AUGUST STRINDBERG 
A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY WITH SPECIAL 
REFERENCE TO THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX 
By 
AXEL JOHAN UPPVALL 
Boston 
RICHARD G. BADGER 
The Gorham Press Copyright 1920, By Richard G. Badger 
All Rights Reserved 
The Gorham Press, Boston, Mass., U. S. A. 
Made in the United States of America. TO 
William JMafce Woob, Otjuire 
OF ARLINGTON, MASSACHUSETTS 
NOBLE FRIEND AND GENEROUS BENEFACTOR 
THESE PAGES ARE DEDICATED 
BY THE AUTHOR PREFACE* 
This dissertation represents an effort on the part of the writer 
to approach Strindberg's exceedingly complex personality from a 
psychoanalytic point of view. 
It claims, of course, none of that excellence, originality and 
completeness characteristic of the works of Freud (22), Abraham 
(2), Hitschmann (32), Jones (35), Pfister (44), Sadger (51), 
Sperber (54), Zoepf (79) and others. Compared with them it is a 
mere statement of a few but fundamentally important facts, upon 
the basis of which a complete analysis may be achieved. 
While the writer is in no sense so entirely committed to any 
one of the psychoanalytic theories as to be blind to the merits of 
the others, even a casual perusal of this analysis will show that 
it has been worked out mainly along Freudian lines. This 
does not necessarily mean, however, that the writer accepts the 
most radical Freudian teachings with reference to sex, such as 
this, for instance, that 
Whoever would be really free and, therefore, happy in his love-life, 
must needs give up respect for women and adapt himself to the idea of 
incest with mother and sister.1 
On the contrary, the writer has in the course of his study of 
the New Psychology become more and more convinced of the 
truth expressed by Jung and repeatedly emphasized by President 
Hall in his inspiring lectures on Psychoanalysis, The Psychology 
of War, Glandular Psychology (Pawlow) and the Psychology 
of Nutrition (Turro) that the theories of Freud and Adler are 
exceedingly one-sided, neither one of them being of sufficient 
scope and flexibility to do justice to the almost numberless and 
tantalizingly complex problems of psychic life. 
An analysis of Strindberg, or of any other individual for that 
matter, would, therefore, in order to be able to claim at least ap- 
proximate completeness and validity, have to transcend the 
*Refer to bibliography at end of article for numerical and page references. 
1 Beitrage zur Psychologic des Liebesleben. Jahrb. f. psychoanalytische und pay- 
chopathologische Forschungen. Bd. IV, Heft I, p. 46. 
5 6 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
comparatively narrow limits of the Freudian Theory of Sex (now 
somewhat invalidated through the results of the study of shell- 
shock and war psychoses in general), the strictly personal Un- 
conscious, and the Adlerian Ichtrieb and explore the immeasurably 
greater realm of the Collective or Absolute Unconscious postulated 
by Jung, a concept which, roughly speaking, corresponds to the 
Race or Folk-Soul of G. Stanley Hall. This would be to attack 
the problem from the truly genetic point of view. For, as Jung 
says (36): 
The contents of the Absolute Unconscious are not merely the residue 
of archaic human functions, but also the residue of functions of the 
animal ancestry of mankind, whose duration of life was indeed vastly 
greater than the relatively brief epoch of specifically human existence. 
Yet with the full knowledge of the many objections raised 
against the Freudian Theory, the writer has chosen to apply its 
fundamental principles to Strindberg. The main reasons for this 
may be stated as follows: First of all, Freud's Theory is still 
the foundation of all psychoanalysis. Secondly, its simplicity 
as compared with the anagogic interpretation of psychic pheno- 
mena by Jung, Silberer2, Maeder3, and others, naturally appeals 
strongly to the inexperienced analyst. 
And finally, the sexual element in Strindberg seemed-and 
still seems-to the writer so conspicuous, to such extent is the 
great Swedish Author a Freudian-Adlerian type, that no one 
could justly be accused of being biassed in favor of the School of 
Vienna for applying its principles to him in an attempt to inter- 
pret his unconscious motivations-the very woof and web of his 
almost tragic existence-in terms of the Oedipus Complex. 
The writer wishes to take this opportunity to express his deep 
gratitude to all who have in any way facilitated his work. He 
is especially indebted to Karl Johan Karlson, Ph.D., Professor 
William H. Burnham, Ph.D., and above all to his chief instructor, 
2Silberer, Herbert 
Problems of Mysticism and its Symbolism. Transl. by S. E. Jelliffe, NewYork, Moffat 
Yard Co., 1917. 451 p. 
8Maeder, Alphonse E. 
Guerison et Evolution dans la vie de I' ame, etc. Zurich, Rascher, 1918. 69 p. A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
7 
President G. Stanley Hall, Ph.D., LL.D., for his unfailing kind- 
ness, constructive criticism and helpful suggestions in the pre- 
paration of this dissertation, which, had it not been for his 
guidance and encouragement, would never have seen the light of 
day. AUGUST STRINDBERG* 
A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY WITH SPECIAL 
REFERENCE TO THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX 
Axel Johan Uppvall 
I 
I ch Hebe sie, Hebe sie, so wie sie sich mir beim Abschied 
offenbari hat; und die Erinnerung an die ersten Tage 
unserer Verbindung steigt in mir auf, wie sie, Weib und 
Mutter zugleich, sanft und zartlich mich wie ein kleines Kind 
liebkost und hatschelt. 
Und so Hebe ich, begehre sie gluhend zum Weibe. 
1st das ein widernaiitrlicher Trieb? Bin ich das Pro- 
dukt eines Naturspiels? Sind meine Gerfiihle entartet, weil 
ich ja meine Mutter besitze? 1st das unbewusste Blutschande 
des Herzens? 
Die Beichte eines Thoren. 
JOHAN August Strindberg was born in Stockholm, 
January 22, 1849, as the fourth son of Oscar Strindberg, 
a merchant and shipping agent, and Ulrika Eleonora nee 
Norling. The marriage of the parents had been legalized 
but a short time before the birth of the boy, and ac- 
cording to his own opinion, he was not a welcome addition 
to the family. At the age of five he was sent to the kindergarten. 
From there he passed to the elementary schools and entered the 
Lyceum in 1861. In 1862 he lost his mother and the following 
year he entered the Gymnasium, was confirmed in 1864 and 
graduated from the Gymnasium in 1867 at the age of eighteen. 
In the fall of the same year he went to the University of 
Uppsala, but remained there only one term, partly because of lack 
of funds and partly because of the slow pedantic methods which 
were distasteful to his impatient, critical and neurotic nature. 
Returning to the capital he secured a position as teacher in Clara 
School, where he had formerly been a student. Soon discovering 
that he had missed his calling, he decided to study medicine. 
But finding this even as little to his taste as school teaching and 
feeling the creative artist stirring within his soul, he turned his 
attention to histrionic arts. After six months of the most ener- 
*A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Clark University, Worcester, Mass., in 
partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, and accepted 
on the recommendation of G. Stanley Hall. 
9 10 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
getic preparations, unspeakable turmoil of soul, and dreams of 
fame he made his debut at the Dramatic Theatre in Bjornson's 
Maria Stuart with one solitary line to recite. This was in 1869. 
It was an insult to him and two months later he demanded to be 
heard in a classical role. He was granted a trial, but failed, and 
was advised to enter the school of dramatic acting. To him who 
had felt since early childhood that he was ever being held back, 
this was an unbearable blow and he went home fully determined 
to take his own life. To this end he swallowed an opium tablet, 
but a friend who happened to call persuaded Strindberg to go out 
with him. He did so and in a night of revelries he drowned his 
sorrow and escaped the effects of the poison. 
The following day was a memorable one for the young poet. 
The strained relations with his father and stepmother had long 
weighed heavily upon him and while lying on the sofa in his room 
he tried to devise a scheme through the instrumentality of which 
his stepmother might reconcile him with his father. In two 
hours he had visualized a comedy in two acts, and in four days the 
play was complete. It was refused but he felt that his honor was 
saved, inasmuch as it drew some compliments from the theatrical 
authorities. 
He was now seized with a veritable passion for writing and 
in less than two months he had completed two comedies and a 
tragedy called Hermione. The latter was later accepted and 
played. It was now suggested to him that since he had given 
evidence of the powers of literary creation he should return to 
Uppsala and read for a degree, since literary success depended 
very largely upon such an education. 
But his second term at the University was largely spent in 
the company of his friends and at the "Runa" Club, and devoted, 
not to his academic studies, but to the writing of plays. The 
play called In Rome was then produced and sent to the Dramatic 
Theatre in Stockholm, where it was accepted and played in 
August 1870. Shortly after, he produced The Outlaw, in which 
he showed^ for the first time, real originality and exceptional 
powers. This play was also accepted and performed at the 
Royal Theatre in the fall of 1871. 
In the fall of that year he returned to the University after 
a violent quarrel with his father, without a dollar in his pocket, 
and no prospects of obtaining any funds. But fortune favored 
the brave, almost despairing young author. King Charles XV 
had been present at the performance of The Outlaw, and the A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
11 
Viking play had appealed to him to such an extent that he com- 
manded the author to appear before him. Strindberg, after some 
hesitation, fearing foul play, put in appearance and was offered 
a scholarship of 800 Crowns per annum which was gratefully 
accepted. 
Now he returned to Uppsala once more feeling somewhat 
elated and contented for the first time in his life. He took up his 
work in earnest. The year 1871 closed very favorably for him, 
for in addition to his recognition by the theatrical authorities and 
the king, he also became the recipient of honorable mention from 
the Swedish Academy on account of his Greek drama Hermione. 
But despite his success he soon began to chafe under the academic 
work, and when for some reason or other, the scholarship was 
withdrawn in the spring of 1872 he left Uppsala. 
For a few months he tried to glean a living from newspaper 
work. But the creative impulse left him no rest and finally he 
bought a few quires of paper and started for Kymmendo, a small 
island in the Stockholm archipelago. Here in his twenty-third 
year he created his first masterpiece Master Olof. Highly de- 
serving as it was, an epoch-making play from every point of view, 
it was refused by the theatrical authorities and was not produced 
until seven years later, in the year of 1880. 
Again he had to resort to newspaper work and thus barely 
succeeded in keeping body and soul together. Then fortune 
smiled upon him once more. In 1874 he received an appointment 
as amanuensis in the Royal Library in Stockholm. Now he 
immediately plunged into the study of the Chinese language. 
A treatise which he wrote on the subject of some old manuscripts 
earned him medals from, and membership in, many learned so- 
cieties, and recognition from the French Institute soon followed. 
In the midst of all this good fortune he met his evil genius. 
He was introduced to and fell in love with Baroness Wrangel, nee 
von Essen1, whom he married on December 31, 1877. This new 
life revived in him the creative impulse and when he left Sweden 
in 1883 in a rather serious physical and mental condition, he had 
a score of recognized works to his credit, such as: From Fj drdingen 
and Svartbdcken, The Red Room, From the Sea, Here and There, 
The Secret of the Guild, Sir Bengt's Wife, The Journey of Lucky 
Peter, Studies in the History of Culture, the Swedish People, The 
New Kingdom and Poems in Verse and Prose. 
'Her full maiden name was Sophia Mathilda Elizabeth Von Essen. She is often 
referred to by writers as Siri, and in The FooTs Concession Strindberg speaks of her as 
Maria. 12 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
In France he joined a cosmopolitan group of painters at Grez 
par Nemours. During his stay abroad between the years of 1883 
and 1889, residing alternately in France, French Switzerland, 
German Switzerland, Bavaria and Denmark, he published a 
number of famous works, the most important of which are: 
Married, Real Utopias, his Autobiography in four volumes, The 
Father, Lady Julia and Comrades. 
In the year of 1889 Strindberg returned to Sweden with the 
intention of settling down permanently. But in 1892 he again 
turned his back to his native land. Ever since his stay in Swit- 
zerland the relations between himself and his wife had been 
unbearable. According to Uddgren (72 p. 154) a Swiss woman 
had forced herself between them and did not even leave them 
alone in Sweden. The result was that he sought divorce in 
January 1891. The history of this exceedingly unhappy union 
of fifteen years is related in A Fool's Confession, published in 1893. 
The divorce proceedings which followed and dissolved the 
marriage in 1892 are touchingly described in his drama The Link, 
published in 1897. 
During the years of 1891-92 he led the life of a hermit on the 
island of Kymmendo where he wrote and painted a large number 
of canvases, which at the time received considerable attention 
and recognition. In the fall of the same year he started for 
Germany and settled down in Berlin where he delved into the 
study of the natural sciences. 
His reception in Germany was extraordinary. Richard 
Dehmel greeted him with a poem called An Immortal. In the 
shop windows his photograph hung alongside that of the Iron 
Chancellor, and his plays were on the repertoire of the foremost 
theatres all over the continent. 
It was during this stay in Germany that Strindberg became 
the centre of attraction T^um Schwarzen Ferkel. This important 
period in Strindberg's life has been presented in a sympathetic 
manner by Dr. Schleich (53 p. 25 ff.) in his Erinnerungen an 
Strindberg. 
It was in 1892 also that he met Frida Uhl, a young Austrian 
writer, to whom, after a great deal of hesitation, he was married 
in the spring of 1893. 
The so called Inferno period, properly speaking, begins 
shortly after Strindberg's arrival in Berlin if, indeed, it may not 
be said to have begun earlier. Be that as it may, the spirit of 
William Blake had cast a spell over the whole of artistic Europe A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
13 
and spiritism had been replaced by theosophy. Schleich (op. 
cit. p. 12 ff.) tells us that Strindberg, when he first met him, ad- 
hered to a mechanistic Weltanschauung, but adds that he was 
fast drifting towards mysticism and that he had already at that 
time (1892) developed demonological notions. The same au- 
thority also intimates that Strindberg at this time was already 
intimate with Swedenborg's Arcana Coelestia, Jacob Boehme and 
Paracelsus. To this period also belongs his play To Damascus, 
although it was not published until 1898. 
After his marriage to Frida Uhl the couple went to England 
and settled down in Gravesend. Owing to the confiscation of 
Die Beichte eines Thoren, they had to return. Strindberg left 
his law suit in the hands of an attorney in Berlin and he and his 
wife went to her home in Ardagger near Armstadten on the 
Danube. 
In the fall of 1894, after a few months' stay in Berlin, Strind- 
berg and his wife left for Paris where he intended to study chemis- 
try. Here the theatres were playing his dramas, and translations 
of his novels were being printed in various periodicals. No 
Swedish author had ever before achieved such success in the 
French capital where even Ibsen had been able to create but a 
moderate interest. 
As though the surpassing of the great Norwegian dramatist 
had been Strindberg's only purpose, he now turned his back on 
his literary achievements and enormous success and shut himself 
up in the laboratories of the Sorbonne. 
Deeply absorbed in his scientific experiments he now became 
oblivious of his young wife and secretly wished to be relieved of 
her. In November 1894 he accompanied her to Gare du Nord; 
ostensibly she was going home to care for their child who was ill, 
but in reality they parted for life. Shortly after this their 
marriage was dissolved. 
In July 1896 Strindberg returned to Sweden after having 
passed through all the horrors so graphically described in his 
Inferno. At first he sought and obtained refuge in the home of a 
friend in Ystad, Dr. Eliason. About two months later he ac- 
cepted an invitation to visit his Austrian parents-in-law and to 
see his little daughter. After a stay there of nearly three months 
he returned to Lund, Sweden, where he began the study of 
Swedenborg in earnest. The following year in May his mental 
equilibrium was so far restored that he could take up his literary 
work once more. On May 3, 1897 he began to write his Inferno 14 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
which was ready for publication on June 25th of the same year. 
Immediately upon the completion of this work he began his 
Ledgens, which work was published in 1898. 
In the fall of 1897 he again visited Paris where he spent the 
winter, returning to Sweden in the spring of 1898. 
His health was now completely restored and with the cele- 
bration of his fiftieth birthday his last and greatest creative 
period began. Between the years of 1898 and 1912, when he 
died, he produced between fifty and sixty different works, great 
historical plays, plays of realistic symbolism in a Swedenborgian 
spirit, sagas, poetry, novels, autobiographical works, dramaturgy, 
speeches, historical and philosophical essays. 
From Lund he removed to Stockholm and in 1901 he married 
for the third time, a young Norwegian actress, Harriet Bosse. 
This marriage also ended in a divorce in the year of 1904. 
In 1906 the so called Intima Teatern, under the direction of 
August Falk, began to present Strindbergian plays. They met 
with unqualified success. During the presentation of Lady 
Julia the other theatres in the capital were almost deserted. 
Thus his recognition had come at last. About this time his 
name was the by-word of the entire Scandinavian North as well 
as that of continental Europe. 
The following excerpt from a leading Stockholm periodical 
may truly be said to have voiced the sentiment of the nation 
(66, p.XX): 
For over thirty years he has dissected us from every point of view; 
during that time his name has always been conspicuous in every book- 
shop window, and his books gradually pushed out the others from our 
shelves. Every night his plays are produced at the theatres; every con- 
versation turns on him, and his is the name the pygmies quarrel over 
daily. The cry is heard that he has become hysterical, sentimental, out 
of his mind, but the next one knows he is robustness itself, and enduring 
beyond belief, despite great need, enmity, sorrow. One hour one is 
angry over some great extravagance which he has allowed himself, the 
next captivated by one of his plays, stirred, melted, strengthened and 
uplifted by his sublime genius. 
On January 22, 1912, the Swedish nation celebrated Strind- 
berg's sixty-third birthday. It was in the eleventh hour of his 
stormy existence. All the Stockholm theatres performed Strind- 
bergian plays that night and gigantic torch-light processions filed 
past the Blue Tower. With bowed head and tears in his eyes he 
beheld the thronging multitudes and heard the deafening cheers, A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
15 
which to him meant far more than either a literary Nobel prize 
or membership in the Swedish Academy. On the same occasion 
he received a purse of fifty thousand crowns from the Swedish 
people, but although he was practically penniless he gave the 
money to the poor. 
On May 14, 1912, his eyes closed in death. His last wish was 
that the Bible and a Crucifix should accompany him on his last 
journey, that he should be buried during the early hours of the 
day and not among the wealthy. 
Thus ended the pilgrimage of a man whose whole life had 
been devoted to the search for truth, of a soul that had doubted, 
blasphemed, despaired and suffered more intense psychic tor- 
ments than most human beings, and who finally could write, 
with a fair amount of conviction (70, p. 293): 
Pray but work, suffer but hope, keeping both the earth and the stars 
in view. Do not try to settle permanently, for it is a place of pilgrimage, 
not a home but a halting place. Seek truth for it is to be found, but only 
in Him, who Himself is "The Way, the Truth and the Life." 
The genealogy of the Strindberg family has been studied in 
detail by several authors (14, p. 8; 72, pp. 17-20; 42). During the 
latter part of his life Strindberg himself showed a lively interest 
in the history of the family. 
In the first volume of his autobiography (69, p. 9) he writes: 
There was an old genealogical table in the family which showed noble 
ancestors on one side, from the seventeenth century. Since then the 
paternal ancestors-all coming from Jamtland-had been ministers, of 
Nordic, perhaps of Finnish blood. In the course of time it had become 
mixed. His paternal grandmother could trace her origin to Germany 
and a carpenter's family. His grandfather was a grocer in Stockholm, 
Chief Commander of the City Volunteers (Borgerskapets Infanteri), 
a high mason and an ardent admirer of Charles XIV.2 
One of the members of the family, Major Zakarias Akerfelt, 
married a young woman by the name of Scheffel, from Wismar, 
and from her the artistic tendencies are supposed to have come. 
These tendencies thereupon remained dormant for many years 
until they again revealed themselves in Strindberg's grandfather, 
the above mentioned grocer and Chief Commander of the City 
Volunteers, Zakarias Strindberg. 
*Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, founder of the present dynasty and king of Sweden 
18x8-1844. 16 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
Already as a young man he seems to have had a taste for 
dramatic sketching, but in all probability business and other cir- 
cumstances prevented him from developing his talent. 
The three brief plays which he left to posterity do not herald 
the famous grandson. Uddgren says (72, p. 19): 
All they show, is that the worthy major possessed a good deal of 
feeling and a sense of humor and that he tried in so far as he was able 
to go his own ways. 
Concerning the above mentioned Zakarias Strindberg, Es- 
swein (14, p. 9) makes the following statement: 
His portrait shows in the formation of the forehead and the eyebrows, 
which point to a passionate and at the same time highly differentiated 
character, a striking likeness to the features of the poet (August Strind- 
berg). 
It would seem from the several studies of Strindberg's remote 
ancestors that they were physically and mentally sound. The 
same is largely true of his parents. His father was undoubtedly 
of a rugged physique and mentally as sound as the average man. 
The son characterizes him as a man of great reserve and will- 
power whom business failures and conjugal unhappiness had 
turned into an uncommunicative, melancholy solitaire, who had 
a wound which he wanted to conceal and to heal, but who had not 
given up the hope of rising in the world once more. He died in 
1883. 
By far the weakest link in Strindberg's hereditary chain is 
the mother. She died from tuberculosis in 1862 at the age of 
thirty-nine. We are informed by Strindberg himself (68, p. 84) 
that she was of a very high strung temperament and that her 
nervousness increased toward the end of her life. "She was more 
given to moods," he writes, "than before, and contradictions 
would set her cheeks aflame." On one occasion during a dispute 
with her brother "she took fire," he says, "and suffered an 
attack of hysteria." 
From the point of view of heredity, therefore, Strindberg 
entered the race of life somewhat handicapped. Undoubtedly 
he is correct in his assumption that he inherited his temperament 
from his mother, for his was very largely that febrile response to 
stimuli, that activity, restless versatility and sensitiveness to 
impressions, which Havelock Ellis (13, p. 182) considers so 
characteristic of the consumptive. A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
17 
To his physically defective mother may perhaps also be 
ascribed a serious organic inferiority in the son which I have every 
reason to believe is not generally known. The malady to which 
I refer and from which he suffered intensely was chronic stran- 
gury. I base my statement on a personal communication re- 
ceived from Dr. Magnus Westergren of Boston, Massachusetts, 
the only living member of a coterie to which Strindberg belonged 
in the middle of the seventies. 
In view of these facts we may well accept Dr. Rahmer's 
(46) conclusions that Strindberg was born a neuropath. 
II 
The next important factor in Strindberg's life which must be 
considered before we can proceed to the discussion of his nuclear 
complex, is his environment. 
