly sublimates into a quest to save this woman. Meanwhile, Freud must wade through the morass of Holmes’s unconscious to understand what drives the detective’s cocaine addiction.

Now, let’s dive into the time Freud cured Sherlock Holmes’s cocaine addiction.