ABSTRACT
Faced with the murderousness unleashed by the Great War, Sigmund Freud writes a letter to Lou-Andreas Salome in November 1914. Freud's remarkable essay could be read as a commentary, not only on the war but also on the unforeseen changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Splitting is an ordinary mental action. It plays a part in "compartmentalization", a process that serves the need to set some things aside in order to focus on a particular issue. August Strindberg identifies an aspect of splitting: it devastates the integrative capacity of any self, leaving souls "vacillating" from one position to another. Strindberg identified the fragmentation that was beginning to split open centuries of European hegemony built around interconnecting axioms. Ignored for the most part by his fellow Germans, Nietzsche would be discovered by the Danish critic George Brande, inspiring a correspondence between Nietzsche and Strindberg that shoved Nietzsche into the limelight across Europe.