In the first volume of his autobiography (69, p. 8. ff.) he has 
given us a most realistic picture of his gloomy home where the 
son of the grocer and the servant girl awoke to consciousness 
of self, of life and its duties. His first sensations, according to 
later recollections, were fear and hunger. He was afraid of dark- 
ness, of punishment, of displeasing everybody; he was afraid 
of falling, of hurting himself, of being in the way. 
He was afraid of the fists of his brothers, the hair-pulling of the hired 
girls, the rebukes of his grandmother, the mother's wrath and the father's 
rattan cane. He feared the general's servant who stood in the hall down- 
stairs with spiked helmet and side-arm; he feared the deputy landlord 
when he played around the garbage bin in the yard; he feared the Lord 
Justice, the landlord. 
Everybody seemed to have the right of exercising power over 
him, from the brothers even to the high court authority of his 
father. But above all he feared the deputy landlord who pulled 
his hair and threatened to send the landlord after him. 
In his house John's father3 and mother with seven children 
and two servants occupied three rooms. The furniture consisted 
largely of tables and beds. Children lay on ironing-boards and 
chairs, in cradles and beds. In the atmosphere of this home 
where baptisms and burials followed one another in rapid succes- 
8Strindberg's full name was Johan August. In his autobiographical writings he 
speaks of himself almost exclusively as Johan (John). 18 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
sion, John grew sturdy and tall. His playground was the court- 
yard which he aptly describes as the stone paved bottom of a well 
into which the sun never shone. A cracked garbage bin with a 
flap-cover stood by the wall. Slops and sweepings were emptied 
into it and through the cracks its promiscuous contents flowed 
into the yard. The other side of the yard was lined with wood 
sheds and cabinets d'aisances. The atmosphere of this yard was 
one of dampness, gloom and evil odor. But not even in such an 
abominable milieu was John permitted to play unmolested. 
Concerning the educational influence of the home he makes 
the following statement (op. cit. p. 14): 
The education consisted of scolding, hair-pulling and exhortations to 
obedience. The child heard only about his duties, nothing about his 
rights. Everybody's wishes carried weight, his were suppressed. He 
could undertake nothing without doing wrong, go nowhere without being 
in the way, utter no word without disturbing someone. At last he did 
not dare to move. His highest duty and virtue was to sit on a chair 
and be quiet. It was continually dinned into him that he had no will 
of his own, and so the foundation of a weak character was laid. 
Later on the cry was: What will the people say? And thus his will 
was broken so that he could never be true to himself, but was forced to 
depend on the wavering opinion of others, except on a few occasions 
when he felt his energetic soul work independently of his will. 
The child was very sensitive. He wept so often that he received a 
special nickname for doing so. He felt the least remark keenly and was 
ever in a state of fear lest he should do something wrong. He was very 
awake to injustice and while making great demands upon himself he 
narrowly watched the failings of his brothers. When they escaped 
punishment he felt deeply injured. When they were undeservedly 
rewarded his sense of justice suffered. He was accordingly considered 
envious. 
In due time he entered Clara School where the discipline was 
exceedingly severe. Mere tardiness was subject to corporal 
punishment. A single illustration will suffice to show why, in 
later years, Strindberg avoided everything that might remind 
him of his childhood Inferno, and forced him to declare that his 
worst nightmare was to dream himself back in school. 
Once he was the unfortunate latecomer (op. cit. p 33): 
With a slow step he entered the hall. Only the porter is there who 
laughs at him and writes his name on the blackboard under the heading 
"Late." A painful hour follows, and then loud cries are heard in the 
lower school and the blows of a cane fall rapidly. It is the headmaster 
who has made an onslaught on the tardy ones, or takes his exercise on 
them. John bursts into tears and trembles from head to foot-not from A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
19 
fear of pain, but from a feeling of shame to think that he should be fallen 
upon like an animal doomed to slaughter, or a criminal. 
It was here that he became convinced that school life was a 
preparation for hell rather than for life, and that life itself was a 
penal institution for crimes committed before birth, on account 
of which he went about with a perpetual bad conscience. Here, 
moreover, he first felt the whole crushing weight of class dis- 
tinction. It was a school for the well-to-do. John wore leather 
breeches and greased leather boots which smelled of oil and black- 
ing, on which account the boys who wore velvet jackets refused to 
sit near him. 
Neglect of his studies and rebellion against his teachers earned 
him poor marks. Thereupon his father removed him to Jacob's 
school. Here the boys were poorly dressed, had sores under 
their noses, ugly features and smelled badly. In this school, 
which formed a sharp contrast to Clara school in that it was 
largely frequented by children of the poor, John undoubtedly 
acquired that sympathy for the lower classes which is so strongly 
reflected in his satirical and socialistic works. The conditions of 
this school as well as those of a large percentage of the pupils 
attending it are well illustrated by the following episode told by 
Strindberg himself. In the school in question there was a boy 
who was always untidy, who smelled badly and had a discharge 
from the ear. He was scolded and beaten by the teacher and 
avoided by the schoolmates. On account of absence from classes 
John was sent to investigate the cause and to report his findings 
to the teacher. What did he find? He found conditions some- 
what similar to those of his own home. The boy was tending his 
little sister, the grandmother carried a baby in her arms, and 
the parents were out working. In this single room-the home 
of the family-there was an odor of sulphur fumes from the coal 
fire and a strong smell of human excrements. Here clothes were 
dried, food cooked, paint stuffs ground, putty kneaded. In this 
environment young Strindberg discovered the fundamental 
cause for his schoolmate's immorality. 
The rebellion against prescribed studies characteristic of 
his terms in the Clara and Jacob's Schools continued in the Ly- 
ceum and the Gymnasium which he entered in 1861 and 1863 
respectively. When he graduated from the latter institution in 
1867, at the age of eighteen, he was a man and had passed through 
all the severe crises incident to puberty. They had shaken his 18 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
sion, John grew sturdy and tall. His playground was the court- 
yard which he aptly describes as the stone paved bottom of a well 
into which the sun never shone. A cracked garbage bin with a 
flap-cover stood by the wall. Slops and sweepings were emptied 
into it and through the cracks its promiscuous contents flowed 
into the yard. The other side of the yard was lined with wood 
sheds and cabinets d'aisances. The atmosphere of this yard was 
one of dampness, gloom and evil odor. But not even in such an 
abominable milieu was John permitted to play unmolested. 
Concerning the educational influence of the home he makes 
the following statement (op. cit. p. 14): 
The education consisted of scolding, hair-pulling and exhortations to 
obedience. The child heard only about his duties, nothing about his 
rights. Everybody's- wishes carried weight, his were suppressed. He 
could undertake nothing without doing wrong, go nowhere without being 
in the way, utter no word without disturbing someone. At last he did 
not dare to move. His highest duty and virtue was to sit on a chair 
and be quiet. It was continually dinned into him that he had no will 
of his own, and so the foundation of a weak character was laid. 
Later on the cry was: What will the people say? And thus his will 
was broken so that he could never be true to himself, but was forced to 
depend on the wavering opinion of others, except on a few occasions 
when he felt his energetic soul work independently of his will. 
The child was very sensitive. He wept so often that he received a 
special nickname for doing so. He felt the least remark keenly and was 
ever in a state of fear lest he should do something wrong. He was very 
awake to injustice and while making great demands upon himself he 
narrowly watched the failings of his brothers. When they escaped 
punishment he felt deeply injured. When they were undeservedly 
rewarded his sense of justice suffered. He was accordingly considered 
envious. 
In due time he entered Clara School where the discipline was 
exceedingly severe. Mere tardiness was subject to corporal 
punishment. A single illustration will suffice to show why, in 
later years, Strindberg avoided everything that might remind 
him of his childhood Inferno, and forced him to declare that his 
worst nightmare was to dream himself back in school. 
Once he was the unfortunate latecomer (op. cit. p 33): 
With a slow step he entered the hall. Only the porter is there who 
laughs at him and writes his name on the blackboard under the heading 
"Late." A painful hour follows, and then loud cries are heard in the 
lower school and the blows of a cane fall rapidly. It is the headmaster 
who has made an onslaught on the tardy ones, or takes his exercise on 
them. John bursts into tears and trembles from head to foot-not from A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
19 
fear of pain, but from a feeling of shame to think that he should be fallen 
upon like an animal doomed to slaughter, or a criminal. 
It was here that he became convinced that school life was a 
preparation for hell rather than for life, and that life itself was a 
penal institution for crimes committed before birth, on account 
of which he went about with a perpetual bad conscience. Here, 
moreover, he first felt the whole crushing weight of class dis- 
tinction. It was a school for the well-to-do. John wore leather 
breeches and greased leather boots which smelled of oil and black- 
ing, on which account the boys who wore velvet jackets refused to 
sit near him. 
Neglect of his studies and rebellion against his teachers earned 
him poor marks. Thereupon his father removed him to Jacob's 
school. Here the boys were poorly dressed, had sores under 
their noses, ugly features and smelled badly. In this school, 
which formed a sharp contrast to Clara school in that it was 
largely frequented by children of the poor, John undoubtedly 
acquired that sympathy for the lower classes which is so strongly 
reflected in his satirical and socialistic works. The conditions of 
this school as well as those of a large percentage of the pupils 
attending it are well illustrated by the following episode told by 
Strindberg himself. In the school in question there was a boy 
who was always untidy, who smelled badly and had a discharge 
from the ear. He was scolded and beaten by the teacher and 
avoided by the schoolmates. On account of absence from classes 
John was sent to investigate the cause and to report his findings 
to the teacher. What did he find? He found conditions some- 
what similar to those of his own home. The boy was tending his 
little sister, the grandmother carried a baby in her arms, and 
the parents were out working. In this single room-the home 
of the family-there was an odor of sulphur fumes from the coal 
fire and a strong smell of human excrements. Here clothes were 
dried, food cooked, paint stuffs ground, putty kneaded. In this 
environment young Strindberg discovered the fundamental 
cause for his schoolmate's immorality. 
The rebellion against prescribed studies characteristic of 
his terms in the Clara and Jacob's Schools continued in the Ly- 
ceum and the Gymnasium which he entered in 1861 and 1863 
respectively. When he graduated from the latter institution in 
1867, at the age of eighteen, he was a man and had passed through 
all the severe crises incident to puberty. They had shaken his 20 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
psyche to its very foundation and left an indelible impression 
upon his later life. 
The death of his mother had marked the inception of a re- 
ligious crisis which took the form of a mild anxiety neurosis. 
One is tempted to seek its origin first of all in the loss of his mother, 
the pietistic atmosphere in which he had moved during his child- 
hood and early youth, and the promise which the mother exacted 
from the thirteen-year-old boy on her death bed, to live close to 
God-a promise which he failed to keep. But while all these 
facts undoubtedly stand in a close causative relation to his state 
of mind, the real source of his Weltschmerz must be sought in the 
deeper strata of his unconscious mind. 
The reader of The Son of a Servant, which is the history of 
the development of a soul, cannot fail to notice that the young 
boy even from the earliest childhood struggled with melancholia 
which was but another expression of his morbid fears and his in- 
tense and persistent feeling of guilt. 
A guilty conscience is unthinkable without a cause or causes. 
Psychoanalysis has demonstrated beyond a shade of doubt that 
the consciousness of guilt is in every case a product of repression. 
Pfister says (45, p. 101): 
One of the most frequent sources, where it appears with great force 
and in conjunction with anxiety, is masturbation. 
With reference to the same perverse practice, Bleuler (9) 
has made the following significant statement: 
I know of only one source as yet of the feeling of guilt, which one 
might call religious or transcendental: onanism or some similar sexual 
transgression. Where I could analyse such feelings of guilt I came upon 
sexual self-reproach. 
Moreover, clinical experiences have confirmed Sadger in his 
belief that youthful preoccupation with and worship of virtue is 
always an over compensation for this very common and serious 
childhood sin of masturbation. The individual's unsatiable 
demands for parental tenderness, his morbid longing for trust 
and confidence, his excessive need of confiding in and being under- 
stood by his parents, brothers, sisters and friends, excessive 
curiosity and abnormal intellectual activities, shyness, blushing, 
stuttering, blinking, obstinacy, enviousness-all are symptoms 
of secret indulgence in masturbatory practices. A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
21 
This had been clearly demonstrated in a very large number 
of clinical cases and ordinary analyses of which von Kleist (52) 
is a brilliant example, to mention no others. It is also interesting 
to know that ordinarily the malady breaks out only when the 
onanism previously practiced without restraint or hesitation is 
suddenly stopped, because of threatening warnings (45, p. 102). 
Again, Freud (23, p. 98) has pointed out, and it has been 
fully borne out by analyses that premature intellectual develop- 
ment and sexual precocity go hand in hand. This would be 
ample proof in Strindberg's case had we no other evidence of the 
fact that he was given to perverse practices, but thanks to his un- 
usual candor we need not resort to any hypothetical statements. 
After having described his experiences at Mariefred he says 
(69, p. 68): 
The whole matter scarcely seemed to have any connection with the 
higher sexual life, for the boy had been in love with a girl at the age of 
eight when the sexual impulse was as yet completely dormant. 
Consequently he concluded that this incident formed no 
turning point in his psychic life, for he was born a brooding spirit 
md his new thoughts only made him a recluse. 
Besides, he soon quit the vicious habit when he came across a book 
that frightened him. But then there ensued in its place a fight against 
desires which he could not conquer, since they attacked him in the form 
of dream illusions when his powers of resistance were at an end, and quiet 
sleep he was not permitted to enjoy until at the age of eighteen when 
he had established connection with the opposite sex. 
The book which fell into his hands he describes as a terrible 
piece of literature. He fairly devoured it. His knees trembled 
and the blood receded from his face, his pulses froze. He was 
thus condemned to death or lunacy at the age of twenty-five. His 
spinal marrow and the brain would disappear, his hair would fall 
out, his hands tremble. And the cure? Was there one? Yes- 
Jesus. But He could only cure the soul, and the only thing for 
him to do was to save it from eternal damnation. 
Later on he came across another book intended to counteract 
the dangerous work referred to above, but for an entire year he 
found no word of consolation. Accordingly he began to study 
the pietistic literature left by the mother where he made a new 
acquaintance with Jesus and prayed and suffered agony. He felt 
like a criminal and humbled himself. In going through the 22 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
streets he would step out of the way of people. In this way he 
crucified himself daily, in the expectation of soon entering into 
the joy of the Lord. 
Lack of space forbids my going into further detail as regards 
this uniquely important phase of his development, to which he 
himself has given so much attention in his autobiography. I 
cannot resist the temptation, however, of giving a concrete ex- 
ample of how furiously he fought against the onslaught of his 
awakening sexual life during the storm and stress of puberty 
(64 Ch. I). 
His mother had been dead two years and the time had come 
for his confirmation. Under the tremendous weight of his moral 
conflict he one day found himself in a motley crowd of catechumens 
upon whom the discourse on the wounds and precious blood of 
Christ had no effect whatever. Here he avows that for the first 
time in his life he became fully conscious of the two worlds, the 
spiritual and secular. The promise he made to his mother was 
uppermost in his mind (op, cit. p. 33): 
He had a dim notion that once upon a time a terrible crime had been 
committed which it was now everybody's business to hide by practicing- 
countless deceptions. 
The minister brought up the question of immorality. It was 
largely a rehearsal of the old subject. The unpardonable sin was 
bound to result in death and there was only one remedy; complete 
surrender to Christ. When John came home he felt degraded, 
touched no food, went to his bedroom and read a book which the 
minister had lent him. It was on the subject of the vanity of 
reason. Reason was sin for it questioned God's existence and 
tried to understand what was not meant to be understood. The 
boy surrendered. He read Arndt, recited the creed, the Lord's 
Prayer and the Blessing, went to bed, fell asleep, awoke in the 
middle of the night dreaming of a champagne supper in company 
with a girl. He sprang out of bed, threw the bedclothes on the 
floor and lay down uncovered on the mattress. He was cold and 
hungry, but he felt that the devil had to be subdued. He re- 
peated the prayers. Finally he fell asleep and dreamed that 
lovely forms appeared before him. He heard low voices, stifled 
laughters, soft music and saw sparkling wines, cheerful faces and 
candid eyes. Presently a curtain was drawn apart, a charming 
little face looked in between red silk draperies, her slender throat 
was bare, the beautiful sloping shoulders reminded him of Greek A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
23 
sculpture. She held out her arms and he drew her to his throbbing 
heart. 
Frightened almost to death he sprang out of bed once more 
and kneeled on the bare floor, fervently praying God for strength. 
After the prayer he removed the bedclothes and slept on the bare 
spring. The following morning he awoke with a high fever and 
was then confined to his bed for six weeks. Medical attendance, 
plenty of food and rest, restored his strength and the struggle 
began with renewed vigor. 
To understand the boy's religious conflict we must bear in 
mind that parallel with the pietistic movement there ran a strong 
reactionary current known as the New Realism, and that the boy 
was familiar with and consciously and unconsciously influenced 
by its doctrines. 
Chapter VIII of The Son of a Servant is an indisputable proof 
of my contention. It shows that he was seriously concerned with 
questions of grave philosophical content such as Fate versus 
Reason, Freedom of the Will, Predestination, and a host of other 
more or less unprofitable queries. Already at the tender age of 
fifteen he was exceedingly well read. In the field of Belles Lettres 
and the drama he had discovered Byron, Walter Scott, Tasso, 
Zola, Dickens, Eugene Sue, Alexandre Dumas, and according 
to his own statement he had devoured the complete works of 
Shakespeare in Hagberg's translation. 
But the most pronounced influence came from other quarters. 
In the Gymnasium he had read Renan's Life of Jesus and Cramer's 
Farewell to the Church. Just to what extent he was familiar with 
Bostrom's Doctrine of Helf Rydberg, Krummacher, Norbeck, 
Darwin, Moleschott and other authors whom he quotes or men- 
tions is difficult to say. But it is safe to assume that these and 
similar works formed the basis of his skepticism. 
Now while in this state of high psychic tension he chanced 
to meet a young engineer whose arguments further undermined 
his tottering faith, and finally when Theodore Parker's sermons 
without Christ and hell fell into his hands, the dogmatic founda- 
tion of his religious belief collapsed. But his conscience still stood 
between him and the harmonious life for which his childish soul 
yearned, and he was now in greater need of a guiding hand than 
ever before. His Virgil soon appeared in the person of a sophis- 
ticated school-mate. One day the latter proposed that they 
take lunch together. Strindberg agreed and this incident be- 
came a memorable event in his life. A square meal with beer AUGUST STRINDBERG 
24 
and brandy dispelled the gloom of life and from that day Strind- 
berg was a changed man. It was a solid pleasure he tells us 
(68 p. 146) to feel the red blood course through half-empty ar- 
teries, which were to nourish the nerves for the struggle of life. 
It was a pleasure to feel spent strength return and lax sinews of 
a half-crushed will stretched again. Hope was awakened, the 
mist became a rosy cloud and the friend made him see glimpses 
of the future as it was formed by friendship and youth. 
During his last year in the Gymnasium he became the ring- 
leader of a number of rebellious classmates and in spite of threats 
and exhortations on the part of the Rector of the institution, he 
refused to attend morning prayers. His realization of God in 
nature replaced the desire to worship Him in temples made by the 
hands of men. He was a freethinker, a rationalist, in whose rest- 
less and revolutionary mind the various conceptions of life pre- 
sented themselves in the profoundest antitheses. As such he 
entered the University and soon found himself in a greater con- 
flict with self, God and humanity than ever before. A psycho- 
analytic inquiry into the causes of this, his life long conflict, is 
the purpose of the following pages. 
Ill 
In the preceding pages I have presented a brief outline of 
Strindberg's eventful life. I have also discussed in such detail 
as seemed to me not only desirable but necessary for an under- 
standing of the analysis, his ancestry, parentage, home en- 
vironment, his life and experiences in school and Gymnasium, and 
the crises incident to puberty and adolescence. It now remains 
for me to consider the most important aspect of his life and de- 
velopment-his relation to his parents. 
From his autobiography we know that like all other children 
he was weak and that he craved maternal affection in an unusual 
degree. In this work as well as in many others he has expressed 
himself in the most unequivocal terms with reference to this very 
important matter. 
In speaking of his gloomy home and his father's diversions, 
one of which was to cultivate flowers in window boxes, John tells 
us that he specialized in pelargoniums but that he, at that time, 
could not understand why. Later, however, when the mother 
was in her grave and John had visions of her, he imagined that he A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
25 
saw her round about the pelargoniums in the windows. He says 
(69. p. 12): 
The mother was pale. She had undergone twelve confinements and 
had become consumptive. It may be that her face resembled the trans- 
parent white petals of the pelargoniums with their crimson veins, which 
grew darker towards the pistil, so as to form an almost black pupil, 
black like hers. 
Again, when discussing the subject of favoritism and the 
enviable position of his oldest brother, who, by the way, suffered 
from hysteria, he says (op. cit. pp. 14-15): 
This brother was the mother's favorite, the other one that of the 
father. There are favorites in all families. That is the way one child 
wins more sympathy than the other. Why this is so is difficult to say. 
John was nobody's favorite. He felt it and it hurt him. 
When the grandmother noticed his predicament she tried 
to console him, but he rejected her sympathy. He was not satis- 
fied with her love, he wished to win that of his mother. In trying 
to do so, however, he acted awkwardly and was repulsed. But 
in the darkness of the night when the child suffered with nervous- 
ness the mother, his only consolation, would steal to his bedside, 
tuck the clothes around him and whisper in his ear: "Don't be 
afraid, God will protect the unfortunate ones." 
One fine summer day John and his brothers started off on a 
vacation and in the evening he found himself standing on the 
deck of a steamer "far off to sea." This, he remarks, is that 
part of the day which is always melancholy, like the beginning 
of old age . . . He began to miss something; he had a feeling 
of emptiness, of being deserted, broken off. It was a longing to 
return home, and when he realized that this could not be done 
immediately he was filled with terror. He despaired and wept. 
When the brothers learned that he was homesick, sick for the 
mother, they ridiculed him (op. cit. p 41). 
But her image recurs to him serious, mild and smiling. Her last 
words at parting still ring in his ears: "Be obedient and respectful to 
all, take care of your clothes and don't forget your evening prayers." 
This stirred up remorse in his sensitive heart. He realized 
how often he had been disobedient and felt concerned about her 
health. She became transfigured, as it were, and drew him to 
her "with unbreakable cords of longing." This feeling of loneli- 26 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
ness and longing for his mother, he affirms, followed him all 
through life. He could never understand why, but wondered 
whether he had not come too early and incomplete into the world. 
