every individual that is at all alive is an anarchist and rebels unconsciously, if not consciously, against the limitations that a life of culture puts upon him. After hundreds and thousands of years of training, man is still an animal that may be trained but never completely tamed. To comply with the demands of cultural life is a sacrifice. Through marriage man renounces his incestuous and polygamous instincts in favor of a single woman. Consciously man does this willingly, we are told, but unconsciously bitter feelings are born because of this sacrifice of personality, the shackling, smothering and partial stamping out of the ego.
A happy marriage is unthinkable except where one of the contrahents is completely vanquished, or where both parties have descended to a level of pathological indifference and vegetation. Marriages fail, according to Stekel, because the contrahents are too self-centered, too narcissistic, in other words neither one of the two will become subordinate to the other. He who is madly in love identifies himself with the object of his love. He who simply loves is still conscious of a part of his own ego. Love marriages are, therefore, not necessarily happy, for love and marriage are different things.
This philosophy of love, formulated by Stekel on strictly Adlerian principles, is the key to the understanding of Strindberg’s vicissitudinous conjugal life. Already in 1887 he wrote in A Fool's Confession with reference to his first wife (60 p. 338):
I hate her because I love her.
That Strindberg's attitude towards the opposite sex was largely determined by his psycho-sexual fixation on the mother has been recognized even by writers who have not publicly identified themselves with any one of the psychoanalytic theories. Lind-af-Hageby (40 p. 22) says with reference to Strindberg:
The mother soon became an object of analysis; he was torn between love for her and contempt for her faults which he discovered through making comparisons between her and his father.
This is correct so far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. It is necessary to amplify the statement as follows: On the one hand she was the flawless mother, the source of love and consolation to whom the child gravitated. But later on she also became the sensual, impure woman, who had violated both laws and conventions and so to speak became the concubine of his
