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As Gregar Samsa awoke one morning from a troubled dream, he found himself changed in his bed to some monstrous kind of vermin. He lay on his back, which was as hard as armor plate, and raising his head a little, he could see the arch of his great brown belly, divided by bowed corrugations. The bedcover was slipping helplessly off the summit of the curve, and Gregar's legs, pitiably thin compared with their former size, fluttered helplessly before his eyes. “What has happened?”, he thought, “It was no dream.”2
These are the opening lines of a short story by Franz Kafka named Metamorphosis (1). Two analysands gave the contents of this gruesome story as important associations to crucial dreams. Analysis of these dreams indicated that the lasting impression made on these individuals by the story was due to the resulting recognition of their own long standing unconscious identification with a cockroach. The analyses of both of these patients revolved around this pathologic identification.
This paper aims at presenting the meaning of this identification. It is of importance to note that (1) the crucial cockroach identification was not a part of the analyses until