What could hold him so closely bound to his mother? This 
question he could never find an answer to either in books or in 
life. But of one thing he felt certain: he never became himself, 
he was never liberated, never a complete individuality, and so he 
compared himself to a mistletoe, a climbing plant that must have 
support. 
The mother was not always just and loving (op. cit. p. 13). 
. . but for the children she played the part of Providence itself. She 
cut ingrown nails, bandaged injured fingers, always comforted, quieted 
and soothed when the father punished, although she was the official 
accuser. 
While away from home on the said vacation he spent much of 
his time pining for the mother, or else he was in extremely high 
spirits and indulged in risky amusements. He characterized 
himself (op. cit. p 45) as, 
alternately timid and daring, overflowing with spirits, or brooding, but 
without the proper balance. 
And again (op. cit. p 46): 
After he had parted from his mother and felt himself surrounded by 
unknown threatening powers, a profound need of having recourse to 
some protecting powers awakened in him. 
Not being able to flee to his mother he turned to God in 
prayer. He writes (op. cit. p. 46): 
He said his evening prayers with a fair amount of devotion, but in the 
morning when the sun shone and he was well rested, he did not feel the 
need of it. 
This dependence upon and constant longing back to the 
mother, which is more or less basic in every human life, is very 
conspicuous in Strindberg. Unconsciously he "yearns retro- 
gressively from the struggles ... of life towards the safe 
haven of childhood," (34 p. 149) and the failure to realize this 
ardent desire is the main source of his psychic conflict. 
In the first chapter of Married (64 p. 9 fl) he gives a very 
sympathetic description of himself and his mother-the mother A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
27 
who "thought only of heaven and the children," who had always 
been her husband's truest friend, the only human being who had 
never been jealous or envious . . . and who had never con- 
tradicted him. 
During the twelve months of her illness, he tells us, he had 
come to know her personally and a very close relationship had 
sprung up between them, a relationship, he emphasizes, that is 
rare between parents and children. In the story last quoted he 
represents himself as a young boy, the son of a professor. He 
writes, 
The mother on the other hand, was not a well educated woman. 
She had merely been head housekeeper and children's nurse in her hus- 
band's house. Numerous births and countless vigils (she had not slept 
through a single night for the last sixteen years) had exhausted her 
strength. When she became bedridden at the age of thirty-nine and was 
no longer able to manage the house, she made the acquaintance of her 
second son. 
Now that her part as mother of the family was played to the end and 
nothing remained of her but a poor invalid, the old-fashioned relation- 
ship of strict discipline, that barrier between parents and children was 
superseded. The thirteen-year-old boy was almost constantly at her 
bedside, reading to her whenever he was not at school or doing home 
lessons. She had many questions to ask and he had a great deal to 
explain, and, therefore, all those distinguishing marks erected by age and 
position vanished one after another; if there was a superior at all it was 
the son. 
But the mother also had much to teach, for she had learned her lesson 
in the school of life, and so they were alternately teacher and pupil. 
They discussed all subjects. With the tact of a mother and the 
modesty of her sex, she told her son all that he should know of the 
mystery of life. He was still innocent, but he had heard many things 
discussed by the boys at school which had shocked and disgusted him. 
The mother explained to him all she could explain, warned him of the 
greatest dangers to a young man, and exacted a promise from him never 
to visit a house of ill-fame, not even out of curiosity, because, as she 
pointed out, in such a case no man could ever trust himself. And she 
implored him to lead a temperate life and turn to God in prayer when- 
ever temptation assaulted him. 
By this time the bankruptcy of the father had been for- 
gotten, the family had moved into better quarters and prosperity 
reigned in the home. Life now looked bright to the young boy. 
He no longer felt the unbearable pressure of past years and he 
would in all probability have found, he assures us, an easy path 
through life, had not Fate willed otherwise. 
It was the mother, the ruling passion of his young life, that 28 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
now cast a sudden impenetrable gloom over his budding life. 
She had now been ill for a year and was not expected to live. 
One night he was aroused from his sleep and in the dark he 
heard a deep trembling voice calling him to his mother's death 
bed. (68 p. 86 ff.) 
It went through him like a flash of lightning. He froze and trembled 
while dressing, his head felt ice-cold, his eyes were wide open and the 
tears streamed so freely that the lamp flame appeared like a red blur. 
And now they stood by the death bed and wept for hours . . . His 
mother was unconscious and recognized none of them . . . John 
thought of all the sins he had committed and found no good deeds to 
counterbalance them. After three hours of weeping his thoughts began 
to take various directions . . . "How will it be," he asked himself, 
"when mother is no longer there?" Nothing but emptiness and desola- 
tion; no comfort, no compensation. There was nothing but a deep 
gloom in which he searched for a ray of light. 
And now his eyes fell on the mother's chests of drawers and 
he happened to think that in it lay the only compensation for his 
loss, the gold ring that his mother had promised him. He would 
wear this ring and weep when it reminded him of her. These 
thoughts he immediately repressed, he tells us, but no matter how 
deep within him this incident was buried, he could never forget it. 
It kept turning up now and then, and when he thought of it during 
sleepless nights and in hours of weariness, he felt a flush of shame mount 
to his cheeks. Then he began to examine himself and his conduct and 
reproached himself with being the meanest of all men. 
On the day of the burial he was able to exercise perfect con- 
trol, probably because of the fact that he felt concerned and 
somewhat responsible for the younger members of the family. 
To Strindberg, blood was always thicker than water. That is, 
indeed, one of his traits. He states elsewhere (69 p. 44) that 
he could not see any one of his own flesh and blood suffer .... 
without feeling it intensely. This was but another instance of his lack 
of independence, a proof of the irrefutable reality of consanguinity, of 
the umbilical cord, which could not be cut but only gnawed off. 
Now when he felt the small trembling body of his infant 
sister clinging to him he suddenly became possessed of a strength 
which he had not experienced heretofore. Disconsolate, he was 
able to console and in quieting her he himself became quiet. 
With reference to his mourning of the mother he makes the A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
29 
rather surprising statement that his sense of real loss scarcely 
lasted more than three months. This statement he immediately 
reinforces or rather rejects by saying that he mourned her loss 
much longer, but that was more because of a need to continue 
in that mood, which was one of natural melancholy. 
The two main components of Strindberg's psychic attitude 
towards the father are admiration and fear. His admiration for 
him is due in a great degree to the fact that he could trace his 
origin back to nobility, which places him in the sharpest contrast 
to his plebeian wife who, to use Strindberg's own words (69, p 10), 
was a poor tailor's daughter sent out into life by her stepfather to 
make her own living, first as a servant girl and later as a cafe waitress, 
in which position she was discovered by John's father. 
Despite the fact that their relations were seriously strained 
even from the earliest childhood, John could not but admire his 
father. Not only was he deeply impressed by the manner in 
which he dealt with the servants, since it bespoke authority and 
power, but he was infatuated with his father's personality. His 
features, beautifully regular and strong, his neat appearance, clean 
linen, full beard, his spectacles, his hair combed according to the 
style of Louis-Philippe, his bearing in general-everything in his 
makeup proclaimed the man of aristocratic blood. 
But here his admiration ended. No matter how sincere it 
was, it was always overshadowed by an ungovernable fear, at 
least during his pre-pubertal stage of development. As to what 
extent this fear was justifiable we cannot long be in doubt if we 
recall that the discipline of the home was most severe and that it 
often bordered on cruelty which was largely enforced by the 
father. The mere mention of his name was enough to strike 
terror in the hearts of the children. The threat to tell father, was 
identical with a thrashing (op. cit. p 12). 
At the cry: "Father is coming," the children ran and hid themselves 
or rushed into the nursery to be combed and washed. At the table 
there was a death-like silence and the father spoke but little. 
In referring to the strict discipline of the home Strindberg 
tells us that falsehood was subject to merciless punishment. This 
also applied to disobedience in general. As a typical example of 
the manner in which the boy was taught the value of truthfulness 
I cite the episode of an emptied wine flask (68 p. io): 30 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
One day during the midday meal his father examined the wineflask. 
It was empty. "Who has drunk the wine," he asked, looking around the 
circle. No one answered, but John blushed. 
"It is you then," said the father. John who had never noticed where 
the wineflask was hidden burst into tears and sobbed: "I did not drink 
the wine. " "So you lie, too. When dinner is over you will get something." 
The thought of what he would get after dinner, as well as the continued 
remarks about John's secretiveness caused his tears to flow even faster. 
They arose from the table. "Come here," said the father, and went into 
thebedroom. His mother followed. "Ask father's forgiveness," she said 
as the father took down the rod from behind the mirror. 
"Dear Papa, forgive me," cried the innocent child. But nowit was too 
late, he had confessed the theft and the mother assisted in the execution. 
John howled from rage and pain, but chiefly from a sense of humiliation. 
"Ask father's forgiveness now," repeated the mother. The child looked 
at her and despised her. He now felt lonely and deserted by her to whom 
he had always fled to find comfort and consolation, but so seldom justice. 
He again asked his father's forgiveness with compressed, lying lips. 
Then he stole away to the kitchen, to the nursemaid who al- 
ways combed and washed him, to sob away his grief in her apron. 
In reply to her question as to what he had done he answered 
" nothing. " Just then the mother appeared and overheard John's 
denial. Once more he was fetched into the bedroom and tortured 
until he had confessed an offence of which he was not guilty. 
Vividly recalling these experiences he cried out with indigna- 
tion more than thirty years later (op. cit. pp. 11-12): 
Splendid moral institution, sacred family, unassailable and divinely 
appointed, where citizens are to be educated in truth and virtue. Thou 
pretended home of the virtuous, where innocent children are tortured 
into their first falsehood, where wills are broken by tyranny, and self 
respect killed by narrow egoism. Family, thou art the home of all social 
evils, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for 
fathers and a hell for children. 
After this day, he declares, he lived in perpetual fear and was 
absolutely isolated. He suspected enemies everywhere. God, 
he knew only in his prayers . . . but in the dark he had, like 
the savage and the animal, premonitions of evil spirits. 
Fear is, as we know, the attribute par excellence of the weak 
and helpless. In the same degree as the individual's physical 
strength and mental powers increase, and providing, of course, 
that the fear is not successfully repressed, it changes into de- 
fiance and hate. This is plainly the case with Strindberg. Never 
in his life was he able to forget completely the unjust treatment A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
31 
received during his childhood at the hands of his parents. As 
soon, therefore, as his strength permitted, he challenged his father, 
mother and the other members of the family. One or two ex- 
amples will suffice to illustrate his behavior. After having de- 
scribed in the minutest detail how he successfully picked a quarrel 
with his father and how by means of a skillful and malicious man- 
ipulation of the material at his disposal he succeeded in giv- 
ing his mother the lie, he says (69, p. 64): 
The coldness towards the father increases and now he (John) is on the 
lookout for acts of oppression, and despite his weakness he makes 
attempts at rebellion on a small scale. 
One of the many ways in which he tried out his strength and 
the safety of his policy of opposition was by refusing to go to 
church. When he found that this might be done with impunity, 
he grew bolder. 
The gradually increasing tension between the father and the 
son reached its culmination when, less than twelve months after 
the death of his wife, the father announced his intention of marry- 
ing the housekeeper. Strindberg says (op. cit. p. 92): 
The two elder brothers took the matter lightly and were resigned. 
The father-cult was their religion. They believed, never doubted. 
They had never thought of fatherhood as being an accident that might 
befall anyone. 
But John doubted. He fell into endless disputes with his brothers 
and attacked the father for becoming engaged before the expiration of 
the conventional period of mourning. He conjured up the shades of his 
mother, prophesied disaster and ruin, and worked himself up about it and 
went to extremes. 
Later on at a gathering of the new relatives in the home, 
he absolutely refused to meet them. His father was vexed but 
did not wish to show it. After exchanging a few unfriendly 
words with the father, the boy went upstairs to his room (op. cit. 
P- 93): 
Here it was cold and dark and he could not work on account of the 
music and the dancing below . . . Hungry and angry he paced 
up and down the room. At intervals he wanted to go downstairs where 
it was light, warm, and cheerful, and several times he took hold of the 
door knob. But he turned back for he was shy . . . He went to 
bed hungry and considered himself the most unfortunate creature in the 
world. 32 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
On his father's wedding day he revolted. He did not kiss 
the bride like the brothers and sisters, but withdrew to the toddy 
room where he became somewhat intoxicated. 
About this time he entered the Gymnasium. This meant a 
decided rise in the world. From the point of view of the school 
authorities he was no longer a boy. The conditions of the home 
continued to be the same, or became worse. Under the new 
regime of the stepmother food was scarce, and the father refused 
to provide him with proper clothing and up-to-date text books, on 
which account the boy became an object of ridicule among his 
schoolmates. What depressed him was that this poverty was 
imposed upon him as a retaliation, a punishment, for it was not a 
necessity. When he complained about it to his brothers they 
told him not to be proud. He now came to the conclusion that 
the difference in his and their education had opened up a gulf be- 
tween them. They belonged to a different class in society and 
ranged themselves on the side of the father who was of their class 
and the one in authority. 
But there was yet another kind of humiliation or punishment 
in store for him. In spite of the fact that there was no lack of 
servants in the home, the boy was aroused early each morning 
and sent out on different errands. When pleading lack of time 
he was invariably told that he would always find time for his 
studies. Later in life he asked himself whether all this had been 
done purposely, i. e., whether the father thus endeavored to 
counteract the harmful effects of excessive brain activities, or 
whether it was for some other reason unknown to the boy. He 
himself failed to see any beneficent intention in the matter. He 
says (op. cit. p ioi) : 
The whole affair seemed so dictated by malice and an intention to 
cause pain that it was impossible for him to discover any good purpose 
though it may have existed along with the evil one. 
To relate even superficially the continuous conflicts, real 
and imaginary, extending over the adolescent period of the boy 
would call for more space than this study could well afford to 
give to the subject. Nor is it necessary. The antagonism and 
enmity between the father and the stepmother on the one hand 
and the future famous author on the other, I trust I have demon- 
strated beyond a shade of doubt. The significance of these re- 
lations will be dealt with presently. A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
33 
IV 
I think we may assume, without much risk, on the basis of 
the evidence that I have presented in the preceding chapters, 
that we are dealing with a real case of psycho-sexual fixation 
on the mother, with its consequent concomitant feature-hatred 
of the father. Neither can there be any valid doubt about 
Strindberg's marked neurotic tendencies manifest already at a 
very early age. 
To the Freudian Psychologist this means that the serious 
psychic anomalies so characteristic of Strindberg's later life 
were due to unsuccessful repression of the so called libido sexualis. 
The Adlerian, on the other hand, would be governed by other 
considerations and attribute his extraordinary life and achieve- 
ments to organ inferiority and subsequent psychic over com- 
pensation. Others again, failing to accept either one of the 
theories referred to, would probably apply the principles of 
Jung (37 p. XXXV) who places the pathogenetic conflict in the 
present moment, and holds that it is produced by some important 
task or duty which is essential biologically and practically for the 
fulfilment of the ego of the individual, but before which an obstacle 
arises from which he shrinks and thus halted cannot go on. 
It would be difficult, it seems to me, to demonstrate in a 
convincing manner that the Strindberg problem could not be 
fairly successfully solved by the methods referred to, either 
separately or jointly. This would hold more particularly in a 
post mortem analysis where the psychiatric aim is no longer a 
matter of consideration. In the following analysis, therefore, 
I shall make free use, in so far as I am able, of psycho-analytic 
principles and technique, regardless of their origin, and in so far 
as they do not conflict. 
As far as I am aware, no psycho-analytic study in the Freu- 
dian sense has been made of Strindberg. Bjerre, (7 pp. 138-139) 
however, in his History and Practice of Psychoanalysis states that 
Strindberg has been the object of study by Freschi, a devoted 
follower of Adler. He writes: 
The neurotic, as I have already said, occupies a place between . 
two extremes. He keeps himself within the framework of the outside 
reality; but he lives either upon phantasies which have nothing to do 
with reality-or else makes continual unsuccessful efforts to overcome 
it as a creator. To Adler, Strindberg is the embodiment of this concep- 
tion (4 p. 248 ff). It is well-known how, in childhood, Strindberg suffered 34 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
from an overruling feeling of inferiority, and all his after life was a series 
of desperate efforts to work himself . . . out of this. All that 
he aimed to construct to this end soon collapsed and he again stood in the 
same place as before. In spite of all his unprecedented power for creat- 
ing, he never succeeded in bringing out one single value that became 
established for himself or could show a way for others;- it all dissolved 
in chaos. Finally he succumbed to the feeling of inferiority with which 
he started out, dying with the cross before his eyes and hate in his heart; 
the cross, which is the everlasting symbol of inability to master the 
earthly life, and hate, which is only the negation of all emotional value. 
And again (7 pp. 154-155): 
One of Adler's most faithful adherents, Freschi, has recently devoted 
himself to a study of Strindberg's book For Pay. This points out 
how, for the author, everything was a question of power, an effort to 
demonstrate his superiority. He feels his inferiority in regard to woman 
and marries three times in hopes of finally becoming master over some 
one. At the bottom of his inclination to endow woman at one and the 
same time with irresistible charm, and with the most horrible qualities, 
lies one of those strange stratagems which are so often met with in 
neurotics; he does it to protect himself from the humiliation which other- 
wise would mean his going under in the battle against her, for no one 
need be ashamed of being unable to withstand such monsters of artifice 
and enchantment as he makes his fictitious women appear to be. Helen 
must conquer in order to show the dangerous power of which she is 
possessed and it is easy to understand the need of the man to protect 
himself against her-against woman-etc. Out of Strindberg's life 
and out of all his books it is easy to see how aggression tendencies 
originated from a neurotic thought scheme, to which he must cling in 
order to assure himself, since he plainly felt how great was his insecurity 
against woman. This feeling of powerlessness in the struggle against 
her was, however, only one expression standing out in the foreground, 
for a general feeling of inferiority which he had with him from the very 
beginning. When Strindberg speaks of love between man and woman, 
it does not mean anything like love, but only the question which of the 
two shall get the better of the other in the struggle for power. 
Since I have not had access to Freschi's study, I cannot dis- 
cuss its merits but Strindberg's story is not, in my opinion, good 
proof of his desire for power or a demonstration of superiority. 
The story in question may be found in Married (64 p. 261 ff.) 
under the title of Corinna, and I leave it to the reader to decide 
whether it is anything else than a sex duel conceivable in the case 
of any man who is unfortunate enough to marry a woman suffer- 
ing from chronic sexual anasthesia, and accompanying masculine 
tendencies. A far better field for the gleaning of proofs of his 
struggle for power wherewith to counterbalance his deep-seated A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
35 
and intense feeling of inferiority and threatened security may be 
found in his autobiographical works. 
It seems to me after a careful perusal of a large number of 
Strindberg's representative works, as well as of criticism and 
interpretation, that in spite of his marked egocentric tendencies, 
which must be recognized, one would have to be especially biased 
in favor of the Adlerian theory in order to make it the exclusive 
basis for a psycho-analytic study of the man. 
In his Makers of Man, Charles J. Whitby (76 p. 316) makes 
the following significant statement: 
No investigation of the types of human greatness could be in any 
way satisfactory-it is futile to talk of "completeness" in such a con- 
nection-which ignored the great question of their sexual proclivities. 
In no other manifestation of temperament or character are more signi- 
ficant glimpses to be obtained of the fundamental spiritual attitude to- 
wards life and its responsibilities, whose diagnosis is the ultimate de- 
sideratum of ethological scrutiny. A man's conception of womanhood 
in general, and of his relation thereto, is one of the main expressions, 
perhaps the main expression of his general instinctive bias. It colors, 
for good or evil, his entire emotional and intellectual being and largely 
determines his rank in the scale of spiritual values. 
This is undoubtedly true not only of types of human great- 
ness, but of man in general, no matter what his intellectual and 
other endowments may be. That it is eminently true of Strind- 
berg I shall endeavor to prove in the following pages, and to this 
end I will immediately proceed to a consideration of his family 
constellation. Let us begin with his father. 
Freud (19) has pointed out, and it has been corroborated 
by Jung, and others, that the father's influence upon the child 
exerts the most lasting of all influences and is of an overwhelming 
importance in any later neurosis. 
Says Jung (36 p. 156): 
This relationship is in fact the infantile channel par excellence in 
which the libido flows back when it encounters any obstacles in later 
years, thus revivifying long-forgotten dreams of childhood. It is ever 
so in life when we draw back from too great an obstacle-the menace 
of some severe disappointment or the risk of some too-far-reaching 
decision-the energy stored up for the solution of the task flows back 
impotent; the by-streams once relinquished as inadequate are again 
filled up. He who has missed the happiness of a woman's love falls 
back, as a substitute, upon some gushing friendship; upon masturbation, 
upon religiosity; should he be a neurotic, he plunges still further back 
into the conditions of childhood which have never been quite forsaken, 36 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
to which indeed the normal is fettered by more than one link-he re- 
turns to the relationship to father and mother. 
For a fuller treatment of the subject, the reader is referred 
to the work of Dr. Emma Furst (28) whose achievements in this 
particular field are of special importance. 
But the far-reaching importance of the father complex is 
perhaps most convincingly demonstrated by Jung (36 p. 172) 
in his chapter on the significance of the father. 
He says: 
If now we survey all the far-reaching possibilities of the infantile 
constellation we are forced to say that in essence our life's fate is identical 
with the fate of our sexuality. If Freud and his school devote them- 
selves first and foremost to tracing out the individual's sexuality it is 
certainly not in order to excite piquant sensations, but to gain a deeper 
insight into the driving forces that determine the individual's fate. 
If we can strip off the veil shrouding the problems of individual destiny, 
we can afterwards widen our view from the history of the individual to 
the history of nations. And first of all we can look at the history of 
religions, at the history of the phantasy systems of whole peoples and 
epochs. 
And so he goes on to show (op. cit. pp. 173-74) that the Old 
Testament raised the Pater familias to the position of Jehovah of 
the Jews, whom the people worshipped in fear and dread. The 
Patriarchs played an intermediate role between man and the 
Deity. The neurotic awe and dread of the Jewish religion he 
pronounces an unsuccessful attempt at the sublimation of a still 
too barbarous people and hence the excessive severity of the 
Mosaic Law, the ceremonial constraint of the neurotic. 
