Kafka Meets Freud... and Whatever that Means: Introducing the link between them
Those who are first exposed to Kafka's work often fall into one of two categories: some dive in with no orienting, no preconceived notions, no sense of what to expect, and swim amidst the bizarre and murky world he created grasping at straws, grappling for meaning. Others are guided by the ever-present, ever-ready psychoanalytic lens, and see Kafka's work as ripe for the Freudian picking. Both these approaches have limited the reader from relating to what Kafka has created- and often, those who belong to the first group drift into the psychoanalytic camp for some sense of stasis and grounding.
Yet Freud’s influence upon Kafka is more intricate, multifaceted, and sophisticated than previous (and numerous) attempts at interpretation of Kafka’s texts have attributed. Perhaps, the problem lies in attempting interpretation; the term, pregnant with psychoanalytic connotation, bellies an overly-mechanized approach to Kafka, where each word of Kafka has a one-to-one correlation to Freud’s work. This project attempts a short survey of popular Freudian readings of Kafka, a concise critique of those attempts' limitations, and an alternative way to imagine and relate to Kafka as someone who embraced the Dream as something integral to the whole self (whatever "self" means) 
While anecdotal evidence documents how Kafka would refer to “his own ‘dreamlike inner life” and allude to concepts of psychoanalysis while discussing dream states, it does not elucidate the manner in which he held Freud’s theories (Campbell 426-428). Familiarity does not imply shared ideology, nor is it anything less than expected of a contemporary of Freud’s, whose literary and philosophical influences include Arthur Schopenhauer, Baruch Spinoza, Charles Darwin, Jules Verne, and Fyodor Dostoevsky (Baker ix).
While Kafka drew from many sources, several movements have hailed Kafka as one of their own. From the Existentialists and Surrealists to the Marxists and Zionists, the modern world seems to mesh well with Kafka- Psychoanalysis should be an easy fit. Kafka and Freud each crafted a world of dreams, they carved out a reality of the human mind by examining its intricacies. Freud’s world attempts analysis, contrast, comparison, everything that boils down to a hierarchical relationship between the dream and the individual. In the very first line of his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud states this motive:
I shall provide proof that there is a psychological technique which allows us to interpret dreams, and that when this procedure is applied, every dream turns out to be a meaningful physical formation which can be given an identifiable place in what goes on within us in our waking life.Psychoanalysis demands that dreams be drilled, quarried, dissected for a greater good and this is where Freud and Kafka are ultimately divergent. For Freud, the soul is somehow outside the individual, he distinguishes between “self” and “soul” attributing the dream world to the latter. Dreams are valuable for the self because they make the soul more palpable; dreams are not part of the self, they are just a byproduct of it. Kafka understood dreams differently- as something more integral, almost more natural to the individual.
Franz Kafka was born July 3rd 1883, he lived in Prague for most of his life and died in Vienna, Austria in 1924.
Sigmund Freud was born in Austria in 1856 and lived there until 1938 when it was annexed by the Nazis
The Kafka Project
The Freud Museum
Read more:
Kafka Meets Freud... and Whatever that Means: Introducing the link between them
Just what makes Kafka so Kafkaesque?
One popular (and quite possibly missguided) way of reading Kafka’s Dreams:
More than Metaphor
A Country Doctor: How Many Lit Critics does it take screw in some meaning?
Kafka on Trial: THE TRIAL and its Potentiality
Concluding (Somewhat) Inconclusively
Further Reading
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