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“Child, the human thought needs no wires to make a way for itself ***”
August Strindberg, that mystic Oedipus Rex of the Northland who dared the wrath of the world by telling the truths of human nature, believed himself to have been a medium from youth onward. His writings are saturated with clairpsychism. The vast, brooding mind of this Viking genius, ever in tortured schism through the influences of a double loyalty, pondering the essential injustice of things, projected itself beyond the limitations of space and time into the realm of the Unknown. He, the unwanted “Son of a Servant,” felt himself to be in communion with and, as the years went by, under the special protection of, “The Powers.”
Strindberg, a psychoanalytic wizard who perhaps alone of all men has been able to match strides with the necromancer Dostoevsky in the exploration of the dark caverns and innermost recesses of the soul, is autobiographical in his creations to a superlative and startling degree. He is merciless with himself as well as with others. He spares no one, not even himself. And in this sado-masochistic process of self-dissection he reveals his intimacy with the world of demons and spirits: a Swedenborgian world, wherein he transcends the barriers of the senses.
Pathological to the very core of his being, eternally in the clutches of suspicion, fear, and sensuality, the alleged clairpsychism of Strindberg is extraordinarily difficult to evaluate. According to the weight of psychiatric studies devoted to his remarkable case, he is to be regarded as a victim of paraphrenia.1 His well-known paranoid and hysterical disposition renders it necessary for us—almost needless to say—to place a big question mark after his confident averments concerning