The only ones who succeeded in freeing themselves from this 
constraint, he continues, were the prophets, who actually identi- 
fied themselves with Jehovah and thus became the fathers of the 
people. Through Christ, who was the fulfilment of the prophecy, 
the fear of God ends, for His message was and is that God is love. 
But later successful sublimation of the Christian Mass once more 
leads to the ceremonial of the Church from which, occasionally, 
some minds-saints and reformers-capable of sublimation- 
have been able to deliver themselves. 
This development of world processes is also seen in the 
individual. The parents constitute the child's higher controlling 
power. But as the child grows the clash between the infantile 
complex and his budding individuality is inevitable. Parental A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
37 
influence is now forced below the threshold of consciousness, but 
that does not mean that it is eliminated. For we must remember, 
-first that one of the most salient characteristics of the Uncon- 
scious is its absolute retentiveness, and secondly that its entire 
content is dynamic. And so, as by invisible threads, as Jung 
says, the paternal influence directs the creative impulses of the 
offspring and thus makes possible the first religious sublimation. 
In due time the father with all his faults and virtues disappears 
and in his place appears a duality. On the one hand the Deity, 
on the other the Devil. In the case of the neurotics God is the 
symbol of complete sexual repression and the devil that of sexual 
lust. 
Pfister (45, pp. 147, 575 and footnote 26) in the discussion 
of the father and mother complexes shares the views of Freud 
and Jung. He quotes some of the Saviour's many utterances as 
regards the necessity of liberation from the father imago; just 
as he himself effected a complete emancipation from his mother. 
He quotes the postulate of sublimation formulated in Matthew 
XXIII, 9: 
And call no man your father on the earth; for one is your Father, 
even He who is in heaven. 
Thereby Jesus has relieved the harmful fixation and broken the 
bonds of free personal development. 
In this connection he also cites Hebbel's statement in his 
Aufzeichnungen aus meinem Leben (Chap. V) where he tells us 
how religion helped him to cut the mental navel string which had 
previously bound him exclusively to his parents. 
The significance of the influence, conscious and unconscious, 
of the father upon Strindberg's life can hardly be over esti- 
mated. To him he owes, to a very large degree-just as Schopen- 
hauer did to his father-his inveterate cynicism, aggressiveness 
and will to power. To the father influence we may also attribute 
his unquenchable thirst for kno.wledge, his incorruptible honesty, 
rigid truthfulness, his sensitiveness to pressure, the primitive 
force of his response to environmental stimuli, his dualism, ex- 
pressed by his continual warfare between the spirit and the flesh, 
his religious doubts and general skepticism and sense of justice. 
The stern, unsympathetic father who, as I have already 
shown, punished him severely and too often unjustly, bred in the 38 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
child a deep, bitter hatred which he soon transferred upon civi- 
lization at large with all its restraining influences. It was the 
father who awakened in the boy the primitive man who fought 
for his primitive, unlimited rights. In school and college his 
attitude towards his teachers was largely that which he assumed 
towards his father. In his discussion of the father complex Frink 
(27 p. 214) quotes one of his patients as saying: 
I have always been so afraid of doing something wrong, that I have 
never yet done anything right. 
That is a true Strindberg sentiment expressed more than 
once. His whole childhood is characterized, as we know, by 
over conscientiousness. His entire life up to the Inferno period 
shows in a most conspicuous manner a transferrence of the hostile, 
defiant feelings of his father complex upon such surrogates as 
University professors, military forces, civic and national govern- 
ments, prominent individuals in Swedish history (kings, poets, 
artists), religious institutions and dogma, theatrical managers, 
newspaper editors,-the world and all that the human kind holds 
dear. His was the spirit of the iconoclast, 
the active atheist, railer at conventional restraint. 
Toward the age of fifty an over compensation developed and 
ambivalently he went to the other extreme of religious fanaticism. 
If we bear his home environment in mind we can easily under- 
stand his horror of authority and the enthusiasm with which he 
looked forward to the atmosphere of freedom at the University, 
and with which he embraced everything revolutionary and an- 
archic during the subsequent thirty years of his life. It is no 
wonder that his enthusiasm broke all bounds when he discovered 
Schiller's Die Rduber and that he swore immediately by Karl 
Moor who voiced his own hostility towards the platitudinous 
conventionalities of life. Here he had found a truly kindred 
soul who preached insurrection against laws, morals and religion. 
Again, it is in part an unconscious revolt against his father, 
the tyrant of his childhood and youth, that throws him with irre- 
sistible force into the rioting crowds on the side of the masses 
to whom he is related by ties of blood and sentiment (63 p. 70 ff). 
The same spirit of defiance moves his hand when he sits down to 
sketch the drama Jesus of Nazareth designed to wipe Christianity 
from the face of the earth. Thorwaldsen, the hero of his juvenile A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
39 
play In Rome (67 pp. 186-187), facing the gigantic statue of Jason, 
ready to batter it down with a sledge-hammer, is truly symbolic 
of the youthful author's real attitude towards the object of his 
deep, unconscious hatred and aversion-his father. 
That Strindberg's fate was also closely bound up with and 
largely shaped by physical qualities inherited from the father 
is certain. He inherited from him that rugged physique which 
saved him from premature death and the madhouse on more than 
one occasion. In his writings he has made little direct mention of 
his father, but like Goethe, he has told us what he considered was 
his inheritance from both his father and mother. 
In Married (64 p. 13) he says: 
One might compare the boy's character to an ill-proportioned com- 
pensation pendulum; it contained too much soft material of the mother, 
not enough hard metal of the father. Friction and irregular oscillations 
were the natural consequences. 
But there is still another angle from which we must view 
the relation of father and son, in order to be able to appreciate 
to the fullest extent the son's attitude towards the father. Those 
who are familiar with the Freudian psycho-analytic theory, are 
well aware of the fact that until Freud's epoch making discovery, 
in the early eighties of last century, of the cause of hysteria and 
his subsequent formulation of the theory of sex and the incest 
motive as the nuclear complex of the neurosis, nothing was known 
of the close and peculiar relations of the child to its parents. The 
child was considered asexual up to the time of puberty when the 
reproductive instinct manifested itself all at once. Now it is a 
well known fact, even if not generally accepted, that the child 
passes through three distinct stages of sexual development and 
that its future depends upon the successful passing of the pre- 
inhibitory, latency and pubertal periods. Frink writes (27 p. 21): 
It will be sufficient . . .to say, that every step in ontogenetic 
development, every transition that must be passed through, offers 
possibilities of morbid disturbances through a persistence of this or that 
phase that should normally be passed, through the opening up of avenues 
for aberrant development, or through the formation of locus minoris 
resistentiae at which the apparently normally accomplished sexual 
synthesis may give way under the strain and stress of adult life. 
Despite the fact that there is still in the child at this stage 
of development-the preinhibitory, from three to four years of 40 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
age-no sexual synthesis, the infantile eroticism, according to 
Freud, and others, is not so widely different from adult sexuality 
as might be expected. 
At any rate before the termination of the period the libido 
turns outward and it is significant that a child even at this early 
age shows preference for the opposite sex. Here begins the 
serious development of the child's sexual life. Jealousy of real 
or apparent rivals is evidently raging in the breast of the child 
long before it can be detected or its intensity can be determined 
by the untrained mind. A classical example is that of little Hans 
of whom Freud (17 pp. 1-122) says in his Analysis of the Phobia 
of a Five-year-old Boy: 
In his relation to father and mother Hans confirms most emphatically 
and palpably everything that I have asserted in the Interpretation of 
Dreams, and in the Sexual Theory concerning the sexual relation of 
children to their parents. He is truly a little Oedipus who would like 
to see his father out of the way in order to be alone with his handsome 
mother and to sleep with her. 
This early selection of the love-object is the foundation of the 
family constellation known in psycho-analysis as the Oedipus 
Complex for the male and the Electra Complex for the female 
child. 
The latency period is one of repression of sexual instincts 
through the ethical and aesthetic forces of inhibition incident 
to later sexual life. This making over, so to speak, of the primitive 
instincts for higher purposes is called sublimation. This process 
may be only partially successful and sex-life may take very de- 
finite forms even at this early age. In children showing such 
tendencies later neurosis or sexual abnormalities may be expected. 
This is exactly what happened in the case of Strindberg. 
Long before the advent of puberty it may be assumed with great 
certainty that his sex-life reached an abnormal development. 
The first proof that I venture to offer is the fact that his earliest 
impressions of life were fear and hunger. Freud (23 p. 83) says: 
The fear expressed by children is originally nothing but an expression 
for the fact that they miss the beloved person. They, therefore, meet 
every stranger with fear, they are afraid of the dark because they cannot 
see the beloved person and are calm if they can grasp that person's hand. 
With this we may well compare Strindberg's excessively de- 
veloped fear so graphically described in The Son of a Servant. A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
41 
Again-and this is important to remember since Strindberg 
attributed his fear partly to the trials which the parents had 
undergone before his birth and partly to his environment-Freud 
(op. cit. p. 83) emphasizes that 
the effect of childish fears and of the terrifying stories told by nurses 
is overestimated if one blames the latter for producing fear in children. 
Children who are predisposed to fear absorb these stories which make no 
impression whatever upon others; and only such children are predisposed 
to fear whose sexual impulse is excessive or prematurely developed. 
The child, Freud adds, here acts like the adult; its libido 
is changed into fear when it cannot be gratified and the grown-up 
having become neurotic because of ungratified libidonous desires, 
behaves in his anxiety like a child. 
Strindberg's early childhood fears which, by the way, he 
never outgrew were, therefore, but another form of that morbid 
sexual attachment to the mother which is so plainly visible 
throughout his whole life. 
Because of his constitutional defect4 his fears and general 
feeling of insecurity were undoubtedly aggravated. His be- 
havior throughout childhood and youth is such that one might be 
warranted in assuming that he suffered from enuresis. His organ 
inferiority was, as we recall, located in the urinary organs. Says 
Adler (5. p. 73): 
Pavor nocturnus in childhood, which very frequently occurs in enure- 
tic constitutions, arises from the over great necessity for tenderness in 
such children which finds its outlet at night by sleep and in the dark by 
fright and screaming. The fearfulness which burdens almost every 
enuretic in childhood is a universal expression of helplessness in regard 
to the inferior organ and often burdens even grown people. In later 
life, in addition to the usual characteristics, fear of water and fire, fear 
of the night, is frequently added. At times the neurotic is able to con- 
quer the terror in every form and to achieve the contrast, extreme 
bravery and courage. 
Lastly I wish to point out that Adler (op. cit. p. 74) cor- 
relates this defect with a series of defects and perversities peculiar 
to children. In his opinion, it becomes the mainspring in the 
awakening of auto-eroticism and leads to masturbatory practices. 
Under certain conditions the enuretic may also incline towards 
homosexuality and exhibitionism. He says: 
4 See page 17 of this thesis. 42 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
The early awakened auto-eroticism makes the child more unfitted for 
bringing up, the prevention of bad, uncivilized impulses becomes 
difficult from the outside, for the same reason the child does not adapt 
itself to cultural life and becomes evil and unamenable. At the same 
time there arises in him further supports for his cowardice, shyness and 
anxiety, and he seeks comfort and protection for the understanding 
which he has of the sin in childish superstitions and religious phantasies 
with unfortunate results. In the psycho-analysis of neurotic persons we 
find both in the ideological sexual superstructure. Physiologically 
viewed it is compensation of the sexual organs in the psychomotor field, 
strengthening and check. How often these happenings become the 
foundations of psychoneurosis as soon as compensatory interruption 
and reciprocal effects of two inferior psychomotor fields occur, Freud 
has irrefutably shown in his psycho-analytic material. • 
But even if we were not in possession of all these facts, many 
other circumstances might be brought forth as potent causes 
of Strindberg's early awakened sex-life. Says Freud (23 p. 87): 
Quarrels between the parents and unhappy marital relations between 
the same determine the severest predispositions for disturbed sexual 
development or neurotic disease in the children. 
And again (op. cit. p. 98): 
Sexual prematurity often runs parallel with premature intellectual 
development; it is found as such in the infantile history of the most 
distinguished and most productive individuals and in such connection 
it does not seem to act so pathogenically as when appearing isolated. 
Among the many conditions actively favoring that phase of 
the child's development which I have discussed may also be men- 
tioned the cramped quarters in which he was reared. Even in 
the least favorable milieu we know that when the child begins to 
have a faint realization of self as distinguished from his surround- 
ings, he begins a more or less thoroughgoing sexual investigation. 
This is about the time of transition from the infantile to the 
latency period. He becomes interested in his own origin and that 
of others. The many stories of the stork, the doctor, etc., furnish 
irrefutable proof of the universality of such infantile activities. 
The sexual investigation normally comes to an end at the be- 
ginning of the latency or inhibition period and all memories of 
the child's early speculation vanish from the mind. But before 
the approach of puberty a second period begins. The children 
now discuss the matter openly with one another and in rare cases 
they learn the whole truth of reproduction from parents, guardians A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
43 
or teachers. But as a rule their theories are even now absurd. 
Some children, however, particularly those who share the bed- 
room with their parents, necessarily must arrive at conclusions 
different from those of children who have been in a less favorable 
position for making observations. The former are apt to con- 
ceive of parental sex-life as an act of aggression as Freud (op. cit. 
p. 57) has pointed out. He says: 
If children of so delicate an age become spectators of the sexual act 
between grown-ups . . .it impresses them in a sadistic sense. 
Psycho-analysis also teaches us that such an early impression contributes 
much to the disposition for a later sadistic displacement of the sexual 
aim. 
Now if we take into consideration that Strindberg in all 
probability not only shared the bedroom with his parents but at 
times their bed, that births and deaths, baptisms and burials 
alternated in rapid succession and that the child was more obser- 
vant because of his excessive nervousness, we are forced to the 
conclusion that his milieu was a most favorable one for the de- 
velopment of abnormal infantile phantasies. This helps to ex- 
plain his sexual aggressiveness in later life. 
I must, therefore, conclude from the evidence that I have 
presented here as well as in preceding chapters, and from an 
abundance of material that I cannot deal with in this connection, 
that Strindberg, because of his premature sexual development 
and fixation on his mother, early began to regard his father as an 
intruder and a dangerous rival. 
The male child's psycho-sexual fixation on the mother and 
all that it implies, repulsive as it is, is something which may not 
be explained on the basis of assumed abnormal development and 
as appertaining only to the degenerate and the neurotic. In 
discussing the tragic fate of Oedipus Tyrannus, Freud says 
(19 p. 223): 
There must be a voice within us which is prepared to recognize the 
compelling power of fate, while we justly condemn the situations occur- 
ring in Die Ahnfrau or in the tragedies of later date as arbitrary in- 
ventions. And there must be a factor corresponding to this inner voice 
in the story of King Oedipus. His fate moves us only for the reason that 
it might have been ours, for the Oracle has put the same curse upon us before 
our birth as upon him. Perhaps we are all destined to direct our first 
sexual impulses towards our mother and our first hatred and violent 
wishes towards our father; our dreams convince us of it. King Oedipus, 
who has struck his father Laius dead and has married his mother Jocasta, 44 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
is nothing but a realized wish of our childhood. But more fortunate 
than he, we have since succeeded, unless we have become psycho-neu- 
rotics, in withdrawing our sexual impulses from our mothers and in 
forgetting our jealousy of our fathers. We recoil from the person for 
whom this primitive wish has been fulfilled with all the force of repression 
which these wishes have suffered within us. By his analysis, showing 
us the guilt of Oedipus, the poet urges us to recognize our own inner self, 
in which these impulses, even if suppressed, are still present . . . 
Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of the wishes that offend morality, 
wishes which nature has forced upon us, and after the revelation of 
which we want to avert every glance from the scenes of our childhood. 
To what extent the incestuous impulse is fundamental in the 
development of all that humanity understands by culture in the 
fullest sense of the word, the voluminous psycho-analytic litera- 
ture has shown in astonishing detail. Besides Freud I need 
mention only such names as Havelock Ellis, Frink, Hugo Hell- 
muth, Ernest Jones, Jung, Adler, Moll, Reitler, Pfister, Bleuler, 
Putnam, White, Jelliffe, Brill, Ferenczi, Abraham, Stekel, Reik 
and Rank (48) whose monumental work Das Inzest-Motiv in 
Dichtung und Sage affords us an insight, from the Freudian point 
of view, into the inner structure of artistic creation and the con- 
ditions and processes underlying them. Here the individual roots 
in their incredible ramifications are shown in the types of the 
representative incest dramas of the world's literature, ancient and 
modern. Here the life and death struggle of all the untold ages 
between father and son, as recorded in myth, fable, Christian 
Legends and Holy Writ, stands forth in all its repulsiveness. 
Here again the relation of father and daughter, that of brother 
and sister, sheds new light upon human life and its hidden motives. 
Here finally the problem of genius has been represented as in- 
separably bound up with the nuclear complex of the neurosis- 
incest-from Sophocles to Ibsen. Says Pfister (45 p. 301): 
Whether the incest is constantly the innermost nucleus of the symbols, 
as Freud assumes, or whether the incest wish, even where it expresses a 
natural desire, is to be constantly solved as symbol, as Jung asserts, is 
for me undecided. As remarked before (165) I consider the incestuous 
wish to be the expression of an actual wish which bears witness to old 
inhibitions without including at the same time a sublimated impulse.5 
Whether we accept the one or the other interpretation of the 
Oedipus phantasy undoubtedly depends in the final analysis 
5Cf Riklin (49) Oedipus und Psa. Wissen und Leben V 1912, p 552. A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
45 
upon the success or failure of our own infantile sexual develop- 
ment. But a recognition of the Oedipus complex in essence, it 
seems to me, as demonstrated in the works already referred to 
and those of Westermark (75) and Marcuse (41) to mention no 
others, is inevitable. For while we are today far removed from 
the necessity of being under the restraint of incest taboos, such 
as described by Freud (24) or of the curse of Deuteronomy (6), 
we are all struggling under the constraint of our moral, religious, 
ethical and aesthetic codes with the Titan within us. 
We are compelled to realize the truth of Dr. White's (77 p. 
147) statement, 
That in the life history of every individual who grows to adulthood 
there comes a time when he must emancipate himself from the thraldom 
of the home. He must break away from his infantile moorings, and go 
forth into the world of reality and win there a place for himself. This 
is not to be understood to mean that he must simply physically leave the 
home . . . but he must leave it in his feelings, he must put aside his 
childhood, put away his infantile attachments and conquer his own 
world. While this is necessary it is extremely painful and many persons 
never accomplish it. They are the future neurotics. 
I have already presented evidence, irrefutable in my opinion, 
of Strindberg's incestuous attachment to his mother. But even 
if we were to ignore it all, even if we attached no importance 
whatever to such a statement of his as this, viz. (69 p. 137), that 
sons are reared as if they were to be sons for life without a single 
thought of the fact that nature had the parental function in view, 
or again, that (op. cit. p. 152) in every young woman who aroused 
the love emotions in his bosom, he saw part of his mother; or 
again that, as he said later in life, he never could tell whether he 
was looking to women for a mother's love or for that of a mistress, 
I could point to even more conclusive evidence in his adult life 
and activities and particularly and naturally in his relation to the 
opposite sex. 
We could, therefore, waive all evidence produced of his in- 
fantile object selection and begin with its obvious after effects 
about the time of puberty. Says Freud (23 p. 86): 
Even those who have happily eluded the incestuous fixation of their 
libido have not completely escaped its influence. It is a distinct echo 
of this phase of development that the first serious love of the young man 
is often for a mature woman, and that of a girl for an older man equipped 
with authority, i. e., for persons who can revive in them the picture of 
the mother and the father . . . The man seeks above all the memory 46 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
picture of his mother as it has dominated him since the beginning of 
childhood. . . . 
Now let us see how this corresponds with the facts in Strind- 
berg's case. In chapter VII of The Son of a Servant he tells us 
that when he was fifteen years of age he fell in love with a woman 
of thirty. If, as he says (68 p. 131). 
it really was love and not mere friendship. 
In response to his own question as to how he came to love her 
he states (op. cit. p. 132 ff.) that it was not from one motive but 
from many. 
She was the landlord's daughter and had, as such, a superior position. 
The house was well appointed and always open to visitors. She was 
cultivated, admired, managed the house and spoke familiarly to her 
mother; she could play the hostess and lead the conversation; she was 
also surrounded by men who courted her. She was emancipated without 
being a man hater; she smoked and drank, but was not without taste. 
She was engaged to a man whom her father hated and did not wish to 
have for a son-in-law. Her fiance stayed abroad and wrote seldom. 
Among the visitors to her home were students, clerics, a District Judge, 
a man of letters, and townsmen who all hovered about her. John's 
father admired her, his stepmother feared her and his brothers courted 
her. 
According to his description of her, she was tall and masculine 
and suffered from dropsy and Bright's disease. It seemed absurd 
to him to be in love with such a woman and yet he was in love 
with her for she had him firmly under her control. 
After having described their first conversation he says (op. 
cit. p. 134): 
After this she assumed an air of superiority and became motherly. 
This made a deep impression upon him, and when later she was teased 
because of her fondness for him she felt almost ashamed, banished all 
other feelings except that of motherliness and began to labor for his con- 
version, for she also was a pietist. 
The following statement concerning his attitude towards her 
is significant (69 p. 127): 
John never concentrated his thoughts on her body, he only noticed her 
eyes which were deep (dark?) and full of expression. Nor was it exactly 
the mother whom he worshipped in her, for he never longed to put his 
head in her lap, no matter how unhappy he was, as he always wished to A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
47 
do in the case of other women. He also had a horror of touching her, 
not the horror of secret desire, but of aversion. He danced with her 
once, but never again. It was probably only friendship and her soul 
and body were masculine enough to make friendship possible. 
This is no sign that she was a poor surrogate for the mother. 
It is rather a good example of vigorous unconscious resistance 
necessary to counteract his incestuous desires and thus only one 
of the many defence mechanisms characteristic of the neurotic. 
Space forbids a detailed treatment of his psychic develop- 
ment so graphically described in volumes II and III of his auto- 
biography (63, 62), covering the years of 1867-1877. It may be 
characterized by a single term: Zerrissen, the result of ten years 
of the most violent, almost super-human efforts to effect a ca- 
tharsis, a discharge of the emotional content of the Unconscious. 
