Word: strindbergism
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Incest of the Soul. If August Strindberg had lived in the heyday of Freud, he would probably have been locked up as a paranoiac or reduced to the status of a dull neurotic. Since he died unpsychoanalyzed, in 1912, he remained merely a famous literary figure and an exceedingly odd duck...
Although few Americans know any of Strindberg's plays, they have heard his shrieks echoed on their own stage, particularly in the works of Eugene O'Neill and in some of Lillian Hellman's more unpleasant plays. Strindberg wrote straight historic drama, sunny fairy-tale plays and symbolic fantasies. But he is most noted for his dramatization-in a manner as unnerving as chalk scratching on a blackboard-of seemingly ordinary families in which hatred and insanity screech at each other over the tea cozy...
...strange life, recorded with more care than brilliance by Biographer Sprigge, unfolds much like a Strindberg play, except for an occasional redeeming touch of the ridiculous...
...Strindberg was the son of a shipping agent and a servant girl; his dominant childhood memories were the sound of nearby church bells and a gnawing fear of practically everything. He violently loved his mother, described his feelings as "incest of the soul." Yet, as with almost all the women in his life, his love for her was tinged with jealousy and hate. When she died and his father married the family housekeeper, he cast himself in the role of Hamlet...
After a sordid divorce from Baron Wrangel, Siri married Strindberg. He wrote furiously-learned history (Sweden's Relations to China and the Tartar Lands), a religious play (The Secret of the Guild), a novel (The Red Room) for which he was denounced as an atheist and a radical. In 1884 he briefly became a popular hero when he was brought to trial (and acquitted) for committing blasphemy in print. He once called Christianity a religion for "women, eunuchs, children and savages." When his four-year-old son asked him whether God could see in the dark, Strindberg answered...