A Country Doctor through a Freudian lens.

      Franz Kafka’s short story “A Country Doctor” embodies the psychoanalytic concepts Freud introduces in his lectures. The narrator is a Doctor, with no defined name, who needs to tend to a patient living ten miles away from his home. Unfortunately, the Doctor’s horse had died, so in order to make the long journey, he asks Rose, his servant, to look for another horse. After Rose finds a horse for his use, all of the details are unveiled. Most of the story’s features are dreamlike, full of very confusing and odd symbols, and numerous sexual references. However, through a Freudian lens, the story’s overall message becomes clear; it is revealed via the dreamworks concepts, along with the manifest, condensation, and latent content as to why the Doctor feels guilty for leaving Rose and losing control over himself. 

  Dreams are very complex and it’s usually hard to interpret their meaning. However, once the symbols begin to add up, the complexities of a dream unfold and everything becomes clear. Kafka’s short story portrays the complexities of a dream and how his writing is embedded around Freud’s ideas. Manifest content, according to Freud, is the actual component of a dream (2222). Kafka’s writing style, in A Country Doctor, is presented as a stream of consciousness, giving it a dream-like quality. The elements of the short story that could be analyzed through dreamworks are Rose, the groom, the little boy and his wound, the doctor, and the large and strong horses. While these symbols can be taken at face value to interpret the text, a deeper interpretation of Kafka’s work can be reached by using Freud’s condensation concept.

Freud defines condensation as the combination of many ideas or scenes in a dream that amalgamate into one larger symbol (Freud 2223). In “A Country Doctor,”  Kafka introduces large dark horses that the doctor is going to use for his journey. Horses are usually perceived as being strong, muscular, and large. However, in one scene, the horses are portrayed as being more than just strong figures;  Kafka writes “two horses, enormous creatures with powerful flanks..their legs tucked close to their bodies…by sheer strength of buttocking squeezed out through the door hole which they filled entirely…standing up, their legs long and their bodies steaming thickly”(137). By using words and phrases such as “powerful flanks,” “buttocking,” “squeezed,” “hole,” and “steaming,” the narrator creates sexual undertones in his description of the horses. Since the horses are larger than normal size and are a symbol of masculinity, dominance, and power, through the Freudian perspective, the horses can represent the male genital. The door hole, on the other hand, can represent the female genital; the moment where the horses “filled” the door hole entirely represents ejaculation and the male climax. 

After this scene, The Groom, the horse’s caretaker, proceeds to do the unthinkable to Rose when he bites her face aggressively and locks her into his arms (Kafka137). This is another form of condensation because the large horses are a metaphor for The Groom’s dominance and beast-like characteristics. The Doctor then tells The Groom to go on the long journey with him to manage the horses; however, the groom responds, “‘Gee up!’ he said; clapped his hands… I was deafened and blinded by a storming rush… I was already there; the horses had come quietly to a standstill” (Kafka 138 ). This scene portrays The Groom’s power not only over Rose but The Doctor as well. He forcibly makes the horses leave on command, so that he does not have to go on the journey with the doctor, and can be left alone with Rose. Furthermore, this scene also portrays The Doctor’s weakness, which is his inability to take control. This image of The Doctor is presented throughout the rest of the story. 

       When the Doctor reaches the sick boy’s home, he goes on to check on the young boy. During the check-up, The Doctor finds something: vile on the side of the boy’s body. He describes it as “an open wound as big as the palm of my hand. Rose-red, in many variations of shade, dark in the hollows, lighter at the edges…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” (Kafka 141). This is another example of condensation: the wound is a hole filled with worms; the worms are another representation of the male genital because of their phallic and distinct shape. The hole, on the other hand, is an imitation of the female genital and the rose-red blood represents the loss of virginity. With all of these elements in place, the boy’s wound represents Rose being raped by The Groom and her losing her virginity while the doctor is away. The elements of condensation throughout A Country Doctor portray the latent content (the hidden meaning of a dream) specifically pertaining to the doctor and his guilt. 

     The Doctor who has to tend to his patient could not stop thinking about Rose and how he left her all alone with The Groom. On page 139 he says “And only now did I remember Rose again; what was I to do, how could I rescue her, how could I pull her away from under that groom at ten miles’ distance, with a team of horses I couldn’t control”. Towards the end of the story, the doctor realizes what little control he has in saving Rose and the wounded boy. He feels guilty for leaving Rose and feels that he has no control over saving the boy either. His practice as a doctor falls right between his fingertips and his duty to protect Rose withered away. This is the latent content of the story. After telling the young boy he could not save him since the wound was so deadly (Kafka 141) the doctor was forced to lay naked beside the boy and his wound. This is evident on page 142 when the narrator says “They laid me down in it next to the wall, on the side of the wound. Then they all left the room; the door was shut;”. This clearly represents how the doctor was forced to watch the slow decay of the boy’s life just as Roses’s innocence was decaying ten miles away beside The Groom who used his power over her. Even with this guilt, he tries to get home in the cold harsh storm fully naked and says to himself “Never shall I reach home at this rate; my flourishing practice is done for; my successor is robbing me, but in vain, for he cannot take my place; in my house, the disgusting groom is raging; Rose is his victim” (Kafka 143) The Doctor is fully aware of everything he has lost and how everything around him is falling apart. 

    Freudian analysis is pertinent to understanding the symbolism in A Country Doctor. The Doctor knows his practice has failed the sick boy and as a person, his dignity and his servant’s innocence has been violated by a single man, The Groom. Through the use of manifest content, condensation, and latent content we can understand the conflict The Doctor has with himself and how impossible it is for him to resolve being under the control of The Groom, and how much guilt he is burdened with.