For while an almost endless number of factors helped to shape 
his life's course during this period-from eighteen years of age to 
twenty-eight-as well as later, his psycho-sexual fixation on the 
one hand and the imperative need of breaking its spell over him 
constituted that force par excellence, which at times threatened to 
extinguish his lights of reason and which drove him repeatedly 
to suicidal attempts, as recorded in J dsningstiden and I Roda 
Rummet. 
If we accept the theory (Jung's) that religious conflicts so 
characteristic of adolescence are symbolic of the sacrifice of the 
libido, i. e., of infantile phantasies in favor of the larger adult life 
and its functions, then Strindberg's life during this period referred 
to was, psychologically speaking, largely an endeavor to return 
to a more primitive psychic level. At the same time it was the 
first real and partly successful attempt, as shown by the under- 
currents of his juvenile dramatic sketches, Fritdnkaren, Her- 
mione, I Rom, The Outlaw and Master Olof to turn his mind out- 
ward from the realm of phantasy to that of reality. 
But how unsuccessful he was in his endeavor to part with the 
past and to what an incredible extent his first serious steps were 
influenced by his infantile fixation is plainly to be seen in his 
marriage in 1877 to the Baroness Wrangel. 
The union, as I have already pointed out, was an exceedingly 
unhappy one, and while this was the result of an unusually large 
number of factors attributable not alone to one but to both of 
the contrahents, I believe that the cause must largely be sought 
in Strindberg's Oedipus complex. 48 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
In his masterly analysis of Hamlet, Ernest Jones (35) has 
called attention to some of the results that may be caused by the 
complicated interaction between the Oedipus phantasies and 
other influences. He says: 
If the awakened passion undergoes but little repression . . . the 
son may remain throughout life abnormally attached to his mother and 
unable to love any other woman, a not uncommon cause of bachelor- 
hood. He may be gradually weaned from this attachment, if it is less 
strong, though it often happens that the weakening is incomplete, so 
that he is able to fall in love only with women that resemble the 
mother; the latter occurrence is a frequent cause of marriage between 
relatives and has been interestingly pointed out by Abraham (2a). 
The maternal influence may also manifest itself by imparting a strictly 
tender feminine side to the latter character. When the aroused feeling 
is intensely repressed and associated with shame, guilt, etc., the memory 
of it may be so completely submerged that it becomes impossible not 
only to revive it, but to experience any similar feeling, i. e., of attraction 
to the opposite sex. This may declare itself in pronounced misogyny, 
or even when combined with other factors, in actual homosexuality, as 
Sadger (52a) has shown. 
Whether Strindberg may properly be said to belong, to any 
of these categories remains to be seen. His mother was a plain 
woman, without education or aspirations, whose sphere was the 
home such as it was, and whose only ambition was to live for her 
husband and children. That type of woman Strindberg always 
leaned towards, in fact most of his liaisons previous to his marriage 
were with such women, and how completely he was under the 
influence of some of them may be seen in the autobiographical 
works to which I have referred above (62, 63, 68). 
Out of his Einstellung to the mother developed on the one 
hand that deep, indestructible and unchangeable love of the op- 
posite sex, which those of us who are not blinded by its ambivalent 
form of hatred of the type diametrically opposed to that of his 
mother, recognize without difficulty. He says himself (69 p. 152): 
He adored . . . only those [girls] who were kind, and felt honored 
when he was well treated. The dashing ones, the flirts, he was afraid of. 
They looked as if they were in search of prey, as though they wanted to 
devour him. 
And again (69 p. 128): 
He longed to plunge into the whirlpool of life, he wanted to work, to 
support himself and marry. To marry was his dream, for in no other A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
49 
way could he think of a union with a woman. It had to be legalized and 
hallowed. 
But his social standing and his ambition, and above all his 
aesthetic nature formed a barrier between him and the essentially 
maternal type of woman. He states explicitly (62 p. 105): 
He could not fall in love with a woman with coarse features, ugly 
nails and large feet. He wished to be able to look up to the woman he 
was to marry. What did this mean? Above him in intelligence no 
woman could stand. Hence he wished to look up to beauty, blood, 
social standing, wealth-all that which was not to be had. Thus he 
wanted to rise in the social scale. But in his conception of a woman 
worthy of his love also entered: womanhood, motherliness, just those 
things which man looks up to because he lacks them, the complement 
which made woman superior to man. 
We can now understand in part why the handsome Baroness 
Wrangel, nee von Essen, made such an impression on him at their 
first meeting. She was his romantic ideal combining in herself 
all those qualities which he regarded so essential. And so, from 
the first time that their eyes met, he was a lost man. 
From a psycho-analytic point of view, this choice of love 
object is highly interesting and significant. Here as in his 
former relations with the opposite sex, certain rather veiled mo- 
tives, not mentioned by Jones, play an all important part. 
In his important contribution to the psychology of love life 
entitled: Uber einen besonderen Typus der Objektwahl beim Manne 
Freud (20) describes a type of neurotic lover to which Strindberg 
conforms very closely. A representative of this type first of 
all never directs his love to a women that is free, i. e., she must 
either be married or engaged or related to another man in some 
other way. He says: 
The first of these love conditions may straightway be characterized 
as specific. As soon as it is found we may look for the presence of the 
other characteristics of this type. We can call it the condition of the 
wronged third party (des geschadigten Dritten). 
The second condition which often coincides with the first is 
that the chaste, trustworthy woman, has no power of attraction 
for this type of lover. Her reputation must be of a questionable 
character. The first condition offers an opportunity for the 
gratification of the antagonistic feelings towards the man to whom 50 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
the woman stands in the relation of wife, fiancee, a friend or 
what not; the second makes possible that jealousy which is an 
absolute necessity for this type of neurotic lover. Only when 
they can be jealous, says Freud, does their love life reach its acme. 
But strange to say, they are not as a rule jealous of the lawful 
husband or the lover, but of others who may be attracted by the 
woman, or whom they may suspect of evil designs. 
In pronounced cases the neurotic intruder does hot show any 
desire of possessing the woman alone but rather seems to be sat- 
isfied with this three-cornered affair. 
Freud tell us that one of his patients whose "lady" had 
caused him intense suffering by such a liaison, had no objection 
to her marriage to the other man, nor did he show any signs of 
jealousy. In another typical case, however, the principal not 
only showed intense jealousy, but actually urged the woman to 
sever connections with her husband. 
Not infrequently the soteric aspect of the love is conspicuous. 
The man is convinced that the woman depends upon him and that 
without him she is bound to sink to a deplorable level of immoral- 
ity. All the while he may, however, be making the most elaborate 
and ingenious preparations for her seduction. 
This peculiarly conditioned choice of the love object Freud 
refers to as the result of a severe and protracted infantile fixation 
on the mother. The proof of it is best seen in the case of the 
wronged third party, who is none but the father of the neurotic 
lover with whom the latter vies for the possession of the wife and 
mother. 
The second condition, that of the questionable reputation, 
(Dirnencharakter) while apparently diametrically opposed to 
the content of the mother complex proper, is easily explained if we 
only remember that the content of the Conscious and the Un- 
conscious are distinct psychic phenomena which, however, under 
certain conditions may coincide or fuse entirely. It is being 
explained, therefore, on the basis or principle of repressed mem- 
ories on the part of the individual from the pre-pubertal periods 
and the later initiation into the secrets of legalized, as well as 
illicit sexual relations of the sexes. 
All this is exemplified to a remarkable degree in Strindberg's 
early love-life, certain phases of which I have already discussed, 
and as described by himself particularly in the work entitled In A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
51 
the Red Room®. But the best illustration is afforded us by the 
Strindberg-Wrangel affair. 
Here we have a woman who lacks none of the qualifications 
essential for a rapprochement. She was the (adored ?) wife of a 
titled captain of the Royal Guards, the object at the same time of 
Strindberg's fear and admiration. He feared him (60 p. 134) 
as a son of the people, a descendant of the middle classes, who 
cannot but be impressed with the insignia of the highest power 
of the land. 
Whenever they met, says Lind-af-Hageby (40 p. 126), 
the aristocracy of birth and the aristocracy of brain presented them- 
selves to Strindberg in a juxtaposition which threw the superiority of the 
former into pleasant relief. 
After a visit to the Guard-house where he felt the whole 
crushing weight of his ignominious parentage and humiliating 
inferiority he wrote (60 pp. 136-137): 
As I saw him sitting there, the sword between his knees-a sword of 
honor, the hilt of which was ornamented with the initials and the crown 
of the royal donor-I felt strongly that our friendship was but an arti- 
ficial one, the work of a woman who constituted the only link between us. 
Previous to this visit at the Guard-house the Baron had called 
on Strindberg in the Royal Library. Strindberg describes his 
feelings toward the Captain in the following words (op. cit. pp. 
50-51): 
Oppressed on account of the insignia of his rank . . . his belt and 
parade uniform, I endeavored to restore equilibrium by exhibiting my 
knowledge. But I only succeeded in making him restless. Sabre and 
pen; the nobleman down the bourgeois up. Perhaps the far-sighted 
woman instinctively knew to whom the future belonged when later to 
the advantage of her unborn children she chose a father who belonged to 
the coming nobility of intelligence. 
Initially Strindberg's passion for the Baroness-the Madonna 
with the Child, the Virgin Mother-was ideal and pure, he assures 
us. He writes (60 p. 39): 
In a word I adored her without a desire of possessing her. I adored 
her such as she was: as wife and mother . . . as the wife of this man, 
the mother of this child. And in order that I might do this, in order 
that I might realize this happiness, the presence of the husband seemed 
8This work must not be confused with The Red Room. 52 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
to me inevitably necessary. For without the husband, I said to myself, 
she would be a widow, and I am not sure whether I could have wor- 
shipped her under such circumstances. Perhaps as my own, as my wife? 
No. First of all such a frivolous thought could not enter my mind, and 
then she would have been married to me and not the wife of this man, 
the mother of this child, the mistress of this house. Yes, such as she 
was, not otherwise. Yes, it was the sacred memories that clung to this 
house,T it was also the innate inclination of a representative of the lower 
classes to admire noble, blue blood . . . and thus the worship of 
this woman resembled in every particular the religion which I had dis- 
carded: To worship, to sacrifice myself, to suffer without the slightest 
hope of gaining anything else than the enjoyment of worship, of self- 
sacrifice, of suffering. 
And now began his Madonna cult. He made his mansard 
into a temple of worship. He writes (op. cit. pp. 60-61): 
It had become a habit of mine to draw the curtains at sunset, to 
arrange the flower-pots in a semi-circle and to place by the lamp in the 
centre the picture of the Baroness. In this picture she appeared as a 
young mother with indescribably pure but somewhat stern features, her 
handsome head being crowned by a wealth of blond hair. On a table 
near her stood her little daughter . . . Before this picture I com- 
posed the letters "To my Lady friend" which I always sent to the 
Baroness' address on the following day. This was the only outlet for 
my literary inclinations and in them I gave expression to the innermost 
secrets of my soul. 
But a few hours later his psychic tension became too great 
and a single thought of her produced loathing in him and she 
became the fiendish creature, the beast from whose influence he 
must free himself at all cost. He felt that he was being slowly 
entangled in a family drama and reproached himself for playing a 
reckless part in a farce that was bound to assume tragic propor- 
tions. 
Once during such an alternate spell of hatred of the Madonna 
he fled to the club (op. cit. p. 67). After having been greeted by 
his friends he drained half a litre of Arrack Punch and then in 
7 As by the irony of Fate, Captain Wrangel and his family occupied the former resi- 
dence of the Strindberg family in Norra Allen. Of his first visit to the Wrangel's he 
writes (op. cit. p. 31): 
How fatal. It was the house of my parents in which I had spent the 
hardest years of my youth, in which I had experienced all the inner 
storms of the advent of manhood, the first communion, the death of my 
mother and the coming of the stepmother. Seized by a sudden feeling 
of uneasiness, I felt tempted to turn around and flee. I feared to find 
once more all the misery of my adolescence . . . 
At the sound of the bell, I expected that my father would open the door 
for me. A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
53 
high-sounding verses and anatomical terms he celebrated 
woman as the personification of the inability of man to enjoy himself 
alone (sich mit sich selbst zu amusieren). 
He became intoxicated with his drastic speech, with the 
profanation of the Madonna, the pathological product of un- 
gratified desires. He unchained his whole hatred against the 
false idol and was full of bitter hopelessness. He writes (op. 
cit. pp. 68-69): 
In the spirit I see the adored one before me giving herself up to every 
excess of her conjugal love only in order to divert herself from the bore- 
some torment of existence. To her, the absent one, I direct all the in- 
famies, attacks, insults of my blind rage, since I cannot possess her, re- 
coiling from such a crime. 
The Bacchanalian revelry finally came to an end, and then 
there rang out in chorus, like a single voice: 
"Forward. To the women." 
He adds (op. cit. p. 70): 
Half an hour later the band broke in upon a horde of girls. Now 
stought was ordered, fires kindled in the stoves and the Saturnalia 
began with living pictures. 
Fearing his own weakness and the irresistible power of his 
infatuation for the Baroness, he now decided to flee from Sweden 
and accordingly embarked on a steamer bound for Havre. But 
before the vessel had reached the Baltic, his "inexpressible longing 
to see her again" took complete possession of him. He was 
powerfully affected by the leaden October sky and the naked 
islands of the Archipelago. Like an imprisoned animal he ran 
about the decks of the steamer seeking some person to whom he 
might tell his sorrow. He suffered physical pain, like a per- 
manent toothache, but he could not localize it. The farther the 
vessel advanced, the greater became his psychic tension. He 
felt that the umbilical cord which united him to home, fatherland, 
family and her was about to snap. He was frightened by his own 
fear which he attributed to premature birth or an attempt at 
abortion on the part of his mother, a practice which is common 
enough, he says, in large families. 
While thus straying on the decks of the vessel he came upon 54 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
an old lady who told him that he looked unwell and who finally 
gave him some medicine and put him to bed (op. cit. p. 105). 
He writes: 
How well she knew how to do it. A motherly warmth which the children 
seek at the breast of their mother emanated from her. The tender 
touch of her hand calmed me, and in two minutes gentle sleep took 
possession of me. I imagined that I was a nursing-baby and saw how 
my mother tenderly busied herself about my bed. . . . 
but soon the mother's image fused with the handsome countenance 
of the Baroness and that of the compassionate lady, and then he 
lapsed into a state of unconsciousness. He slept. 
When he awoke he felt that he had to get back to the Baroness 
or go mad. He writes (op. cit. pp. no-in): 
Indeed, my love was of the right quality because I had relapsed into 
a state of childhood, obsessed by a single idea, as single image, by an 
overwhelming feeling that had rendered me void of resistance so that I 
could do nothing but sob. 
Accordingly he persuaded the Captain of the necessity of 
being put ashore. It was done. But no sooner was his wish 
fulfilled than he recognized the hopelessness and disgrace of his 
condition and determined to end his life, for life without her was 
impossible. He says (op. cit. p. 113): 
But with the cunning of a madman, I decided to get some satisfaction 
out of my death by contracting pneumonia or a similar fatal disease, for 
in that case, I argued, I should have to lie in bed for some time: I could 
see her again and kiss her hand in saying goodbye forever . 
After having engaged a room in the Village Inn, he returned 
to the shore to carry out his plan. The coast was precipitous 
and the water deep, everything just as he wanted it to be. In 
the cold October gale he undressed and lept into the surf. He 
swam about in the water until he was nearly exhausted and then 
returned to the cliff. He sat down on the rock in order to allow 
the cold wind to do its deadly work, but was finally compelled to 
climb a tree, since it was extremely difficult for him to remain 
in one place. He remained in the tree until he was convinced 
that he had attained his end and then he hastily dressed himself. 
Upon reaching the village, he immediately sent a dispatch 
to the Baron telling of his sudden illness and the cancelling of 
the trip. Then he went to bed, rang for the maid and told her to A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
55 
send for a physician. Since there was no physician in the village 
the Apothecary sent the patient an opiate with directions not to 
take too much as the contents were enough to kill a man. Strind- 
berg took it all in one draught, rolled the quilt about himself and 
soon went to sleep. 
In the morning he awoke after a night of gorgeous dreams 
and in his joy of being alive there was only one discord: his 
shameful acts of yesterday. He now began to plan his trip with 
the next steamer. While doing so the Baron and the Baroness ap- 
peared on the scene and Strindberg all but fell on the lady's neck 
in the presence of her husband. Her presence immediately 
restored his equilibrium. We read (op. cit. p. 120): 
She treated me like a child. And this role of mother was very becom- 
ing to her. With the sweetest words of flattery she spoke of me as "he", 
wrapped me in a shawl, placed a napkin before me at the table, poured 
the wine in my glass and decided what I was to do. She was all mother. 
His attempt to free himself from the Baroness was not a 
success although the measures to which he resorted were severer 
than those which resulted in the separation from a former mis- 
tress (62 p. 7$ff). 
He returned to Stockholm and the old relations were resumed. 
In spite of the most phenomenal resistance he finally made his 
declaration of love. One day they met in the National Museum 
of Fine Arts and in the shadow of the statue of Psyche he im- 
plored her to take the final step and leave her faithless husband. 
She, now realizing the seriousness of her position, reminded him 
of the brother-sister compact. To this he answered (60 p. 159 ff): 
"To the devil with the childish brother-sister compact." 
" . . . man and wife, beloved and mistress. I adoreyou, yourbody 
and mind, youf blond locks and honest soul, the smallest shoes in 
Sweden and your straightforwardness, your eyes . . . your charm- 
ing smile, white stockings and red garters" . . . 
"But Sir" . . . 
"Yes, noble Lady. I have seen everything. I will bite your neck, 
I warn you that I will smother you with my warm kisses, crush you in my 
arms. Yes, I am strong as a god and will consume you entirely. You 
think I am weak. No, I am the imaginary sick man, or rather the 
hypocrite. Be on your guard against the sick lion, don't go into its 
cave, it will love you to death. Off with that hateful mask. I desire 
you, as I have done from the first time I saw you. What do I care about 
the friendship of this dear Baron. I, the bourgeois, the provincial, 
disinherited one. He hates me and I curse him." 56 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
And she went into the lion's den. In his mansard, the one- 
time temple of pure adoration he seduced her after having alleged 
an organic defect, which, if it did not render him sterile, made 
him practically harmless. 
Soon afterwards divorce proceedings were begun and the 
Baroness had to desert her husband in order to be free. She 
went to Copenhagen and induced Strindberg, after much resist- 
ance on his part, to accompany her, if only a few miles outside 
of the capital. Finally he consented. But the misogynist had 
already supplanted the idolater. A quarrel began between them 
before the train pulled out of the station. He felt the noose 
tighten around his neck. The Baroness wept and talked of 
nothing but her love for him. He rebelled and felt a wild desire, 
he tells us, to throw himself out of the car window and thus es- 
cape a prison where he was being watched by an enemy, struggling 
helplessly in the clutches of a sorceress. He suffered all the 
terrors of a nightmare and cursed his existence. 
But all of a sudden the Baroness, feigning exhaustion, put 
her feet on the upholstered seat and Strindberg was on his knees 
begging her forgiveness. He had seen her adored feet (op. cit. 
p. 189). 
At Katrineholm they parted. Like a mother she kissed 
him, made the sign of the cross and entrusted him to God's 
keeping. Having left her he felt greatly relieved, but in the 
Village Inn, where he was to spend the night, he broke down 
feeling that he could not live without her. He made the following 
confession (op. cit. p. 190): 
I love her, love her such as she revealed herself in the moment of 
parting: and the remembrance of the first days of our acquaintance rises 
up within me, when she-wife and mother at the same time-gently and 
tenderly caressed and fondled me like a little child. And so I love her, 
desire her passionately for a wife. 
Is that an unnatural impulse? Am I the product of the caprice of 
nature? Are my feelings those of a degenerate, since I am in possession 
of my mother? Is this unconscious incest of the heart? 
Then he sat down to write a letter in which he prayed to God 
for her safety. The first part of a Fool's Confession ends as 
follows: 
Her last embrace has brought me back to God, and under the influence 
of her last tears, of which there are still traces in my beard, I renounce A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
57 
the new faith which stands for the evolution of mankind. The first 
halting place on the downward path of a man has been reached, the other 
will follow naturally even to insensibility, to the verge of madness. 
After her return from Copenhagen, Strindberg, eager as he 
was to get away, not only from the one-time Virgin Mother who 
now inspired him with disgust, but also from the repulsive heap of 
offal-the divorce proceedings-left for Paris. Very likely this 
would have been the end of their relations. But while there he 
received a letter from the Baroness saying that she expected 
to be a mother before long and begged him to return and save her 
from dishonor. Strindberg immediately returned and the 
marriage was solemnized on December 31, 1877. Shortly 
afterwards a little girl was prematurely born. She died a few 
days later. 
The remainder of A Fool's Confession is the story of the first 
ten years of his married life8. No sooner was he legally joined 
to this woman than he began to suspect her of intercourse with 
other men. First of all he suspected the former husband, then 
the family physician, and finally he discovered that she had not 
only illicit relations with men, "but even extends her natural 
desires in amor lesbicus to her own sex." (31 p. 221). 
A pug dog also came in for a generous share of violent hatred 
and threatened to break up the household. Finally in the year of 
1883 he left Sweden on account of poor health-a voluntary 
flight into a state of neurosis-but primarily in order to escape 
the imaginary bad reputation of his wife in the capitol. But 
whether they were in Sweden or on the Continent was immaterial 
to her. Her conduct continued to be the same and he suffered 
unspeakable torments. The only defence mechanism that he 
could fall back upon was to move from place to place, from 
country to country, in order to prevent her from meeting her 
women friends. And so they moved from France into French 
Switzerland, from there into German Switzerland, then to Ba- 
varia and finally to Denmark and Sweden where they arrived in 
1889. 
Several times during these years of psychic agony, of an un- 
ceasing rhythmical vacillation between eruptive fits of the most 
glowing love and maniacal adoration on the one hand and utter 
disgust and hatred on the other of the hermaphrodite, as he 
8 First avant-propos in the French edition {Plaidoyer d^n Fou) of 1894 is dated 1887. 
At the end of the volume we read: Septembre 1887-Mars 1888. 58 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
called her, he made up his mind to die, so he fled from her and 
wandered upon the highways of the Continent weeping like a lost 
child. One day he found himself in Vienna. He had lefthis wifeand 
children with the firm determination of returning no more, but as 
usual, he changed his mind. The City seemed like a tomb to him 
and he went about the streets, he tells us, like a corpse. Everywhere 
he saw her, continually he dreamed of her and planned for her. In 
the Belvidere he stood for an hour before the Venus of Guido 
Reni, resembling his adored wife in every respect, and all of a 
sudden he felt an irresistible longing for her person, packed his 
grip and returned suddenly. He was convinced of being be- 
witched by her and that there was no escape. 
