August Strindberg: Did he have Schizophrenia, Bipolar, Paranoia, Melancholia, Alcoholism, Toxic Poisoning, and/or Multiple Personality?

Strindberg (1849-1912), a Swedish novelist and playwright, was admired by his peers and the public, but rejected by the Swedish literary establishment.

He was a complex man with varied interests, including painting, history, religion, alchemy, the occult, hypnosis, linguistics (especially Hebrew and Chinese), Shakespeare, and Beethoven.

Married and divorced three times, he could be charming, but hard to live with. Indeed, he was often paranoid, and occasionally psychotic—e.g., thinking that people were trying to poison him—but there is no consensus regarding his psychiatric diagnosis.

Some published opinions favor schizophrenia or paranoia, but “hardly any Scandinavian psychiatrist writing today [1980] regards Strindberg as schizophrenic” (1, p. 357). Other opinions have included manic-depression, melancholia, alcoholism, and/or toxic poisoning (either from absinthe or the chemicals of his alchemy experiments) (1, p. 356-357).

In this post, I will highlight what I found most interesting in Strindberg: A Biography by Michael Meyer (1).

As a child, his first school was Klara. “It was preparation not for life but for hell…My worst dreams as an adult…were of finding myself back at Klara” where there was “much beating” and an “atmosphere of terror” (1, p. 10). [Multiple personality starts with traumatic experiences in childhood.]

In 1874, while rewriting his play Master Olof, he took a job as a librarian, which he was to hold for eight years. “To those who know him only through such works as The Father and Miss Julie, this may seem surprising, but there was another side to Strindberg, that of an insatiable reader and researcher into varied fields of knowledge, and to this aspect of him, working in a library must have been meat and drink” (1, p. 53).

At a stag party prior to his marriage in 1877, he “suddenly went berserk and broke some chairs.” When asked what pleasure he could find in this, Strindberg “meekly replied that he didn’t understand it himself. It had suddenly come over him like a frenzy” (1, pp. 75-76). [Out-of-character behavior that a person can’t account for, might be an alternate personality.]

His first literary recognition was for the novel, The Red Room, in which “the hero is split into three characters” (1, p. 80).

In 1881, he was having his book The Swedish People illustrated by the painter Carl Larsson, who said, “Strindberg was sweet and lovable, as he could be…Gradually I began to discover the brutal and unpleasant side of Strindberg’s nature…and plain ridiculous lies made me cautious and fearful of this demonic creature” (1, p. 91). [“Lying” may be the inconsistencies between personalities. Larsson’s use of the word “demonic” suggests that he felt Strindberg was sometimes possessed by an evil alternate personality.]

In 1884, Strindberg wrote, “I have discovered that I am not a realist. I write best when I hallucinate.” (“A prophetic remark,” the biographer adds, “for much of his greatest work was to be written in a more or less hallucinatory state of mind.”) Strindberg said, “I sit and write like a sleepwalker, and must not be awakened, or it may stop in the middle.” “If I go on a train or whatever I do my brain works ceaselessly, it grinds and grinds like a mill and I cannot make it stop. I find no rest till I have got it down on paper…I write and write and do not even read through what I have written” (1, pp. 127-129). [This reminds me of other writers quoted in this blog, who got their material from the autonomous consciousnesses within them.]

Strindberg has come to have a reputation as a venomous misogynist, because of the blatant misogyny of some of his writings. However, it is also true that “Strindberg’s sympathy with the movement for female emancipation was of long standing; it was part of his general sympathy for the oppressed” (1, p. 133). He apparently had both feminist and misogynist alternate personalities, but the latter got control of his writing.

In 1886, Strindberg had completed the third volume of his autobiography. He was going to get back to writing his next play, but he had lost his desire to write anything creative “until I have completed this pilgrimage through my tormented past…Simply being an artist nauseates me. My intelligence has developed from fantasising to thinking. The conjuring of voluntary hallucinations at one’s desk is like self-defilement. The novel and the theatre are only for women…Have been reading Tolstoy. Can anyone endure this unending female chatter?” (1, p. 158). [But he obviously had one or more other personality states who loved creative writing. Were any of them female?]

