Book Reviews

Dreams, Life and Literature: A Study of were drawn from Max Brod's Biography,
Franz Kafka. Calvin S. Hall and Richard Janouch's Conversations with Kafka, Kafka's
E. Lind. The University of North diaries, notebooks, letters to Milena and his
Carolina Press 1970, pp. 133. $6.00. famous Letter to the Father, although the
Traditionally the analysis of a personality latter is considered by certain critics to be
is based on introspective data given by the a literary essay. It is regrettable that the
subject, the impressions of contemporaries, authors did not use Klaus Wagenbach's
and the evaluation of the person's actions. biography of Kafka which shows how a
conventional image of a poor unsure, iso-
Depth psychology added 'dynamic' inter-
pretations to this - this is ingenious, but lated man grew out of his subjective picture
of himself, but diverged from his true
lacks the possibility of scientific checking.
personality. t
Content analysis brought a new quantifiable
As a result of the dream content analysis,
method, that is, the statistical-mathematical
several main themes emerged - preoccu-
analysis of texts such as letters, diaries,
pation with the body, especially body dis-
writings, records of speeches and so on.
figurement, clothing and nakedness, scopto-
Such documents are analysed with regard
philia, passivity, ambivalence toward men
to the frequency of certain themes, the
and women and the image of masculinized
intensity of attitudes, the judgments of
women. A great similarity was found be-
values, the adjective-verb quotient and tween these themes and the conventional
contingencies between certain themes or picture of Kafka's personality but the au-
words. Hall and Van de Castle in turn thors found large discrepancies when com-
devised a quantitative method of dream paring the dream content with that of
content analysis; which method was recently Kafka's three main novels. This is surprising
applied by Hall and Domhoff to a com- since his works have always had an oneiric
parative investigation of the dreams of quality and since he himself told Janouch
Freud and Jung. However this book by Hall that The Metamorphosis originated from a
and Lind is devoted to an analysis of the nightmare, as did some of his other short
dreams of Franz Kafka, comparing the stories.
findings with objective data about Kafka's The authors state that the act of creating
personality and with his writings. a literary work entails a greater participa-
The prerequisites to an analysis of this tion of deliberate and conscious activity
kind were: 1) the possession of a collection than the act of dreaming. "A dream hap-
of dream records, 2) a good control sample pens to a person; a writer makes his story
for comparison, 3) reliable data about the happen." However one may wonder what
subject's life and personality. With regard they would have found had they analyzed
to Kafka's dreams, thirty-seven were record- Kafka's short stories rather than his three
ed by Kafka in his diary or in letters. It is novels. Be that as it may, Hall and Lind's
questionable whether this sample is suffi- monograph is a valuable contribution to
cient since Kafka recorded only dreams dream content analysis and further perfec-
which particularly struck him, and there is ting of this method will no doubt be fruit-
no evidence that their content is the same ful in the field of cultural history and per-
as that of a larger collection of unselected haps in psychotherapy. The only serious
dreams. As a normative sample the authors objection to the book is the ugly and ridi-
took a collection of five hundred dreams culous picture on the cover which would
recorded by one hundred college students be fitting for a detective story but is totally
in Cleveland during the years 1947-1950. inadequate for a serious scientific publica-
The data on Kafka's life and personality tion.
H. Ellenberger, M.D.
tSee Klaus Wagenback: Franz Kafka, Berne, Montreal, Quebec
Francke, pp. 184-185.
373