The homecoming on such occasions was always a great event 
and the happiness intense for a few hours, but then the storm 
broke loose once more. Yet no matter how great the estrange- 
ment, no matter how firmly convinced he was of her perversities, 
her malice and unfaithfulness, he was ever ready to flee to her as a 
child to its mother, to confess his faults and to seek forgiveness. 
After a serious attack of mental suffering while sojourning 
in French Switzerland, he writes, as it seems, fully aware of the 
fact that he was suffering from persecutional mania (60 p. 293): 
Why this mania? I am pursued, therefore, it is very logical to con- 
sider oneself persecuted. In short, I relapse into my childhood state 
and in my exceptional weakness I spend my time on a sofa; my head 
rests in the lap of Maria, my arms encircle her waist as in the Pietd of 
Michael Angelo. I press myself to her bosom, call myself her child, the 
man changes himself into a child, the wife becomes his mother . 
She is the female spider who devours the male after the act of copulation. 
The mental condition of Strindberg during the period referred 
to has been discussed by a number of qualified as well as un- 
qualified writers. Most of them are of the opinion that Strind- 
berg suffered from some form of insanity or other. Dr. William 
Hirsch (31 p. 220) in his Genius and Degeneration has diagnosed 
his case as paranoia simplex chronica, largely on the basis of the 
story of his first marriage. He says (op. cit. p. 222): 
It is a manifest case of jealous insanity. The kind of disease is, how- 
ever, essentially completed by the nature of the description; or what is 
more probable, there is a delusion of grandeur. He always speaks of 
himself as the "great poet", the "renowned scholar", etc. In one place 
he says that people are jealous of his talent and, therefore, might put 
him out of the way, which is a characteristic manifestation of delusion 
of persecution. A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
59 
After having reminded us of the fact that the so-called 
referential ideas are among the most important symptoms of such 
maladies, he continues: 
The patients refer all that goes on about them to themselves. In 
every look, in every harmless remark of a stranger, they fancy they de- 
tect a hidden slight intended for them. Whatever is said in their hearing 
they connect with their own individual selves, and find in the simplest 
things strong confirmation of their delusions. If people stand up in a 
shop, it is because they are present. If anybody in the street spits he 
means to do it at them. All the articles in the newspapers are meant to 
apply to them. In short, everything that happens has reference to 
them. 
As a remarkable example of such referential ideas, Dr. Hirsch 
quotes the following passage from Strindberg's A Fool's Con- 
fession (60 p. 306), which Strindberg wrote after having read 
Ibsen's Wild Duck: 
It was a drama of the famous Norwegian blue-stocking, the inventor 
of the equality madness. How the book fell into my hands, I could not 
say. But now everything was clear and gave occasion for the worst 
suspicions concerning the reputation of my wife. The plot of the 
drama is as follows: A photographer (a nickname I had earned from my 
novels drawn from real life), has married a person of doubtful repute, 
who had formerly been the mistress of a great proprietor. The woman 
supports the household from a secret fund which she derives from her 
former paramour. In addition to that, she carries on the business of her 
husband, a good for nothing, who spends his time in drinking in the 
society of persons of no consequence. Now, that is a misrepresentation 
of facts committed by the reporters. They were informed that Maria 
(Strindberg's wife) made translations, but they did not know that it was 
I who gratuitously corrected them and paid over to her the sums received 
for them. 
Matters become bad when the poor photographer discovers that the 
adored daughter who comes before her time into the world, is not his 
child, and that the wife had warned him when she induced him to marry 
her. To complete his disgrace, the husband consents to accept a large 
sum as indemnity from the former lover. By this I understand Maria's 
loan upon the Baron's security, which I endorsed after our marriage. 
But as for the birth of the daughter, I can see no trace of analogy, for 
my daughter was not born until two years after the wedding. But hold. 
The dead girl. There, I am on the track. The dead child which forced 
us to a marriage which otherwise would not have taken place. 
I prepare a great scene for the afternoon. I wished to catch Maria in 
cross-examinations to which I wanted to give the form of a defence for 
us both. We had been equally attacked by the scare-crow of the mas- 
culinists, who had been paid for the pretty job. 60 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
From this work which describes in the smallest details the 
life and death-struggle of a man so plainly under the influence 
of his infantile phantasies as to be wholly unable to make the 
necessary adjustments in the realm of reality, let us turn to his 
famous naturalistic play The Father, where we shall encounter 
further evidence of that incestuous attachment to the mother, 
which I have pointed out in A Fool's Confession. 
Concerning the play in question, Bjorkman (8 p. 57) has 
made the following statement, characteristic, not only of his own 
power of "psychological penetration," but of that of the average 
literary critic. He says: 
The Father was Strindberg's supreme effort to symbolize the life 
and death-struggle between man and woman for such immortality as 
may be offered them by the child. The picture of that struggle is splen- 
did but unfair. Man, as man, is given rational insight, while to woman 
is granted little more than low cunning. And as conscience is alive 
with reason, the victory falls to its unconscionable opponent. It may 
be paradoxical to express a regret that the sex problem should enter at 
all into this play-a play designed wholly to exhaust that very problem. 
But there is a psychological side to the work that has nothing whatever 
to do with sex, and this side would hold our interest just as firmly if the 
conflict were raging between two men. The corrosive power of 
suggestion is here shown with diabolical skill. It is a duel of souls, 
with words for weapons, and by a seed of doubt, sown in the right way, 
at the right moment, one of these souls is shattered and shattered as 
fatally as a warship when its magazine explodes. 
If we compare this summary with Strindberg's defence of the 
play found in the famous preface to Countess Julia (66 Vol I) 
the conclusion is inevitable, viz., that Bjorkman belongs to a 
certain type of spectator therein described. I quote in part from 
this preface: 
The simple brain will further be shocked by the fact that motives 
behind the actions are not simple and that there is not one view alone to 
be taken of it. An event in life-and this is a comparatively new dis- 
covery-is generally produced by a whole series of more or less deep 
seated motives, but the spectator choses for the most part the one 
which is easiest for him to grasp, or the one most advantageous to the 
reputation of his judgment. Take a case of suicide for example. "Bad 
business", says the bourgeois. "Unhappy love", says the woman. 
"Sickness", says the disease-ridden man. "Shattered hopes", the 
bankrupt. But it is possible that the motives lay in all of these causes or 
in none and that the dead man hid the real one by putting forward 
another, which has thrown a more favorable light on his memory. A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
61 
The Father is a tragedy in three acts which presents a heart- 
rending duel between a man and a woman for the possession of 
the soul of a child. The father is a captain of cavalry, serious 
minded, intellectual, studious and amiable. His wife is the in- 
carnation of stupidity, malice and selfishness. In the choice 
of weapons and methods, by means of which she finally destroys 
her husband, she is nothing short of diabolically resourceful. The 
husband is passionately fond of his daughter Bertha, whom the 
women in the house all wish to bring up according to their own 
ideas. The mother-in-law wants to make her a spiritualist. 
Laura, the mother, wants her to become an artist. The governess 
wants her to become a Methodist, old Margaret, a Baptist, and 
the servant girl proposes that she join the Salvation Army. The 
Captain, who considers that he has the chief right to determine 
her future, is opposed in every one of his efforts to have it his own 
way. 
In order to break the resistance of her husband, Laura admin- 
isters the poison which unbalances the man's mind. She suggests 
that he is not the father of the child-and this immediately be- 
gins to trouble his conscience. Thereupon she informs the 
family physician that her husband is suffering from delusions as 
regards his fatherhood and that this thought is fast becoming an 
obsession. Later conversations with the physician confirm the 
captain's doubts and before long he is a raving maniac. Finally 
when his daughter also refuses to regard him as her father, the 
measure is full. He draws the revolver and the old nurse is sent 
in to calm him with stories and memories of childhood. While on 
this mission, she, the good old woman, in whom he had unlimited 
confidence, slips the strait-jacket on him, the raving lunatic. 
Subjugated, crushed, robbed of his faith in God and himself, 
the former strong, happy, influential man dies ignominiously, 
the victim of treacherous women. 
In this rather unenviable role Strindberg has immortalized 
his first wife and at the same time the type of woman which she, 
according to Strindberg, represented. She is the man-eater, 
precisely the type of woman he feared in his youth and cursed 
throughout his life, the diametrically opposite of his own mother, 
whom, as we recall, he spoke of in Married (64 p. 12) as: 
Her husband's truest friend, the only human being who had never 
been jealous or envious . . . and who had never contradicted him. 62 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
This woman is the destroyer of man (53 p. 44), 
the personification of the demonical, the cruelly enticing Daughter 
of Earth, who with her fornication and caresses tries to destroy man. 
The mentally deranged Captain says to his daughter (70 
p. 66): 
"You see, I am a cannibal and will eat you. Your mother wanted to 
eat me, but she did not succeed. I am Saturn who ate his children be- 
cause it had been so prophesied that they should eat him. To eat or 
to be eaten? That is the question. If I do not eat you, you will eat 
me, and you have already shown me your teeth." 
Those who are familiar with Strindberg's life and works, 
in part at least, and are able to deal with his unconscious moti- 
vation will realize that the play centers in the sex-problem and 
that the "corrosive power of suggestion" is but one of the many 
elements involved in it. The play is simply another Fool's 
Confession in dramatic form. It is more than that. It is full of 
mental imageries and memories of childhood. Margaret, the 
nurse, is none but the old wet-nurse, Christina, whom we know 
from The Son of a Servant (68, pp. 18-20). The discussion of the 
religious education of Bertha is taken directly out of Strindberg's 
own childhood. The whole repulsive atmosphere of the play is a 
cross between that of his paternal home and his own married life, 
ruined, according to himself, by a woman who had nothing in 
common with him, who squandered his income, whose immorality 
was a constant source of worry to him, who gossiped about his 
mental condition and planned to have him committed to the 
insane asylum (60 pp. 263, 265, 275, 291). The subject matter 
of The Father is, therefore, taken very largely, as I have already 
stated, out of his own conjugal life, and the same may be said 
almost exclusively of all of his naturalistic plays. 
The play in question justly raises the question not only of 
his sanity, but it affords us further evidence of his Einstellung to 
his mother. Already in 1912 Karin Michaelis (43 p. 32) is re- 
ported to have endeavored to bring Strindberg's misogyny which 
is so akin to that of the Euripidean Hippolytos into rapport with 
his own infantile fixation on the mother. The point is indeed well 
taken. 
"You have always been, as it were, a mother to me." 
In Act I, page 21 (70a) he says to the nurse: A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
63 
In the same act p. 30, the following conversation occurs: 
Captain: 
Can you explain to me why you women treat an old man as if he were a 
child? 
Nurse: 
I don't understand it, but it must be because all you men, great and 
small, are women's children, everyone of you. 
Captain: 
But no women are born of men. Yes, but I am Bertha's father. 
Tell me, Margaret, don't you believe it? Don't you? 
Nurse: 
Lord, how silly you are. Of course you are your own child's father. 
In Act II, page 48, after he has implored his wife to tell him 
who is Bertha's father and after his wife has said: 
"I will swear by God and all that I hold sacred that you are Bertha's 
father. " 
He is still in doubt and continues- 
"I implore you as a wounded man begs for a death blow to tell me all. 
Don't you see that I am helpless as a child? Don't you hear me com- 
plaining as to a mother? . . .Yes, I am crying although I am a 
man . . .Why should not a man complain, a soldier weep?" 
Laura: 
Weep, then, my child, as if you were with your mother once more. 
Do you remember when I first came into your life, I was like a second 
mother? Your great, strong body needed nerves; you were a giant 
child that had either come too early into the world, or perhaps was not 
wanted at all. 
Captain: 
Yes, that is how it was. My father's and my mother's will was 
against my coming into the world, and consequently I was born without 
a will. I thought I was completing myself when you and I became one 
and, therefore, you were allowed to rule, and I, the Commander at the 
Barracks and before the troops, became obedient to you, grew through 
you, looked up to you as to a more highly gifted being, listened to you as 
if I had been your undeveloped child. 
Laura: 
Yes, that is the way it was, and, therefore, I loved you as my child. 64 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
But you know, you must have seen, when the nature of your feelings 
changed and you appeared as my lover that I blushed, and your embraces 
were joy to me that was followed by a remorseful conscience, as if my 
blood had been ashamed. The mother became the mistress. Abominable. 
Captain: 
I saw it, but I did not understand. I believed that you despised me 
for my unmanliness and I wanted to win you as a woman by being a man. 
Laura: 
Yes, but that was the mistake. The mother was your friend, you see, 
but the woman was your enemy, and love between the sexes is strife. 
In the last Act page 72, after the nurse has put the strait- 
jacket on him he says to her: 
"What have you given me for a pillow, Margaret? It is so hard, so 
cold. Come and sit near me. There. May I put my head on your 
knee? So. This is warm. Bend over me so that I can feel your breast. 
Oh, it is sweet to sleep against a woman's breast, a mother's or a mistress' 
but the mother's is sweetest." 
But besides this further proof of Strindberg's incestuous 
fixation furnished by the play in question, another trait of his 
neurotic, if not paranoid condition, stands out in a bold though 
indistinct relief. 
It has been pointed out by Freud and other prominent psy- 
chiatrists and psychoanalysts that an incestuous fixation on the 
mother (or the father) involves a host of other abnormal psychic 
penchants on the part of the individual, manifesting themselves 
in an almost endless variety of perversions and phobias. 
It is not surprising, therefore, that Strindberg's jealousy 
finds an expression in doubt as to whether he is the father of his 
daughter Bertha or not. At the end of Act III Laura asks him 
shortly before he expires, if he does not want to see his child, and 
to this he makes the following reply, which Rank considers as 
very significant (70a p. 72): 
"My child? A man has no children, it is only woman who has 
children, and, therefore, the future is hers when we die childless." 
The unmanly attitude towards the opposite sex which is so 
strikingly noticeable also in other works of Strindberg-more 
particularly in A Fool's Confession-may perhaps justly be con- 
sidered as evidence of a homosexual trend. Dr. G. Stanley Hall 
lately raised this question and as a result of it, the Strindberg A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
65 
problem has become even more complicated than before. His 
suspicion of such a status is well founded. 
Rank (47 p. 33) does not hesitate in pointing to it as a dis- 
tinct paranoid sign that challenges comparison with the famous 
case of Dr. Schreber, analyzed by Freud (21) so admirably in 
Jahrb, III, Vol. 3, 1912. 
Schreber's delusion was, as we remember, that he had been 
changed into a woman. It culminated in his belief that he had 
been chosen to redeem the world and to restore the forfeited 
blessedness of humanity. God had inspired him directly to this 
end just as he did in the case of the Prophets of yore. In order 
to be able to fulfil his mission he had to be changed into a woman. 
This metamorphosis took place much against his own will. In 
his own opinion he was a wonder in the eyes of God and man. 
The transformation of his body was a most miraculous process. 
It amounted to a complete disintegration and for long periods of 
time he lived without stomach, lungs, intestines, throat, bladder, 
etc., until, through the agency of God, his femininity was realized. 
This body would in due time be fertilized by God and so bring 
forth a new race on earth. Then, Schreber would be able to pass 
away, he himself redeemed as well as mankind. 
Freud's analysis rests upon the assumption verified in this 
case, as in so many others, that a wish phantasy presupposes a 
privation, a want or an ungratified desire on the part of the 
individual. Schreber's most ardent desire had been to have 
children and particularly a son, who would have made good the 
loss of fathers and brothers, and constituted the object of his 
homosexual tenderness. The idea must, therefore, have pre- 
sented itself to him that this desire might be realized more as- 
suredly, if he were a woman. Accordingly he reverts to his in- 
fantile life, assumes the female Einstellung to his father imago and 
thus through delusions of grandeur and persecution he accom- 
plishes his unconscious purpose-a defence against the homo- 
sexual impulse. 
The question is now first of all: Is there anything in Strind- 
berg's life besides what is found in his play The Father, to warrant 
such an assumption? With my slight knowledge of psychiatry 
I am far from qualified to judge, but a reading of Freud's analysis 
of Schreber has convinced me that, if Strindberg suffered from 
paranoia, it was a mild case in comparison with that of Dr. 
Schreber. 
I do not disagree with Rank as regards Strindberg's attitude 66 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
towards the opposite sex, nor am I inclined to underestimate the 
importance of the paranoid utterances of the hero of the play. 
On the contrary I maintain that nothing in this play-and this 
applies moreover to everything that Strindberg has written- 
should be taken lightly. Every detail has a profound meaning. 
Goethe has said somewhere that nothing in his writings was 
aus der Luft gegriffen, or something to that effect. The same is 
true of Strindberg, perhaps to an even greater extent. The most 
trivial situations in his writings are incidents out of his own life. 
To give a single illustration I wish to call attention to a passage 
in his play entitled There are Crimes and Crimes (65). 
The opening scene represents an avenue of cypresses in the 
cemetery of Montparnasse in Paris. A woman in widow's weeds 
is praying at a grave and her child is playing nearby with withered 
flowers, picked up from a heap of rubbish. A watchman suddenly 
appears and warns the mother that flowers must not be picked in 
the cemetery. 
Compare this with a passage in The Son of a Servant (68 pp. 
20-21) where he tells of his visit to a church yard in Stockholm in 
which it was forbidden to walk on the grass or to touch the leaves 
of the trees and shrubs. On such an occasion his uncle had 
picked a leaf from the branch of a tree and a policeman was in- 
stantly on the spot. Such instances might be produced almost 
ad infinitum to show that every play, every poem, every novel 
that he has written deals above all other things with his own life 
and experiences. 
One of his critics (30, p. 5) has said that he is the greatest 
subjectivist of modern times. His statement is eminently correct. 
It would be difficult to find another author of whom it might 
justly be said that the whole literary output is so largely autobio- 
graphical as in the case of Strindberg. 
But let us return once more to the subject of homosexuality. 
Of the gross manifestations of sexual inversion such as character- 
ized the life of Walt Whitman (50) for instance, there is not the 
slightest trace in Strindberg's life. At least, from the material 
at my disposal, I cannot point to a single instance. In his youth 
I fail to detect any abnormal leanings toward his own companions. 
That his relation to his youthful friends who figure in The Son 
of a Servant were normal in every respect, seems to me to be be- 
yond a shade of doubt. The same is undoubtedly true of his as- 
sociations with his friends at the University of Uppsala. His 
chum, Fritz, whom we know from The Son of a Servant was one of A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
67 
his closest friends at that time, and that Strindberg admired him, 
he has himself confessed. Moreover they had experiences to- 
gether that not infrequently fall to the lot of youths and even 
grown-ups. 
In Jdsningstiden (63 p. 12) he relates how already while 
they were students at the Gymnasium they fell into the hands of 
the Secretary of one of the Foreign Legations in Stockholm who, 
to judge by the description, was a pederast. This same man 
whom he refers to as von X. also visited the boys during their 
first term at the University and the reunion resulted in a scandal 
on a small scale. After a trip to Old Uppsala where, as he writes, 
their names are still to be found on the register as a reminder of an 
ill-chosen friend, . 
they were invited by von X. to a champagne dinner at a res- 
taurant in the University City where they swore one another 
eternal friendship, embraced and kissed, according to the custom 
of the country represented by von X. But the scandal which I 
have referred to occurred at the railway station later in the 
evening when von X. was about to return to Stockholm. One 
of the young friends had followed him into the car where the old 
gentleman had become aggressive. Strindberg felt very in- 
dignant and now understood why they had been ridiculed by 
the other students while dining with him. 
Any gushing friendship with representatives of his own 
sex I am not aware of in the whole life of Strindberg. The closest 
he came to such a friendship was probably during his stay in 
Berlin shortly after the separation from his first wife in 1892. I 
refer to the coterie Zum Schwarzen Ferkel and in particular to 
Stanislaw Przybyszewski, whom Strindberg (61, p. 67) speaks of 
as 
My Russian friend, my pupil who called me " Father" because he owed 
all his culture to me, my Famulus, who called me "Master" and kissed 
my hands, whose life began where mine ended. 
That this Polish author who also goes under the name of 
Stachu and also Popoffsky, was very much attached to Strind- 
berg, far more so than Strindberg to him, is plain from Uddgren's 
(73 p. 68) comments. Stachu, like Strindberg, was an inveterate 
sentimentalist, and both did their level best during the transition 
period in Strindberg's abnormal psychic development to rid 68 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
themselves of their Weltschmerz by free and probably more or less 
continuous indulgence in Dionysian orgies. 
I am well aware, however, that the absence of all external 
signs of homosexuality does not necessarily preclude the presence 
of such proclivities on the part of the individual. Man is, accord- 
ing to Freud (23 p. 7) bisexual by constitution and nature and 
only becomes monosexual in the course of development. Freud 
says (21 p. 53). 
Also Schreber, whose delusion culminates in a homosexual wish phan- 
tasy that cannot possibly be ignored showed during the time he enjoyed 
health, according to all reports, no signs of homosexuality in the vulgar 
sense of the word. 
If we accept Dr. Hirsch's (31 p. 220) diagnosis of Strindberg 
based on A Fool's Confession, we may assume with some degree of 
certainty that Strindberg was homosexual. Dr. Hirsch was fully 
convinced that Strindberg suffered from 'paranoia simplex chron- 
ica. A careful study of the symptoms of Strindberg's malady 
has confirmed me in my belief that more importance must be 
attached to Dr. Hirsch's judgment in the matter than to that of 
Dr. Rahmer (46 p. 26) whose diagnosis reads as follows: 
According to my opinion it was melancholia, and first of all the 
typical melancholia moralis with a desire for seclusion, indefinite fear, 
thoughts of death, ideas of suicide and false notions of imaginary trans- 
gressions. Later on at the further development of the complex of symp- 
toms, there was added praecordial anguish accompanied by attacks of 
raptus melancholicus followed by chimerical imageries (Wahnideen) and 
sense delusions (Sinnestauschungen). In this complex of symptoms 
and in its course it is a typical case (Schulfall) of melancholia which at 
the height of its development shows itself as melancholia daemomaniaca. 
