You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This small book is an application of a quantitative method of dream analysis devised by the senior author, Hall, and published in 1966 in The Meaning of Dreams. The dream is analyzed into various components such as activity, passivity, aggression, different kinds of characters, body parts, and so forth. The material is arranged quantitatively and the incidence of each component is compared to a control series of five hundred dreams by college students.
Thirty-seven of Kafka's dreams, extending over thirteen years till shortly before his death, are used as the raw material for the study. According to Hall the following themes stand out in Kafka's dreams: a high degree of preoccupation with his body and body disfigurement, an emphasis on clothing and nakedness, scopophilia, passivity, ambivalence, and masculinized women. The authors correlate these themes with what is known of Kafka's life and waking behavior. They also attempt a content analysis of three of Kafka's novels.
It is the senior author's thesis that dreams are more continuous with waking life than is acknowledged by Freud. He rejects the idea