Selma Fraiberg
KAFKA AND THE DREAM
For most of his life, it appears, Kafka lived on terms of
dangerous intimacy with the world of the dream. He possessed a kind
of sensory knowledge of the dream and the dimensions of conscious–
ness which could only be achieved by a man who had an extraordinary
relationship to his own inner life. This knowledge did not corne from
a clinical study of his own states of consciousness, and I feel certain
that it did not corne from psychoanalytic texts. Kafka was not an
academic student of the mind. He was however a meticulous ob–
server of his own mental activity.
There is evidence that he experienced mental states in which
dream-like images and fantasies emerged, then were caught and held
in consciousness, naked specimens of unconscious productions. Often
he preserved these things in his notebooks, recorded along with the
texts of nocturnal dreams, obsessional thoughts, fragments of memo–
ries, and hundreds of other bits and pieces of the disordered contents
of his inner world. Here and there in the Kafka stories a piece from
this attic debris makes its ghostly reappearance.
In
many instances
a dream, a fantasy, or a piece of imagery recorded in the notebooks
becomes the starting point for a sketch or a story. There is evidence,
then, that he not only made exhaustive investigations of his own
mental processes but also made use of his discoveries in his writing.
Introspection for Kafka was not a reflective process but a disease,
the compulsion of his morbid guilt, which drew him deeper and
deeper into psychic depths in hopeless pursuit of the crime and the
judgment.
It
was an obsessional occupation which became a torment
for him and slowly widened the gap between himself and the real
world.
In
1922 this estrangement reached a critical point and Kafka
viewed his mental state with alarm. On J anuary 16 he writes: "This
