Returning to Kafka and Freud for a moment.
While reviewing past readings for ideas about my essay I returned to Freud and Kafka. I am intrigued by the relationship between dreams and art and believe some insight lies here. Critics often mention Freud as influencing the Existentialists and Surrealists; Kafka fits into these movements. In the first line of his “Interpretation of Dreams,” Freud states this motive:
“I shall provide that there is 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 out waking life.”
This demand of psychoanalysis to dissect dreams practically is where Freud steers away from the artists goals of Kafka. Freud views the unconscious as somewhere separate than the individual, he distinguishes between “self” and “soul” attributing the dream world to the latter. Kafka, and many artists we have read, like Shakespeare, understood dreams differently—as something more integral, something natural to the individual. While Freud treats the dream as distorted, Kafka treats the whole world as this since dreams are as vital as any part of the individual. The worlds of his stories are confusing and seemingly disorderly. “A Country Doctor” contains many Freudian ideas about dreams: it is filled with sexual frustration, oedipal angst, and psychosis. Except in Kafka this is the whole world, there is not separate conscious realm. He poses a question I find very interesting: which world is the real world and which is the “dream world.” How do we know this world is any more real than the other? Where do the lines between the two end? How bold are these lines?
Freud understood dreaming as a giant metaphor-machine for issues in our waking life, Kafka believed this alienates the dreamer for his dreams and devalues the inner-self. Kafka does not use his abstract or complex images as a vehicle to carry meanings for others things, they are to be taken as they are and effect the reader however they do. I found the best way to read “The Judgement” was accepting the world presented and analyze it; not compare each thing to what it could be an exaggeration of in the real world, not searching for the “manifest content” as Freud would demand. Freud claims dream-thought “confines itself to reshaping” (329). But to do this he always imposed certain standards of interpretation. In Kafka’s stories one can use all different kinds of Freudian guided interpretations and they will make sense, this denies a “manifest content,” and shows it to be multiple. For Kafka the dream is indiscernible from the real person, therefore as multi-faceted as a person. In this way I think art can present the dream-world far better than psychoanalysis. Dreams are complex and science demands simplification and separation of them into parts for understanding. By relating to the dream as an integral part of the self, not as a mechanism, byproduct, or expression of the psychological self, but an extension of the self that is valid in its own right, Kafka’s writing (like much other Surrealist writers attempts but few have been as successful in my opinion) surpasses the limitations of waking life. Kafka’s stories do not give labels, but rather recreate dream-like realms and let the reader understand it and be affected by them however they will be with their conscious waking minds.