SOURCE: "The Repressed Grandiosity of Gregor Samsa: A Kohutian Reading of Kafka's Metamorphosis," in Narcissism and the Text: Studies in Literature and the Psychology of Self, edited by Lynne Layton and Barbara Ann Schapiro, New York University Press, 1986, pp. 192-212.

In the following essay, Bouson views Gregor Samsa's character in terms of the theory of narcissistic personality disorder put forth by noted neurologist and psychiatrist Heinz Kohut, a recognized authority on the subject.

Why is Gregor Samsa transformed into an insect? Readers have long asked this question. Does it reflect, as some critics argue, his moral or spiritual defects? his extreme alienation? his essential parasitism? his entrapment in a dehumanizing economic system? his Oedipal guilt?¹ Or is it, as others argue, ultimately unexplainable, a paradox of human existence, to quote Heinz Politzer, "knowing of neither cause nor effect"?² Reading Metamorphosis³ in a new context—that provided by Heinz...