In The Ghost Sonata (1907), August Strindberg paints a picture of a fallen world based on illusions and deceptions, where human beings, bound together by a common guilt, are condemned to suffer for their sins. Sigmund Freud, and his most prominent psychological theories are found in this play. Of these theories, I will discuss how the conscious and unconscious mind plays a factor and lastly defense mechanisms and their direct correlation within the play. Sigmund Freud divides the mind into three conscious states: the conscious mind, the preconscious mind and the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind, as he describes it, is a memory bank of feelings, thoughts, urges and memories that are outside of the "conscious mind," so to speak. For example in the first scene, the old man describes the Colonel and the statue of his wife: “If I were to tell you that she left, that he beat her/ sits in there like a mummy/ you’d think I was crazy” (14). The old man subconsciously reopens past wounds that animate the identity of two characters we meet later in the play. This shows the connection between the vision of Strindberg and Sigmund Freud as the latter compares the mind to an iceberg with the majority of it lying beneath the surface. In this case we see the irony in that although the old man is consciously aware of his past, his subconscious vent will lead to his future demise. Sigmund Freud describes six defensive mechanisms that the "ego" can deploy in various situations. Projection is one in which an individual attributes their own unacceptable thoughts to another person. For example, the butler Bengtsson says, “The mummy has been sitting here for forty years/ same husband, same furniture, same relatives, same friends” (18). The butler schools Johansson on the workings inside the house, just as the old man taught the student. This also shows itself in that the cupboard that they find the "mummy" in is covered in cobwebs - an ome