Comment on Dr Lidz's Paper1

The Swedish delegates to this Congress are especially gratified that Dr Lidz has chosen to lecture on Strindberg here in Stockholm, Strindberg's native town, which he loved so well, a love that extended to the archipelago just off the coast. He has immortalized both of them; Stockholm in The Red Room and the archipelago in Hemsöborna. But his inner personal problems and disharmony drove him into exile for long periods, like his older contemporary, the brilliant Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen. It may be that the Scandinavian countries are too small to contain their great men. Perhaps the greatest of them all, Sfren Kierkegaard, whose writings had so much influence on both Ibsen and Strindberg, and whose 150th anniversary was celebrated last month, wandered unappreciated in his native city of Copenhagen, not in physical but in spiritual exile. Eccentric behaviour is perhaps tolerated more in southern latitudes.

Lidz has stressed the many problems of Strindberg's personality: a violent oedipal conflict (which, by the way, Strindberg himself recognized and described, at least so far as his relations to his mother were concerned), marked feelings of guilt, and envy of woman's natural creative ability. Lidz emphasized particularly the significance of Strindberg's first marriage to 'his schizophrenic development and to his genius'.

Lidz's lecture has led us to the heart of many difficult and unsolved problems regarding Strindberg. Here I cannot touch on more than a few of them. But there are four points I must mention, namely (a) the problem of language; (b) the debate around the literary aspects of his works; (c) the psychiatric debate on his mental eccentricities; and (d) the psycho-analytical problems.

There are thousands of articles and books about Strindberg. His own works, all with few exceptions written in Swedish, consist of 60 volumes. To these must be added about 5,600 letters he is known to have written. Most of these are unpub