Freud’s lectures in the 1900s were somewhat revolutionary. As his lectures came out and his ideas were shared, people started to view things differently. For example, a short story by Franz Kafka, if viewed through a Freudian lens, takes on a completely different meaning. Freud’s ideas of manifest content, latent content, and condensation of the dreamwork, can directly be related to the short story by Franz Kafka called “A Country Doctor”; throughout the story the doctor is shown going through multiple hardships, and inner conflict which directly relates to repressed desires.

In Freud’s lectures, he brings up a theory called dreamworks. This idea consists of the manifest content, latent content, displacement, and condensation. Each of these concepts, according to Freud, are what make up a dream. Manifest content is the actual events of the dream, the latent content is the hidden meaning of the dream, displacement is the shift of something important to something trivial, and condensation is condensing many ideas into one symbol (Freud 2222). Through this concept, “A Country Doctor” can be viewed as a nightmare the doctor is experiencing. Freud also brings up how dreams are supposed to be “fulfilments of wishful impulses that had come to them on the dream-day” (Freud 2221). But in the short story by Kafka, the doctor is not fulfilling anything as his sexual desires and worries are not met nor alleviated.

“A Country Doctor” by Franz Kafka, is about a doctor who goes on a difficult journey to save a patient. Even before he’s reached the patient, the doctor was already having trouble with his horses as it “had died in the night, worn out by the fatigues of the icy winter” (Kafka 1). This was already the first sign of trouble within his journey and it only goes downhill from there. There is a servant girl who the doctor wanted to protect from the groom. But even with this the doctor decides his patient was more important and decides to leave her with the groom. As he reaches the patient, he realizes the patient is far from being helped so he came on this long journey through a blizzard for nothing. He then tries to go back to Rose, the servant girl, but to no avail as his new horses were not cooperating.

Everything previously mentioned would be what Freud would consider the manifest content as it was the actual contents of the dream. But the latent content of the story would be about his sexual desires. The servant girl’s name is Rose, and the name Rose has many different meanings to it. When you think of the word rose, you think of love or the color red. In Kafka’s story, the girl represents ‘love’, or in this case, his sexual desire. But in the beginning of the story a groom appears who seemed to have taken an interest in Rose. “Yet hardly was she beside him when the groom clipped hold of her and pushed his face against hers.” (Kafka 1). The groom represents all of the competitors Kafka believes he has. Since it was the 1900s, men did not want to be the inferior male especially when it came to satisfying women. The groom can also be viewed as the man Kafka didn’t want to seem inferior to or the man he lost his woman to. 

Moving along in the story, the doctor finally reaches his patient who had “Worms, as thick and as long as my little finger, themselves rose-red and blood-spotted as well, were wriggling from their fastness in the interior of the wound toward the light, with small white heads and many little legs.”(Kafka 3). These worms are phallic symbols and can represent a penis. They were also described as “rose-red” meaning Rose was still on his mind while he was trying to help a patient. In addition to this, Rose is also the only person named throughout the whole story which reinforces how important she is to the doctor. The wound itself was also described as “rose-red” and can be interpreted as a vagina. These two things combined means the patient’s wound can be a representation of intercourse. When the doctor arrives, the patient whispers, “‘Will you save me?’”, in which the doctor thinks, “Always expecting the impossible from the doctor” (Kafka 3). The patient asking the doctor to save him represents the doctor’s desire to be able to satisfy women sexually. But with his response, the doctor believes that to be impossible which makes him undermine his ability and doubt his performance. This can then lead to the conclusion of the dying patient representing his worries about his sexual encounters and ability to do well during them.

 At the end of the story, the doctor is naked while riding back through “the snowy wastes” (Kafka 4). This can be viewed as him being stripped down to nothing, as he is now left helpless and according to Freud this can mean he is embarrassed or ashamed. The doctor dreams about all these things because as Freud said, “People are in general not candid over sexual matters. They do not show their sexuality freely, but to conceal it they wear a heavy overcoat woven of a tissue of lies” (2227). Since in the real world the doctor would not be able to act on his impulses, his anxiety and worries about his sexual abilities all manifest within a dream.

 “A Country Doctor” is truly a story about Kafka’s anxiety and his repressed sexual desires which he can’t show in real life. The doctor represents Kafka, and everything the doctor went through is his unconscious worries and feelings. Through Freud’s interpretation of dreams, we can reach this final thought of the story which would otherwise be known as just a basic nightmare.’

Works Cited 

D., C. P., et al. “Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis.” The American Journal of Psychology, vol. 91, no. 2, 1978, pp. 2220–30. Crossref, doi:10.2307/1421547.

Kafka, Franz. The Country Doctor. Independently published, 1918. …1918.