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Strindberg, to the study of whom one half of this book is devoted, has been a subject of great interest to German-speaking psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. During his lifetime he was, to his great ire, discussed by Wilhelm Hirsch as an example of mental "degeneration," then a popular concept in psychiatry.
Alfred Adler based much of his exposition of the "inferiority complex" on Strindberg's autobiographical novel, Son of a Servant. In a sort of return to the source, Adler's concept was used as a principal motif by Torsten Eklund in his biographical study of Strindberg, which he also titled Son of a Servant.
Storch's 1922 monograph, The Primitive Archaic Forms of Inner Experiences and Thought in Schizophrenia, drew heavily upon Strindberg's description of his experiences during his so-called Inferno period. In 1924 Robert Waelder's first published paper, "The Psychoses: Their Mechanisms and Accessibility to Influence," made note of Strindberg's partial recovery as an example of restitutional processes in schizophrenia. Lou Andreas-Salomé devoted a monograph to the dissection of Strindberg's troubles with sex and women. There seems to have been an element of striking back, since Strindberg had voiced very cutting opinions about women, particularly about professional women of feminist bent. Andreas-Salomé described Strindberg as a "poet … shocker-psychologist … whose men trembled not before God like master-builders but before everyday women 'satanized'!"1 An earlier antagonist was Laura Marholm, an acquaintance of Frau Lou. To my knowledge, Freud made only