This diagnosis has been criticised by Dr. Tretow (71) of 
Stockholm, as unsatisfactory. Dr. Lange (39) of Tubingen rejects 
it entirely. I must confess that even before I came across this 
last mentioned criticism, the result of Dr. Rahmer's pathographic 
study impressed me as superficial because of the fact that the 
analyst had disregarded entirely that period of Strindberg's life 
upon which I have based my attempt at analysis-his childhood, 
youth and adolescence. 
Dr. Lange attacks Rahmer for the very same reason. He 
takes the latter to task on the basis of his own statement (46 p. 6) A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
69 
that an exhaustive psychiatric analysis of the entire biographical 
material would take him (Rahmer) too far afield. 
and insists that scientific thoroughness never yet has led the 
investigator too far in search of the truth. Dr. Lange supports 
Dr. Rahmer, however, in his belief that Strindberg did not suffer 
from paranoia. While he offers no solution of the problem, Dr. 
Lange is evidently of the opinion that Strindberg was subject to 
periodic attacks of manic-depressive insanity due to organic 
disease of the brain (39 p. 81). 
Since these are questions pertaining exclusively to psychiatry, 
I must leave the argument open. But if, as I have already said, 
we accept Dr. Hirsch's diagnosis, which undoubtedly is as worthy 
of consideration as those of Drs. Lange and Rahmer, we are 
justified in assuming that Strindberg's crises, both that of the 
period covered by A Fool's Confession and that of The Inferno, 
stand in a very close relation to sexual inversion. 
Ferenczi (15 p. 132) says: 
It has become evident that the paranoiac mechanism is set in action 
as a defence against all possible attachments of the sexual hunger, but 
according to the observations made up to the present, is directed only 
against homosexual choice of objects. 
And again (op. cit. p. 133): 
The observation of several cases . . . seems to justify the surmise 
that in the pathogenesis of paranoia, homosexuality plays not a chance 
part but a most important one, and that paranoia is perhaps nothing 
else at all than disguised homosexuality. 
While it cannot be my purpose to decide the question as to 
whether Strindberg suffered from a mild form of paranoia rather 
than from other forms of mental derangement, I cannot refrain 
from calling attention to some of the symptoms of this disease 
as characterized by Kraepelin (Defendorf, n p. 316 ff.). 
First of all the disease is apt to develop between the age of 
twenty-five and forty which was the case with Strindberg. It 
develops on a defective constitutional basis. This may be either 
congenital or acquired and in a large percentage there is defective 
heredity. The early life of the individual is marked by eccentri- 
cities, he may be moody, dreamy or seclusive. It is further 
marked by sexual perversions, aptitude for study and mental 
activity in special fields. Some patients are abnormally bright, 70 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
others flighty, entering into many projects which they are unable 
to pursue with success. The starting point is often formed by 
exciting causes such as acute illness, excessive mental stress, shock, 
business reverses, deprivation and disappointment. 
The development of the psychosis is gradual and very insidi- 
ous. The patient becomes irritable, suspicious, discontented and 
may suffer from insomnia. Imaginary slights become a source of 
worry and suspicion that they are not accidental. He becomes 
distrustful and seeks evidence of unfriendliness and nurses the 
feeling that he is being purposely neglected. All patients suffer- 
ing from the effects of this disease are morbidly sensitive. Harm- 
less jokes, smiles, accidental nods of the head have a special 
reference to themselves. Items in the papers, as already pointed 
out by Dr. Hirsch, are indicative of intrigue against them. A 
passerby cannot light his cigar, cough or walk behind them with- 
out being suspected of sinister designs. 
Out of this mental state develop persecutory delusions. 
Everybody and everything conspires against them. Their friends 
and supposed enemies cause them alarm. Their answers, if 
interrogated, show that they are guilty. They are afraid of being 
slowly pcisoned and put out of the way by electricity. In due 
time and in connection with these delusions, expansive delusions 
may also appear. Since these patients cannot but attract a 
great deal of attention they scon begin to cast about for the 
reason of this. This they find in the property that they possess, 
in personal charm, imaginary noble descent, or else they may 
come to the conclusion that they had been born for a special 
mission. 
Sometimes these delusions may assume the form of exag- 
gerated self-importance. Love and religion play an all important 
part in many cases. Hallucinations are always present but 
rarely persist throughout the whole course of the disease. Audi- 
tory hallucinations are the most frequent-first of indefinite 
noises, later they assume all forms, such as laughter, curses 
uttered at them, etc. Visual hallucinations also occur. Those 
of general sensibility are very frequent, such as pulling of the 
hair, drafts of air, irritation of the skin by .poisonous powders, etc. 
As for the emotional attitude we are informed that it stands 
in direct relation to the character of the delusion. In some cases 
the patient is irritated by his persecutors, he is shy and excitable, 
even despondent. In other cases the persecution is tolerated and 
regarded as essential to his spiritual welfare. But all of these A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
71 
patients sooner or later become arrogant, proud and dogmatic. 
In conduct the paranoiacs appear quite normal for a con- 
siderable time, except for the eccentricities as characterized above. 
Frequently they assume the offensive against their enemies and 
suspects. They are then apt to commit murder and often such an 
act is the first indication of their mental condition. For this 
reason the paranoiac is considered the most dangerous of the 
insane. 
Psychiatrists claim that the course of the disease presents 
distinct periods which coincide with those of the evolution of the 
delusion. The first period is followed by the insidious onset, 
it is followed by the persecutory period (delusions of persecutions 
and hallucinations). Finally there follows the third and last 
stage, the so called ambitious period with a change of personality. 
These are some of the symptoms of paranoia and they are all 
found in the life of Strindberg to a remarkable degree, particu- 
larly during the Inferno period, and if we agree with all those 
representatives of the medical profession who have recognized 
paranoid traits in Strindberg's malady, then he was a sexual 
invert. 
But even if it could not be granted on technical grounds that 
Strindberg suffered from paranoia, there is evidence enough in 
his life to warrant his classification as a borderland case of sexual 
inversion. 
In his Bemerkungen uber einen Fall von Zwangneurose, 
Freud (18 p. 190), after having discussed the chronic parallelism 
of ungovernable love and hate for the same person-a most 
characteristic trait in Strindberg as we know-says, that such 
emotional manifestations are a most conspicuous sign of the 
compulsion neurosis. But not only in the neurosis. Such 
violent, alternate love and hate plays a great role in the patho- 
genesis of hysteria and paranoia. 
Then there is the fetichism to which I have already referred 
and which, I believe, is universally regarded as a proof of homo- 
sexuality. The large number of clinical cases reported by Krafft- 
Ebing (38), Frank (16), Stekel (58, 59) and others confirm one in 
this belief. 
Abraham (1) in his Bemerkungen zur Psychoanalyse eines 
Failes von Fuss-und korsettfetischismus discusses a male patient 
whose mania terminated in a female attitude (Einstellung) to his 
father. The fetichistic phenomenon has been so well explained 
by Freud (23 p. 19 note) that I need not dwell upon it. Suffice AUGUST STRINDBERG 
72 
it to say that no matter how estranged Strindberg was with his 
first wife, the sight of her foot (shoe) or a bit of her stocking would 
always bring him to his knees (60 p. 189). He was thus plainly at 
the mercy of an aberrant sex impulse, itself conditioned in part 
at least, by the various impulses of his infantile eroticism and 
psycho-sexual fixation on his mother. But even in this case 
Strindberg forms a borderland case. For Freud (23 p. 19) has 
pointed out that to a certain extent, fetichism is normal, 
especially during those stages of wooing when the normal sexual aim 
seems inaccessible or its realization is deferred. 
The case becomes pathological only when the striving for the fetich 
takes the place of the normal sexual aim, or again, when the fetich dis- 
engages itself from the person concerned and itself becomes a sexual 
object. 
Stekel (58 p. 372) argues that intense jealousy, Don Juanism, 
a preference for the delineation of female characters, phobias and 
delusions, onanism, fetichism of the hand, the foot, the ears, etc., 
all being symbols of the lacking phallus in women, are nothing 
but masks of homosexuality. 
Furthermore he says (59 p. 268): 
Fetichism is a substitute religion ... It springs out of a com- 
promise between an uncurbable sexuality and deep pietism. It affords 
the individual an opportunity for a more or less complete asceticism. 
Under the cover of diabolism and libertinage there hides a piety whose 
aims reach far beyond this life. The fetichist is in open rebellion against 
every form of authority, particularly against God to whom he secretly 
submits and whom he imagines he serves through special privations. 
The same subject is discussed in his Nervose Angstzustdnde 
(57) where he says that homosexuality is nothing but the success- 
ful defence mechanism of the infantile incest phantasy and other 
painful memories.9 
That Strindberg who shows so many of the traits and tenden- 
cies discussed by these authors suffered from sexual inversion 
does not seem improbable. Those who are able to deal with the 
problem more efficiently than I am, would undoubtedly be able 
to produce even more convincing proofs. To me his inversions 
seem to be of the character which Freud (23 p. 2) has termed 
amphigenous, i. e., lacking in exclusiveness. 
The term woman-hater which is the popular synonym for 
9See also Rivers, Walt Whitman's Anomaly pp. 29-30. A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
73 
sexual invert was regularly applied to Strindberg during his life- 
time, and was always greatly resented by him. In his Zones of 
the Spirit (Blaa bockerna, vol. 1) he writes (70 pp. 176-177): 
There are things which one does not say every day, and one does not 
tell one's wife what her sex is composed of. But one has the right to put 
it on paper sometimes. Schopenhauer has done it the best, Nietzsche 
not badly, Peladan10 is the master; Thackeray wrote Men's Wives, but 
the book was ignored. Balzac has unmasked Caroline in the Petites 
Miseres de la Vie Conjugate. Otto Weininger11(74) discovered the deceit 
at the age of twenty; he did not wait for the consequent vengeance, but 
went his own way, i. e., died. I have said that the little child is a little 
criminal, incapable of self guidance, but I love children all the same. I 
have said that a woman is-what she is, but I have always loved some 
woman and been a father. Whoever, therefore, calls me a woman-hater 
is a block-head, a liar or a noodle. Or all three together. 
Without attempting to go any further into the subject of 
sexual inversion which may or may not be a factor in Strindberg's 
life, let us now turn to that period in his career which marks his 
final and generally speaking successful effort at freeing himself 
from the bondage of the past-I mean the Inferno. 
Uddgren (73 p. 59) believes that it began during the honey- 
moon of his second marriage in 1893. The careful student of 
Strindberg's life would probably point to A Foo? s Confession as 
good evidence of its earlier inception. 
It was, however, during his stay at Gravesend that he be- 
came subject to real visual hallucinations. The vision he had 
on London Bridge was indelibly stamped on his retina for the 
rest of his life. 
Uddgren (op. cit. pp. 59-60) tells us that on a Sunday morning 
while on his way from Gravesend to London, Strindberg had 
arrived with one of the early trains and started to cross the bridge 
on foot. Suddenly it was full of people-an endless procession 
of penitents, who, clad in long gowns and with hoods over their 
10Peladan (Josephin, dit Le Sar), novelist and mystagogue, born at Lyons in 1859. He 
is the author of a number of books the most important of which are: Femmes honnetes, 
1885, le Vice Supreme, 1886, Curieuse, 1886, L' initiation sentimentale, 1887, A Coeur 
Perdu, 1888, Istar, 1888, La Fictoire du Mari, 1889, Cour en Peine, 1890, Uandrogyne, 1891 
La Gynandre, 1891. (La Grande Encyclopedic). 
11 Strindberg greeted Weininger's book Geschlecht und Charakter with the following 
words: "Ein furchtbares Buch, das aber wahrscheinlich das schwerste aller Probleme gelost 
hat," and then exclaimed: "Ich buchstabierte, aber Weininger setzte zusammen. Voila 
un homme." (Cited by Probstin Der Fall Otto Weininger. Grenzfragen des Nerven und 
Seelenlebens, 28-35, 1904-1905. 74 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
heads passed by as noiselessly as shadows. Strindberg repeatedly 
dwelt on this day-dream of his which neither he nor Uddgren 
could interpret, but which psychoanalysis disposes of as a pro- 
jection indicative of Strindberg's own will and ardent desire of 
shifting the battle of life to another level. 
In November of the following year (1894) the crisis was well 
under way. His second wife, just like the first one, became an 
object of suspicion and apathy. After having seen her off at 
the North Railway Station in Paris he felt greatly relieved. He 
writes (61 p. 9): 
As I entered the Cafe de la Regence I placed myself at the table where 
I used to sit with my wife, my beautiful jailer, who watched my soul 
day and night, guessed my secret thoughts, marked the course of my 
ideas and was jealous of my investigations into the unknown. 
But he was not satisfied with being temporarily separated 
from his wife (op. cit. p. 12). 
In a fit of righteous pride, in the passionate desire to do myself an 
injury I commit moral suicide by repudiating my wife and child in an 
unworthy, unpardonable letter. I give her to understand that I am 
involved in a new love affair. The blow goes home. My wife answers 
with a demand for separation. 
From this time on Strindberg led the life of a solitary man, 
"guilty of suicide and assassination." He withdrew from his 
friends and soon began to consider himself the object of unjust 
persecution. At the same time he became aware of what he calls 
the Unknown Powers, which in the past had been placing ob- 
structions in his path of progress. That is the reason, he claims, 
for his having become an atheist and now he challenged the In- 
visible One to wrestle with Him as Jacob did with God. After 
having sustained serious burns on his hands during chemical 
experiments carried on in his own room, and after having spent 
some time in the hospital, Strindberg moved into Hotel Orfila. 
Uddgren who at that time resided in Paris states that it was 
known that Strindberg lived somewhere in the neighborhood of 
Hotel des Americains but that none of his friends dared call on him, 
and furthermore that the story went that he was out of his mind. 
The fixed idea that harrassed him now was that his Polish 
friend Stachu had come to Paris to assassinate him. The reason 
for this was that Strindberg had been familiar with Mme. Stachu 
before her marriage. Strindberg's delusion was not broken until A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
75 
authentic news from Berlin was placed before him to the effect 
that Stachu had been placed under arrest in the City just men- 
tioned on a charge of having urged his wife to take her own life 
and the lives of their children. This she did. His fear and sus- 
picion of the friend now turned into pity, and Uddgren who in 
the meantime had been discovered by Strindberg through mutual 
friends, was summoned to Hotel Orfila. Strindberg was now 
obsessed with another idea, viz., that he had caused Stachu all 
his troubles. Uddgren found him nervous and in a state of 
humble resignation. There was nothing of that hybris (u^pis) 
in him, however, which he himself considered the only sin that 
the gods cannot forgive (73 p. 69). 
While Uddgren's opinion as regards Strindberg's mental con- 
dition at this time was probably not of any greater importance 
than that of the average layman, it is interesting to know that 
to him Strindberg appeared to all intents and purposes quite 
normal. He had always been somewhat of a maniac and the 
most serious of all his manias had been and was, that of self- 
reproach. Uddgren says: 
Besides in his scientific work he had gotten into a cut de sac where it 
was plain to him that he could not advance any further. 
A partial retreat was unthinkable to Strindberg and so he 
began to tear up the foundation of his rationalism and to establish 
himself upon the rock bottom of his childhood faith. His re- 
version to orthodoxy was materially hastened by his relatives in 
Austria whom he visited during a period when his mental re- 
sistance was reduced to a minimum. After the release of Stachu 
the self-torture began with renewed vigor. He now suspected 
his Paris friends of being tools in the hands of the famous Pole, 
and this was possibly the reason why he attempted suicide on 
several occasions, considering his chances of escaping Stachu 
very slight. Each time something interrupted the operation and 
he was saved. One night later, however, he was convinced that 
Stachu was in the adjacent room attempting to kill him by means 
of poisonous gases and electric currents, and then he fled just as 
if he reserved for himself the right of taking his own life. 
In July 1896 he suddenly disappeared from Paris and by 
way of Dieppe finally reached Ystad, Sweden. Here in the home 
of Dr. Eliasson he finally recovered and later went to Lund, 
Sweden, where he wrote his Inferno between May 3 and July 25, 
1897. 76 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
In the fall of 1896, after having regained his mental poise 
under the treatment of Dr. Eliasson, he went to Austria to see 
his little daughter and relatives. When he took the two and 
one-half year old child in his arms he felt, he says, (61 p. 138) 
like Faust when he exclaimed, "The earth has me again." 
Love for a child turns man into a woman; it is sexless and heavenly, 
as Swedenborg says. This is the beginning of my education for heaven. 
But I have not yet done penance enough. 
Chapter IX of The Inferno, The Diary of a Damned Soul, 
opens with a dialogue characteristic of the conversation with 
his mother-in-law, which I cannot refrain from quoting, since 
it brings us face to face with Strindberg's chief conflict (op. cit. 
pp. 166-167): 
My Mother-in-law: 
What have you done in your former existence that Fate deals so rudely 
with you? 
I: 
Think! Remember a man who was first married to another man's 
wife, like myself, and who separated from her in order to marry an 
Austrian woman, as I did! Then this little Austrian woman is torn 
from him, just as mine has been from me, and their only child is kept in 
the Bohemian mountains, just as mine. Do you remember the hero of 
my romance On the Open Sea, who commits sucide on an island . . 
My Mother-in-law: 
Enough! 
I: 
You don't know that my father's mother was called Neipperg . . . 
My Mother-in-law: 
Stop! Unhappy man! 
I: 
And that my little Christina resembles the greatest murderer of the 
century to a hair. Only look at her, the little tyrant, the man-tamer at 
two and one-half! 
My Mother-in-law: 
You are mad. 
I: 
Yes, and what sins have you women formerly committed, since your A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
77 
lot is still harder than ours? See how justly I have called woman our 
evil angel . 
My Mother-in-law: 
To be a woman is twofold hell. 
I: 
And so woman is a twofold devil . . . 
How far cured of his mental breakdown he was while on his 
visit at Dornach may be seen in Chapter X of The Inferno. His 
mother-in-law has informed him that he would not be well until 
Candlemas, when the sun returns once more. As yet it is only 
late autumn. He was still suffering from hallucinations of 
various kinds. One day, he tells us, there was a single clap of 
thunder over his head (op. cit. p. 185 ff). He felt alarmed and 
asked himself why he did not fall down, humiliating himself 
before the Eternal. He answered by saying that having been 
allowed to hear the voice of the Eternal, he felt almost on a level 
with the Lord, like an integral part of His personality, an emana- 
tion of His being, an organ of His organism. He writes (op. cit. 
pp. 186-187): 
He needed me in order to reveal Himself; otherwise He would have 
sent a thunderbolt and struck me dead on the spot. 
But frightened by his megalomania he quickly turned to the 
Bible and by chance opened and read the following verse by Job: 
Wilt thou disannul my judgment? Wilt thou condemn me that 
thou mayest be justified? Has thou an arm like God? Or canst thou 
thunder with a voice like Him? 
He now entertained no further doubt, the Eternal had spoken 
to him and he demanded of Him what His servant should do. 
There was no answer. He writes: 
Good, I will humble myself before the Eternal who has humbled 
Himself to speak to His servant. But bend my knee before the mob and 
the mighty? Never! 
His deliverance is practically effected through the instru- 
mentality of the Seer, the Buddha of the North, Swedenborg, 
whom he had scorned as a fanatic in Uppsala about thirty years 
before (op. cit. p. 206). 78 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
A single word suffices to illuminate my soul, to scatter my doubts and 
vain fancies regarding my supposed enemies, electricians, black magic, 
etc., and this single word is "Devastatio."12 
All my sufferings I find are described by Swedenborg-the feeling of 
suffocation (angina pectoris), constrictions of the chest, palpitations, 
the sensation which I call the electric girdle-all exactly correspond, 
and these phenomena, taken together, constitute the spiritual catharsis 
(purification), which was already known to St. Paul "whom," he says, 
speaking of someone, "I have determined to hand over to Satan for the 
destruction of the flesh, that the spirit might be saved in the day of the 
Lord Jesus," and "among whom are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom 
I have delivered over to Satan, that they may be taught not to 
blaspheme." 
And again (op. cit. p. 213 ff). 
Balzac, the Prophet's assistant, has taught me in Seraphita that Pain 
of conscience is a weakness which does not put an end to sin; repentance 
is the only power which makes a decisive end of all. Very well, let us 
repent. But is not that equivalent to criticising Providence, who has 
chosen me for its scourge? And to saying to the Powers: "You have 
guided my destiny ill; you have made me and commissioned me to 
chastise, to overthrow idols, to stir up revolt, and then you withdraw 
your protection from me and disown me in an absurd way, telling me to 
creep to the cross and repent." 
Strange circulus vitiosus, which I already foresaw in my twentieth 
year, when I wrote my drama Master Olof, and which has constituted 
the tragedy of my life. Why be tormented during thirty years in order 
to be taught by experience what one had already foreboded. When 
young I was sincerely pious, and you have made me a freethinker. Out 
of the freethinker you have made an atheist and out of the atheist a 
religious man. Inspired by humanitarian ideals, I have been a herald 
of socialism. Five years later you showed me the absurdity of socialism; 
you made all my prophecies futile. And supposing I become religious 
once more, I am sure that in another ten years you will reduce religion 
to an absurdity. 
At the close of The Inferno he writes the moral of his life's 
pilgrimage (op. cit. pp 228-229): 
Such then is my life; a sign, an example to serve for the betterment of 
others; a proverb to set forth the nothingness of fame and of celebrity; 
a proverb to show the younger generation how they should not live; 
Yes! I am a proverb, I who regarded myself as a prophet and am reveal- 
ed as a braggart. Now the Eternal has led this false prophet to speak 
empty words, and the false prophet feels irresponsible since he has only 
played the role assigned to him. . 
12According to Swedenborg this is the name of a stage in religious development. 
(Translator's note). A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
79 
Here you have, my brothers, the picture of a human destiny, one 
among the many, and now confess that a man's life may seem-a bad 
joke! 
V 
In order to be able to understand this act of self-redemption 
or spiritual catharsis effected by means of this voluntary flight 
into semi-madness, it is necessary to take a retrospect of Strind- 
berg's exceedingly complex life and to summarize the main points 
brought out in this analysis. 
We started out with a child afflicted with a not inconsiderable 
hereditary Belastung, manifesting itself in organ inferiority and 
consequent hypertrophy of nervous function. The boy was 
reared under extremely adverse environmental conditions of 
home, school and college. From the point of view of physical 
and mental hygiene he suffered as much neglect as any individual 
could suffer. 
The significance of this becomes plain if we remember his 
nervous predisposition and the fact that the limits of normal 
stimulation and response are very narrow. Dr. Burnham says 
(10a). 
