SOURCE: “The Familiar Friend: A Freudian Approach to Kafka's ‘The Judgment’,” in Literature and Psychology, Vol. 27, No. 4, 1977, pp. 164–73.

In the following essay, Levine applies the Freudian principles of dream-analysis to Kafka's “The Judgment.”

I propose to treat “The Judgment” as a dream, applying to it Freudian principles of dream-analysis. Accordingly, I shall insist that such dream mechanisms as disguise, displacement, reversal, and secondary revision are at work in the story. This approach is valuable, I believe, because it illuminates an important cluster of meaning—Georg's sexual predicament—and because it offers coherent explanations for a number of puzzling moments that previous criticism has either ignored or, in my opinion, explained unsatisfactorily.¹

Before beginning the dream-analysis, I feel it necessary to justify this Freudian approach. Kafka, in one diary entry, refers to “my talent for portraying my dreamlike inner life.”² Indeed, he had the energy and the courage to...