In January 1889, Strindberg read Edgar Allan Poe for the first time. He found Poe, “who died in 1849, the year I was born,” to be a kindred spirit. The biographer observes that “Strindberg’s identification with Poe is not surprising…Poe…shared Strindberg’s interest in science, mesmerism and the occult…his combination of quarrelsomeness with elaborate courtesy, his mania for composition, and his belief, as expressed in The Fall of the House of Usher and William Wilson, in the division of personality” (1, p. 208).

“He does not remember next morning what he has done today; no longer knows even what he has written; creates everything under hypnosis; as soon as it is down on paper it has, as far as he is concerned, disappeared. By contrast, his head is always full of lucid and detailed plans of things he intends to write” (1, p. 270).

“One evening Strindberg was served soup as usual. He seemed much angered at this and asked loudly why he was served soup when we knew that he did not eat it. When we remarked that he had eaten soup up to now, he became so angry that he rose and left the room—returning, however, for the next course. Next day he was given no soup. He then asked irritably why he had been excluded from this course…” (1, p. 288). [One personality liked soup, but another personality didn’t, and these two personalities were unaware of each other.]

On Christmas Eve 1895, Strindberg was found “sitting alone in an enormous winter coat…the desk was bare save for a photograph of his children, and a revolver…Strindberg explained that since the age of seven he had suffered from a compulsion to kill himself…” (1, p. 312). [Multiple personality originates as a way to cope with childhood trauma. Perhaps he had a personality who originated at age seven, and had the idea to commit suicide as a way to escape a bad situation. However, there were evidently other personalities who had other ways of coping, since Strindberg died in 1912 of natural causes.]

Strindberg says, “I am now reading Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixir [which involves doppelgängers; i.e., multiple personality] and every word is true” (1, p. 353).

“Perversely, however, he continued [in 1897] to regard himself…as a scientist [who had been very extensively involved with alchemy, etc., over the years] rather than as a creative writer…[but] during the next four years he would write no fewer than twenty plays, including several of his finest” (1, pp. 371-372). [Evidently the scientist and the creative writer were two different personalities.]

In 1899, while writing a play, Strindberg reported that he had reached the middle of Act 3 “without understanding how I got there,” and five days later: “Tomorrow I begin Act 5. Can you imagine! But it is like sleepwalking…” (1, p. 391). [Evidently, the writing and the reporting were done by two different personalities who were not co-conscious; that is, one has amnesia for what the other one does.]

“The contrast between Easter and The Dance of Death could hardly be more marked. Easter is a play of reconciliation and hope, The Dance of Death an expression of the blackest pessimism and hatred…[So how can we account for his writing both plays in the same month?] It was characteristic of him to alternate with bewildering rapidity between opposing moods…” (1, p. 408). [Bewildering for either the average person or a person with bipolar disorder, but routine for a person with multiple personality in which different personalities have different moods.]

In a short preface to A Dream Play, Strindberg explains: “In this dream play…The characters split, double, multiply…” (1, p. 431).

“Strindberg was buried on Sunday, 19 May [1912]. Despite the early hour, over ten thousand people followed his coffin to the cemetery, including representatives from the royal family (Prince Eugen), Parliament, the theatre, literature, the universities and, most numerous, the workers, marching under a hundred red banners…Only the Swedish Academy [which awards the Nobel Prize], as a contemporary bitterly noted, ‘gave no indication that it cared whether Strindberg were alive or dead’” (1, p. 568).

“If one makes it a test of great tragedy that it should survive translation, there have been only seven indisputably great tragic dramatists since the theatre began: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov” (1, p. 578).

I am impressed by Strindberg’s reputation as a great writer. And I have found numerous things in this biography that are consistent with multiple personality. However, his episodes of psychosis are not typical of multiple personality.

Did he have more than one condition: multiple personality and something else? Or did he have an alternate personality who originated in childhood, when he actually had been persecuted, and who continued to live in the past? I have much more reading to do before I come to any conclusions.

1. Michael Meyer. Strindberg: A Biography. New York, Random House, 1985.