Freud's pleasure principle argues that the psyche seeks stimulation and avoids unpleasure — the mind fundamentally drives toward engagement and away from emptiness. Holmes's 'rebellion at stagnation' is a dramatic illustration: his psyche cannot tolerate the absence of stimulation and will find it through work or, failing that, through drugs. Freud would identify Holmes's cocaine use as a displacement — a substitute satisfaction when the primary source (intellectual work) is unavailable. But Freud would also note the death drive lurking beneath Holmes's restlessness: his compulsive need for stimulation, pushed far enough, becomes self-destructive. The seven-per-cent solution is not just a substitute for work but a flirtation with annihilation — Holmes risks destroying the very mind he is trying to feed. The genius who cannot stop thinking finds, in cocaine, a way to think himself into oblivion.