KAFKA METAMORPHOSIS TRIAL

KAFKA METAMORPHOSIS TRIAL

Kafka's two main novels, The Trial and The Castle, are also rich in connotations with relevance to modern psychiatry. Aubrey Lewis, former chairman of psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, is known to have advised his students to read Kafka's books, saying that the best way to study psychiatry is to observe such patterns of thoughts and behaviour. A medical classic should not necessarily be a book written specifically about medicine. Works of fiction with aspects that are relevant to medicine, including writers' own experiences of illness, are a rich resource for doctors. As a climax to this terribly poignant and heart wrenching tale, the bug, having lost much weight, loses the battle with life, and the body is discreetly and unceremoniously disposed of. With the end approaching the bug attempts one final rapprochement with his family and then crawls out after hearing his sister playing the violin, desperate for love and affection. We can observe his family's social decline, burdened by shame and the expense of looking after their metamorphosed son they eventually give up, bitter, tired, and angry. Modern connotations of Gregor's “mental illness” include being in seclusion, stigma, and disability, and his father physically assaults the creature he perceives as dangerous. More subtle changes, such as sleep reversal and changes in taste (the bug eats only rotten food), and anorexia are also in evidence. Psychosis has been associated with loss of personal identity-hence a bug-and a variety of hallucinations, visual, somatic, and auditory, can be teased out from Kafka's descriptions.

With disordered speech, perplexed and lost in time, but paradoxically calm and initially insightless in a nightmarish yet serene universe, the “bug” struggles on. He barricades himself in his bedroom to avoid family, and his voice changes to “animal-like”-monosyllabic and unintelligible. Its predicament could be interpreted as psychotic: dreamlike and detached from reality. Kafka describes, in colourful, evocative detail, how this initially bed bound and haplessly transformed creature tries to survive. “When Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams one morning, he found that he had been transformed in his bed into an enormous bug” is Franz Kafka's superbly mesmerising opening to his novella The Metamorphosis.

Kafka metamorphosis