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A psycho-analytic study of Strindberg is made chiefly from his own
writings. His attitude to women was first over-idealizing followed by exaggeration of all traits he had hated in his mother. Also, in his attitude to men he began first with love and admiration, but as soon as he became in any way indebted or dependent, hatred developed. These characteristic reactions were traced to his attitude to his parents.
His paranoid development first became apparent with the advent of a stepmother whom he believed persecuted him. The paranoia became clear-cut during his first marriage. Beginning with jealousy and the belief his wife was unfaithful, he later became convinced she was Lesbian. At the end of his second marriage, which lasted only a year, a schizophrenic psychosis developed characterized by the delusion that he could manufacture gold, a power for which he was persecuted by his enemies and Unseen Powers by means of electrical attacks from behind him. Later he had the idea of the magical power of thought and a delusion of a double. He made a recovery from this by an attachment to Swedenborg, under whose influence he became fanatically neat, and accepted his torments as just punishment for his gold making. In his later writings he showed oral interests, e.g. there are characters who destroy others by starving them in various ways.
He maintained his hold on reality by reacting to external stress with projection. With the failure of heterosexual adjustment he gradually regressed from homosexuality to oral eroticism. All love objects, male or female, were parent surrogates. The final re-adjustment was made by adopting a passive homosexual attitude towards the father surrogate. This necessitated renunciation of anal eroticism, and was responsible for regression to the oral level.