KAFKA AND THE DREAM
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Kafka replies: "The dream reveals the reality, which conception lags
behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art...."
I think it is also a mistake to look upon his writings, as Charles
Neider proposes, as "freudian allegories" or to speak of Kafka's de–
liberate use of "freudian symbols."
If
Kafka was acquainted with
psychoanalytic ideas (and there is some evidence for this), he did
not pluck his symbols from clinical texts like an amateur with a
drugstore dream book. The use of the term "freudian symbols" is,
in itself, an embarrassment in considering this view, for Freud was
not the inventor of dream symbols but their investigator, and he
repeatedly acknowledged his debt to the creative writers who were
the discoverers of symbolism, including that of the dream.
No formula for dream interpretation exists in psychoanalysis. A
dream, a symbol, can be properly interpreted only through the per–
sonal associations of the dreamer. While Freud brought attention to
a number of "universal" symbols, he repeatedly stressed the multi–
determinants in symbol choice, and hence the futility of assigning a
single meaning to a symbol. Neider's extrapolation of symbols, his
mechanical interpretations, and codification of the symbol types result
in a piece of analysis which is psychoanalytically unsound and which
debases the work studied. It is worth mentioning, too, that many of
the symbols which he has dealt with are interpreted arbitrarily by
him and without the authority of clinical investigation. So far as I
know no clinical investigator has found that a court stands for "the
unconscious" or a boarding house for "the preconscious," and I think
it very unlikely that this will ever be demonstrated.
Moreover, we must admit that even those symbols which are
properly speaking "universal" are not in themselves the material for
creative work. Symbols are sterile things in themselves; it is only
when the symbol is animated through personal experience, when it
acquires dimensions of meaning and ambiguity, that it can evoke
emotional reactions.
Kafka may have profited from the psychoanalytic investigation
of dreams and dream symbolism, but he wrote out of inner exper–
ience. An investigation of Kafka symbolism will demonstrate re–
peatedly how little he was influenced by the arbitrary dream symbol.
It seems to me to be as unprofitable to try to understand Kafka and
his writing in terms of "freudian symbols" as it is to understand a
dream apart from the dreamer's own associations.
