Paper for Dissertation Class - Conclusion

To conclude, when approached psychoanalytically, The Metamorphosis is burden with parallels to the life and relationships of Kafka himself. It is not hard to relate Gregor to Kafka in terms of their characters and their relationships with their families. In order to reveal these unities we used psychoanalytic reading which is only one way to understand and comment on a piece of work in literature. Of course, there are and will always be other methods of understanding a literary text which noone can claim to be totally mistaken or totally true. Yet, the reason I have decided to apply the rules of psychoanalytic reading is the same as the reason the psychologists are still applying the "talking cure" as a method. The capability of this approach to understand the motivations and the behaviors of people provides us with a high percentage of seeing new ties between the author and his characters. In Kafka's example we can see these connections between an author and a text better for, he did not write his stories in order to see them being published, which means his writing was personal to a larger extend. In that respect, it is always possible to hold that Kafka made all these arrangements in his short fiction on purpose. At this point we have to remind ourselves that psycoanalytic reading does never argue these references to be 'unconscious.' It only builds the bridges between the piece of work read or heard by the reader and the biographical data known to the biographers. Besides, it allows us to see the invisible connections. What's more considering a fictional character as a patient in the coach contributes more to its credibility. Morse Peckham indicates a similar idea in a more drastic form accepting the literary criticism as branch of social sciences:
"The humanities are concerned with investigating certain kinds of human behavior, particularly artistic behavior and culturally transmitted behaviour. All aspects of literary criticism, for example, purport to talk about a verbal behaviour. To my mind, literary criticism, except for evaluation, properly belongs to the behavioural sciences." (119)
At any rate, there is no harm in accepting literature as a piece of human activity which can well be an object of psychoanalysis, hence psychoanalytic appraoch. The moment we are able to change the deepest wishes and fears of a person, Norman H. Holland states:
"...we necessarily transform literary criticism from the study of literature alone to the study of literature in the mind of man."