Exercising restraint
Authors: Theodore Dalrymple
Journal: BMJ (2007)

Everyone is agreed that the Swedish writer August Strindberg was a strange chap, although exactly where he fits on the Procrustean bed of modern psychiatric diagnosis is unsure. His misogyny is not yet a formal illness, though it might be made one at some time in the near future, complete with ICD (International Classification of Diseases) number; he had a variety of strange beliefs, including that he could communicate with his third wife by telepathy. He studied chemistry, at one time thought of taking up medicine as a career, and later in his life conducted alchemical experiments, particularly with sulphur (which he did not believe to be an element), and thought he could transmute base metals into gold. But the oddities notwithstanding, he was extravagantly gifted. He learnt enough Chinese to be for a time a librarian of Chinese manuscripts, wrote one of his books in French, and was no mean painter. His dark seascapes suggest a very turbulent, unquiet mind.

Strindberg once attempted to commit suicide by trying to contract pneumonia. This is something I have in common with him, but it is easier said than done. I tried it when I was a child of about 10, for reasons that I cannot now recall but must have seemed important to me at the time and must have involved a large dose of self pity. I had heard that you caught pneumonia from sudden changes in temperature, and one night put my head in the freezer for a few minutes and then sat on a radiator. I discovered that my theory of causation of pneumonia was mistaken. I was no more successful than Strindberg had been.

In his play The Father, one of the main characters is a doctor, Dr Ostermark. His part is not particularly glorious, and he seems to be a man of no very defined personality or even views. Such people exist, of course; perhaps too great a concern with the lives of others has led to the effacement of Dr Ostermark's own self.

At any rate, he is easily manipulated by Laura, the wife of an army captain. Laura wants to drive her husband mad, and hits upon the idea of putting doubt into his mind about the paternity of their only child, Bertha. These days, of course, a DNA test might swiftly have brought the drama to an end; but in those days, as the captain realises, no man could be quite certain of the paternity of his child, or of the child that his wife tells him is his. He cross-examines Laura, and the logic of the situation is that he will be satisfied only with a confession of her infidelity to him.

Such arguments are still common, of course, though not about paternity, which seems to be a matter of indifference to the modern mind, to which fatherhood is so trifling a matter. But, just as in The Father, the arguments often end in violence.

The captain throws a lamp at his wife, and Dr Ostermark resorts almost at once to the straitjacket. (In real life, Strindberg's then wife had a doctor check on her husband's sanity.) The captain then has a stroke almost immediately, and will die from it. People do sometimes die after the mere application of restraint.

If Dr Ostermark's principles were put into practice, there would—by the application of the straitjacket—be whole areas of Britain denuded of males, and an increasing number of females. I can't quite make up my mind whether or not this would be progress.

If Dr Ostermark's principles were put into practice, there would be whole areas of Britain denuded of males, and an increasing number of females