Page:Poet Lore, volume 31, 1920.djvu/160

146 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 circumstances 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 relieve 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 consideration 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