One popular (and quite possibly misguided) way of reading Kafka’s Dreams:
While many superficial similarities between Kafka's fiction and Freud's theories are readily observable, some have ventured to extend psychoanalysis beyond the text and into Kafka's personal life. Because so many first person accounts of Kafka's life are available, and because Kafka was quite intrigued by his own inner life and wrote about it constantly- many have sought to psychoanalyze Kafka himself. Such an approach seems logical at first, perhaps too logical- so much so that all it takes is a computer to do it...
An extreme, almost comical, attempt at tapping into the “real meaning” of Kafka’s stories is found in Calvin S. Hall and Richard E. Lind’s experiment of systematically, surveying the situations and images that are frequent in Kafka’s novels and dreams. Just how systematically? Through computer software that counts and categorizes the images it receives. “Seven themes stand out in Kafka’s dreams. These themes and the empirical data from which they have derived are as follows:” a preoccupation with the body, body disfigurement, emphasis on clothing and nakedness, scoptophilia, passivity, ambivalence toward men and women, masculinized women (Hall 36).
When they fail to find a direct correlation between his dreams and the subjects of his literature they offer that “A very creative and imaginative writer such as Kafka has access to a wide range of psychic material which he can work over and rearrange in an infinite number of ways. Awake the conscious ego is able to employ its capacities for discriminating, selecting, criticizing, reasoning, testing and positioning experiences in space and time. The writer exercises control over his material in a manner which the dreamer is unable to do” (Hall 67)
It is ridiculous to strive so hard to draw a Freudian connection between Kafka's dreams and his literature, such that any diversion from the content of his dreams needs to be justified. Additionally, a survey of Kafka’s dreams, shows them to be really quite normal: abstract, eerie, disorienting, yes, but overall - simply dreamlike-
and what else should dreams be?
Calvin and Hall's work is not without merit, nor is it wrong in its assumption that there is what to learn from Kafka's dreams. However, their singular drive to find a traceable correlation between his fiction and his dreams hinders the independant and unique quality of Kafka's stories.
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Bronze statue of Franz Kafka in Prague by sculptor Jaroslav Rona * and Official Kafka stamp issued in Czechoslovakia in 1969**
* http://german.about.com/library/gallery/blfoto_kafka02.htm
** http://www.jewishgen.org/BohMor/Stamps/KafkaStamps.html
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 misguided) 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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