Page:Poet Lore, volume 31, 1920.djvu/159

Rh 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 Strindberg’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 manner 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 represented 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).

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 compensation. After his first marriage, however, it came to an abrupt end, and a considerable part of his so-called Romantic period and all of his Naturalistic period are permeated with that hatred