Why is it so painful to watch a person sink? Because there is something unnatural in it, for nature demands personal progress, evolution, and every backward step means wasted energy.

A series of psychotic attacks between 1894 to 1896 (referred to as his "Inferno crisis") led to his hospitalisation and return to Sweden. From his earliest work Strindberg developed forms of dramatic action language and visual composition so innovative that many were to become technically possible to stage only with the advent of film. During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult.