Dream, body, breakdown: Kafka’s <i>The Metamorphosis</i> as a clinical archive of the unconscious
<p dir="ltr">This article offers a psychoanalytic reading of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as a clinical archive of psychic collapse under neoliberal conditions. It examines how Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a monstrous, biologically unspecified insect represents the repressed...
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| منشور في: |
2025
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إضافة وسم
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| الملخص: | <p dir="ltr">This article offers a psychoanalytic reading of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as a clinical archive of psychic collapse under neoliberal conditions. It examines how Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a monstrous, biologically unspecified insect represents the repressed, the symbolic foreclosure, and the subject’s libidinal entanglement with systems of labor, familial duty, and institutional authority. Kafka’s oneiric narrative is interpreted not simply as symbolic fiction, but as a diagnostic text that condenses unconscious trauma in somatic form. The analysis places Gregor’s monstrosity as the embodiment of unconscious resistance to a social order demanding constant productivity, self-discipline, and normative compliance. The article highlights the affective costs of repression in a late capitalist era, where suffering is moralized and psychic disintegration made invisible. While rooted in literary analysis, it also addresses clinicians and researchers by mapping psychic structures recognizable in contemporary clinical practice – passivity, exhaustion, and fragmentation sustained by ideological belief. In doing so, this study contributes to both the literary and psychoanalytic discourses on the intersection of psychic suffering, social systems, and symbolic loss. Kafka’s fiction reveals how literature can function as a domain of unconscious inscription, representing collective distress through the poetics of physical distortion and symbolic rupture.</p><h2 dir="ltr">Other Information</h2><p dir="ltr">Published in: The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review<br>License: <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank">http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</a><br>See article on publisher's website: <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01062301.2025.2569177" target="_blank">https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01062301.2025.2569177</a></p> |
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