Every one of us, should we be subjected to stimuli beyond the limits, 
would be thrown into a state of neurosis. 
We also found that the advent of puberty was attended by 
severe storms and stress, the intensity of which was due to the 
general adverse conditions already referred to, but chief of which 
were his fixation on the mother and consequent strained relations 
to his father. Dr. G. Stanley Hall says: (29) (II p. 109) 
Sex, is the most potent and magic Open Sesame to the deepest mys- 
teries of life, death, religion and love. It is, therefore, one of the cardinal 
sins against youth to repress healthy thoughts of sex at the proper age, 
because thus the mind is darkened and its wings clipped for many and 
the highest intuitions, which the supreme Muse of common sense at 
this its psychological moment ought to give. If youths are left to 
themselves and the contagion of most environments, this mental stimulus 
takes a low turn towards the lewd imaginations and vile conceptions 
which undermine the strength and instead of helping upward and making 
invulnerable against all temptations it makes virtue safe only in its 
absence and prepares the way for a fall when its full strength is first 
felt. 80 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
Now, to realize the deep significance of the above statement 
we need only recall certain parts of The Son of a Servant or the 
first chapter in Married, which is the history of Strindberg's 
first real struggles with life and its problems-his awakening, un- 
guided sex-life and the violent repression of it by conditions of 
life over which he had no control. Out of the unsatisfactory 
solution of this problem originated the great majority of Strind- 
berg's woes. From the time of his graduation from the Gym- 
nasium in 1867 to his marriage in 1877, his love-life confirms in 
every respect my assumption of his psycho-sexual fixation on the 
mother. His early literary activities, described by himself 
(63 p. no), demonstrate furthermore that he was conscious, to a 
certain extent, of the shackles of the Family Romance and that he 
made determined efforts to effect a spiritual liberation. 
His youth and adolescence as well as his early manhood thus 
resulted in violent struggles with all the opposite forces that con- 
stitute life, foremost among which are love and religion, symbolic 
of his relation to the parents. He illustrates in a striking man- 
ner the genetic process of religious dualism which, according to 
Rank and Sachs (47) is. the result of a splitting of the feelings 
occasioned by the contrasts of the unconscious Einstellung to the 
father-a conflict which resolves itself into the Ormuzd-Arhiman, 
God-Devil concept. We read (op. cit. p. 68): 
The extreme expression for the overcoming of the father is atheism 
through which the individual comes to rely entirely upon himself and 
recognizes neither master nor Creator. 
Along with this, however, the authors continue, the ambi- 
valent feeling which clings to the image of the father and regards 
homage and gratitude to him as the first religious duty, is never 
absent. For the individual, the childhood relation to the father 
determines the attitude he assumes later towards the heavenly 
Father and creator of all things. Emancipation from the father 
and rejection of his authority does not mean rejection of or 
liberation from the love of and dependence on the earthly 
father. They are part of the Unconscious and may later find 
expression in religious activities. And so the circle closes. For 
religion, springing as it does out of the relation of the child to 
its parents, culminates in the end in a compromise of the ambi- 
valent psychic impulses inherent in it. 
In my former discussion of Strindberg's love life, I confined A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
81 
myself almost exclusively to general statements. Before going 
any further it is necessary in order that we may under- 
stand more fully his domestic conflicts and his attitude 
towards the opposite sex in general, to remember, first that 
there is no such thing as unalloyed love, and secondly that 
qualitatively and quantitatively the philoprogenetic impulse is 
largely determined by the individual's filial affection for his 
mother. The psychology of the feelings and emotions has 
shown that there is no emotion known that has not its counter 
emotion. Stekel (55) in his instructive and interesting chapter 
on Der Kampf der Geschlechter calls attention to some of the 
phenomena which endocrinology now bids fair to make the sole 
basis of future psychology, viz., that the poisonous secretions 
of one set of glands are counteracted by the neutralizing secre- 
tions of other glands. This ambivalence of organic function has 
its innumerable analogues in the field of psychic life, and enables 
Stekel to make the statement that there is no love without hate 
and no hate without love (op. cit. p. 15). 
This hate does not show itself openly until the opportune 
moment when it can no longer be suppressed. And so there is a 
continual battle between the sexes, a battle which Stekel terms 
the love-struggle. It begins in the family where the child ob- 
serves the parents and out of these small beginnings of the Will to 
Power, the battle extends to every opposing force in life. 
Through love the proper mixture of the sensual and the 
spiritual elements surrenders to the object of its activity. Yet 
not even in this case are we entitled to look upon the personal 
element as completely ruled out. It is only forced down below 
the threshold of consciousness. From out of this prison house 
it watches for shortcomings in the love object and finally breaks 
out in open rebellion against the suppressing force in power. 
There is the same rhythmic rise and fall in the emotional life as 
that which manifests itself everywhere in cosmic phenomena. 
This is the beginning then of the quiet battle of sex and in it 
there is no compromise, only the question of either-or. Says 
Stekel (55): 
Hammer or anvil, that is the great question of wedlock. In wedlock 
hatred finds new sustenance because the strongest impulse of the human 
being-his Will to Power-is really nothing else than his instinct of 
independence. 
Personal freedom is the greatest ideal of man. At heart 82 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
every individual that is at all alive is an anarchist and rebels 
unconsciously, if not consciously, against the limitations that 
a life of culture puts upon him. After hundreds and thousands 
of years of training, man is still an animal that may be trained 
but never completely tamed. To comply with the demands of 
cultural life is a sacrifice. Through marriage man renounces his 
incestuous and polygamous instincts in favor of a single woman. 
Consciously man does this willingly, we are told, but unconscious- 
ly bitter feelings are born because of this sacrifice of personality, 
the shackling, smothering and partial stamping out of the ego. 
A happy marriage is unthinkable except where one of the 
contrahents is completely vanquished, or where both parties 
have descended to a level of pathological indifference and vege- 
tation. Marriages fail, according to Stekel, because the contra- 
hents are too self-centered, too narcissistic, in other words neither 
one of the two will become subordinate to the other. He who is 
madly in love identifies himself with the object of his love. He 
who simply loves is still conscious of a part of his own ego. Love 
marriages are, therefore, not necessarily happy, for love and 
marriage are different things. 
This philosophy of love, formulated by Stekel on strictly 
Adlerian principles, is the key to the understanding of Strind- 
berg's vicissitudinous conjugal life. Already in 1887 he wrote in 
A Fool's Confession with reference to his first wife (60 p. 338): 
I hate her because I love her. 
That Strindberg's attitude towards the opposite sex was 
largely determined by his psycho-sexual fixation on the mother 
has been recognized even by writers who have not publicly iden- 
tified themselves with any one of the psycho-analytic theories. 
Lind-af-Hageby (40 p. 22) says with reference to Strindberg: 
The mother soon became an object of analysis; he was torn between 
love for her and contempt for her faults which he discovered through 
making comparisons between her and his father. 
This is correct so far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. 
It is necessary to amplify the statement as follows: On the one 
hand she was the flawless mother, the source of love and con- 
solation to whom the child gravitated. But later on she also 
became the sensual, impure woman, who had violated both laws 
and conventions and so to speak became the concubine of his A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
83 
father. Theoretically, he was born in wedlock, but practically 
he was an illegitimate child. Moreover, he had another serious 
grievance against her. He owed his slave blood to her and those 
traits of servility and lack of individuality which intensify his 
consciousness of social inferiority. 
His fanatical, highly abnormal idealization of woman, 
marriage, motherhood and the family is but a defence mechanism 
against his conscious and unconscious condemnation of his own 
parents, an over compensation for the inherent defects in his 
first and last love object-his own mother. The dualistic image 
of his mother in which the baser component continually 
threatened to become the dominant element conditioned Strind- 
berg's attitude towards the opposite sex. It probably also 
created in him that puritanic worship of virtue which manifested 
itself in an extreme shyness during his youth and adolescence. 
There are many instances of this in his autobiographical writings. 
The hired girl who uncovered him while he was asleep he horse- 
whipped on the following day when told about it (69, p. 152). 
The maid (Karin) whom he found playing in a suspicious man- 
ner with a younger brother while the latter was in bed he spat 
in the face and defied both the father and the stepmother in the 
altercations that followed, for, as he said, he felt that he repre- 
sented the dead mother. 
The dialogue between the father and the son concerning this 
incident I shall not attempt to interpret. But I venture to say 
that a very special meaning must be attached to it. 
All this sensitiveness of his Strindberg regarded as a natural 
endowment. From a psycho-analytic point of view it is a force 
of repression and hence but a defence mechanism against what 
was uppermost in his unconscious, threatening to break through 
and establish itself in consciousness. Ultimately there developed 
out of this trait in Strindberg this doctrine (8). 
that social and individual purity is the only solid foundation for 
physical and mental health, as well as an indispensable condition of true 
achievement. 
The Madonna cult which began in his childhood and which 
outlived his misogyny must also be traced to the same source- 
the mother. It was nothing but another form of over com- 
pensation. After his first marriage, however, it came to an ab- 
rupt end, and a considerable part of his so-called Romantic period 
and all of his Naturalistic period are permeated with that hatred 84 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
of woman, that general misanthrophy and spiritual darkness 
which culminates in and subsides, generally speaking, about the 
time of his divorce from the first wife and his entrance upon the 
road to Inferno. 
Since I have already discussed in detail the various circum- 
stances and factors, the interplay of which finally resulted in 
the unhappy union between Strindberg and the divorced Baroness, 
nothing further need be said. It is plain that Strindberg's fate- 
his Inzestscheu-forced him to marry, not the maternal type of 
woman, but its very opposite. We should, however, not forget 
that there were other motives as I have previously pointed out 
in detail. How violently he struggled against the realization 
of the union I have emphasized and demonstrated by excerpts 
from A Fool's Confession. A reading of the entire work will re- 
lieve anyone of the doubt as to the validity of my statement. 
The fact also that the Baroness was a native of Finland, that 
Strindberg's second wife, Frida Uhl, was an Austrian and the third, 
Harriet Bosse was a Norwegian, gains special significance in con- 
sideration of the fact that Abraham (3 p. 499 ff) thinks there is a 
type of neurotics who has special difficulty in establishing relations 
with the opposite sex. He terms this type exogamous. The 
difficulty consists in this, namely, that the man experiences an 
ungovernable antipathy at coming in contact with a woman that 
belongs to the same race or nationality as he himself, or rather 
that of his mother. This Abraham regards as a positive defence 
mechanism against incest. The neurotic flees from the maternal 
type to such women who are most unlike the mother (or sister) 
in appearance and character. He reports that blond North- 
German neurotics show great antipathy towards the same type 
of women. Nothing in their wives must remind them of their 
original love-the mother. Not even their home dialect. They 
are attracted by foreign brunettes. Dr. Abraham has found an 
abundance of such examples and is inclined to think that this 
type of neurotic makes his selection according to a definite law. 
In all this the inclination to Reihenbildung, emphasized by Freud, 
was most striking. The patient showed himself unable to direct 
his libido permanently or successfully to a particular woman. 
The fixation on the earliest love was over-powering. 
Be this as it may, one thing is certain and that is that the 
Baroness embodied none of those traits which Strindberg admired 
in his own mother, that is the truly womanly qualities, but many 
of those qualities which he abhorred in his own mother. This A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
85 
statement will be plain to anyone who will take the trouble to read 
A Fool's Confession, which I have accepted as a fair and essen- 
tially trustworthy characterization of the woman, even if some- 
what overdrawn here and there, perhaps throughout. And so it 
came to pass that Strindberg found in his much longed for com- 
plement an agent who continually revived in him the memories 
of the serious shortcomings of his own mother and caused him to 
transfer all his unconscious hatred of and contempt for her on his 
own wife and womankind at large in so far as it did not corres- 
pond to the idealized image of his mother. To what extent he 
identified himself with his father and the Baroness with his 
mother is impossible to say, but to an individual so utterly at the 
mercy of auto-suggestion as Strindberg was, such feats would not 
be difficult of execution. 
At any rate his unceasing rhythmic vacillation between love 
and hate, hope and fear, the joy of life with its hard battles on 
the one hand and sickness, poverty, and thoughts of suicide on 
the other finally resulted in the severing of the conjugal bond. 
I have already pointed out that the so-called Inferno crisis 
was the logical outcome of a life that could not run any longer 
in the old ruts. Shortly after his arrival in Berlin in 1892, he had 
come under the influence of Swedenborg and theosophy. The 
scientific studies which he then undertook, undoubtedly in order 
to stifle the small voice from within, soon convinced him of the 
limitations of the human mind and the vanity, the presumptuous- 
ness of wishing to arrive at positive proofs concerning the phe- 
nomena of life. Truth, that treasure of which he had been in 
quest since his childhood, was not to be found. The limitations 
of the human mind now for the first time became an irrefutable 
reality to him and at the same time a good and wholly justifiable 
excuse for beating that retreat which his pride and boundless 
ambition had postponed for years. In other words, his fictitious 
goal was unattainable and his safety at stake. In one way and 
in one only, could he burn the remaining bridges and turn a seem- 
ingly disastrous defeat into a glorious victory-the greatest 
one of which the human being is capable. This was by proclaim- 
ing to the world the Fanitas Vanitatum of Ecclesiastes. And he 
did it. His scientific studies had degenerated into alchemy and 
from out of this atmosphere there was but a single step into ab- 
solute mysticism and occultism. He took the step. And from 
out of "sorrow, despair, darkness and absolute skepticism," he 
began his Inferno wandering by way of Damascus to the Cross. 86 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
This pilgrimage of his is described in the mystic symbolic 
dramas entitled To Damascus. This dramatic trilogy reveals to 
us the soul's final battle with self and the devil-the past with all 
its vanity and sorrow-and the final renouncement of the world. 
Here he bows before and embraces that faith in God which he 
had combatted in his youth, and endeavored to eradicate entirely 
from his life in after years. Here we become acquainted with 
the Stranger and the Lady who journey together from place to 
place in suffering and disillusionment, tortured by violent, 
corroding hatred or solaced by ecstatic love. Finally the 
Stranger attains to perfect peace, that "peace which passeth all 
understanding," in the monastery of dead passions, the white 
mansion on the top of the hill which he greets with the following 
words: 
Anything so white I never before beheld on this unclean earth, except 
in my dreams; yes, this is my youth's dream of a house wherein dwelled 
peace and purity. I greet thee white house . . . Now I am at home. 
In this play Strindberg's whole stormy life, symbolically 
masked, passes in review. Here are found pall-mall The Beggar, 
The Doctor, The Sister, The Mother, The Confessor, The Fool, 
The Shadows-all but one and the same individuality in different 
disguise. With the cross in his hand-the symbol of salvation, 
snatched from a roadside calvaire-The Stranger advances higher 
and higher towards the sky. But he falls and is found in a state 
of delirium by some of the inmates of the monastery who bring 
him to the hospital. After he emerges from the trance he finds 
himself seated in the Refectory in company with all those whom 
he has injured in life and with whom his own fate has in some way 
been bound up. The dominant note of the whole scene is one of 
overwhelming guilt-that guilt which like a red thread runs 
through Strindberg's entire life. The Confessor reads aloud The 
Curse of Deuteronomy and every word cuts the Stranger to 
the quick, making him feel the whole crushing weight of the Law, 
but he suffers it all in resignation for he has reached the rock- 
bottom of life and accomplished his self redemption-the spiritual 
deliverance from all those passions which bound him to the 
past. 
This deliverance is the subject of a large number of plays 
which, generally speaking, resemble To Damascus in thought, 
contents and dramatic construction. Such are among others 
Advent, Easter, The Dance of Death and The Dream Play, which A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
87 
Lind-af-Hageby has characterized as "a new conception and a 
new art ... a play written for a stage not yet built." 
(40 P- 3I5)- 
Strindberg calls The Dream Play a Buddhistic and proto- 
Christian drama. It is more than that, says Lind-af-Hageby, it 
is pre-cosmic. 
The Blue Book (Zones 0] the Spirit), constitute, according 
to Strindberg himself the synthesis of his life. Of this remarkable 
work Nils Kjaer wrote in Verdens Gang: 
It is more comprehensive than any modern collection of aphorisms, 
chaotic as the Koran, wrathful as Isaiah, as full of occult things as the 
Bible, more entertaining than any novel, keener-edged than most 
pamphlets, mystical as the Cabbala, subtle as the scholastic theology, 
sincere as Rousseau's confessions, stamped with the impress of incom- 
parable originality, every sentence shining like luminous letters in the 
darkness-such is this book in which the remarkable writer makes a 
final reckoning with his time and proclaims his fate, as pugnaciously as 
though he were a descendant of the Hero of Lutzen.13 
To this admirable characterization of the book I would add 
that taken all in all it is an apology for his conversion to the new 
life. Like many of his works of the post-Inferno period it is a 
safety and defence mechanism. This is evident from the way 
in which he cites precedents from history, ancient and modern. 
A large number of great men, poets and philosophers grew wise 
like himself in old age and became mystics. He has, therefore, 
lost nothing by renouncing his former self with all its worldly 
vanity and foolish speculations inspired by the arch-enemy of 
man-the devil-but made positive gains; he has written to the 
very summit of the Alpine regions of pure life and communica- 
tion with God, whence his way led onward to the verdant plains 
and the calm waters of Felicity. From this commanding height 
he surveyed the world below where he formerly dwelt and the 
landscape is alternately lit up with sunshine or draped in dark 
mists or drowned in rainstorms. But he, the poet, the redeemed 
one, who has been snatched, as it were, from the jaws of death, 
has escaped alike from dark and bright days. He is above it all, 
reconciled with Fate and the past. 
But Strindberg's faith was far from that of the ordinary 
orthodox Christian. He writes (70 p. 113): 
13Quoted by Babillotte in his introduction to Zones of the Spirit. 88 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
Let the fruit of faith be seen to be Humanity, Resignation, Merciful- 
ness. But don't go and count how many glasses of whiskey your neigh- 
bor drinks; don't call him a hypocrite if once in a while he gives way to 
the flesh, or if he is angry and says hard words. Don't ask how often he 
goes to church; don't spy on his words, if in an access of ill-humor he 
speaks otherwise than he would . . . a white lie or an embellishment 
of a story is not a deadly sin. An impropriety can be so atoned for by 
imprisonment that it ought to be forgotten. Don't secede from church 
because you do not understand some dogma. Do not form a sect with 
the idea of raising yourself to the rank of Shepherd . . . One should 
have a large-hearted Christianity for daily use and a stricter one for 
festivals. 
Again he shows his independence and originality in the 
.following excerpt (op. cit). 
It is my duty to fight for the maintenance of my ego against all in- 
fluences which a sect or party, from love of proselytizing might bring to 
bear upon it. The conscience which the grace of my Divine Protector 
xhas given me, tells me that. 
.Hence it is perfectly safe as well as just to maintain that 
in the last analysis, Strindberg's egotism transcended his spiritu- 
ality. 
Bjerre (7) voicing the theory of Adler is, therefore, essentially 
correct. Strindberg's conversion was, as I have already pointed 
out, to a large degree a strategic retreat, a compromise, a neces- 
sary modus vivendi, conditioned in part at least, by his inability as 
a neurotic to accept enigmatic problems of existence in a pragma- 
tic spirit. Hence his flight into alchemy, magics, mysticism and 
occultism and then to the Cross, the everlasting symbol, as 
Bjerre said, of the inability on the part of the individual to cope 
with and master the problems of earthly life. 
To Strindberg God became the greatest of all realities. To 
try to prove his existence was as foolish as to endeavor to prove 
a geometrical axiom. The men of science are rustic intelligences 
■who confound intelligence with reason and whose discourses upon 
things spiritual are worthless (70 p. 1). 
The consequence of ambition and of learning he characterizes 
as follows (op. cit. p. 250): 
As soon as a man buries himself in books he gets black nails and dirty 
cuffs, forgets to wash, to comb his hair and to shave. He neglects his 
duties towards life, society and man; loses spiritual capacities, becomes 
absent-minded, short-sighted, wears glasses and takes snuff to keep 
himself awrake. He cannot follow a conversation with attention, can- A PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 
89 
not interest himself in other people's affairs, does not see the face of the 
earth by day nor the stars by night. Behind his desire to investigate 
lies the insidious ambition to master his material, to become an 
authority, to tyrannize, to make a career for himself and to receive 
distinctions. 
But despite all his ingenious defence mechanism and pre- 
tended serenity of soul, he was most intimately attached to the 
memories of his past life with all its pains and disasters. As an 
example of this I refer to a few jottings entitled In the Attic 
(op. cit. p. 285 ff), the gist of which is as follows: Three years had 
passed since his marriage and now the storm had carried away 
all-his wife and child. One day he had occasion to go up into 
the attic. Here in the viscera of the house he found himself in 
the midst of the flotsam and jetsam of the wreck. There was the 
canopy of the marriage bed, the cradle, the milk bottle which she 
had washed with her small hands, there were the flower vases 
and withered flowers that came on the eve of their wedding, 
dried up bouquets and laurel wreaths, pieces of furniture belonging 
to the bride. 
His eyes fell on a toy cupboard. It made him think of 
Christmas and of the beaming eyes of a child; it made him think 
of little milk teeth, a rocking-horse and dolls. He opened the 
toy cupboard. It contained a miniature phonograph which 
could utter but a single word. He wound it up. It hummed 
like a bee and then whispered the only word it knew: Darling. 
It was her voice. She had spoken it into the phonograph, but 
he had forgotten it. Darling. He cried to God; he raged 
against Fate; he fell to the ground. As he lay there he could 
only lament: 
If only they were dead. If . . . 
For they were not dead. They lived. That was the thing which 
could not be altered nor atoned for, and all these things were not relics. 
They were the flotsam and the jetsam of the wreck. 
In such hours of extreme psychic suffering among the float- 
ing wreckage of his long, turbulent life, he found solace in the 
memories of the distant past. Like Jubal without an Ego,1 he 
then renounced the fruitless search for his real, lost self, at 
least where it could not be found: 
1 Sagor. Stokholm, Hugo Gebers Forlag, 1909. 154 p. 90 
AUGUST STRINDBERG 
and like all weary men he was seized with a longing for his life's 
origin-his mother. 
In the little hut in the highlands he found her. A miracle 
was wrought by a single word. No sooner had she pronounced 
his name than 
he was transformed into his former self. All his roles of kings, of 
demons, of maestros and models went up in smoke and he was only 
one thing-his mother's son. 
Then once more he knelt before her, gently laid his head in 
her lap and whispered: 
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