An interpretation of Franz Kafka’s “A Country Doctor” from a psychoanalytic perspective. We look at the symbolism and psychological elements of the story.
This novel, which begins with the words “very puzzling,” is actually more puzzling to the reader. The dreamlike, surreal narrative is inexplicable. Imaginary beings pop out of nowhere, and strange words are spoken out of context. The spectrum of commentary is wide, but I will focus on the psychoanalytic perspective. Mostly because Freud was the first person I thought of when I read the book.
On a blizzardy day, the first-person narrator, a country doctor, is in a hurry to travel to a distant village, but he has no horses to pull his carriage. His maid searches the town for a horse, but to no avail. In his distraction, the doctor kicks in the “broken door of the pigsty”. To his surprise, a coachman emerges from it. “People don’t know what’s in their house,” the maid says to her bewildered master. “People don’t know what’s in their own house,” she says, echoing Freud’s famous declaration. “I am not the master of my own house!”
The apparent ego is only the tip of the iceberg, and beneath it lies an infinite unconscious, the core of which is the animal impulse. In this sense, the coachman is a metaphor for the country doctor’s long-suppressed sexual impulses, the object of which is Rosa, the “pretty” maid who has lived in the doctor’s house for many years. Given that there is no mention of a wife in the work, the doctor is either single or separated from his wife in some way. In this situation, the doctor’s sexual urges for the beautiful maid, whom he hasn’t paid much attention to until now, burst forth. The “pigsty, which had not been used for years,” signifies the repression of sexual urges that have been building up, and the coachman’s crawling out on “all fours” suggests his animal nature. Furthermore, the coachman’s violent manifestation of his sexual impulses is evident when he embraces the maid who approaches him, rubbing her face and biting her cheek.
The two horses that follow the coachman’s exclamation are even more explicit. The two horses, which are “stout and strong-looking”, “bow their handsome heads like camels, and with their legs drawn together inward, escape from the narrow partition by the mere force of turning their trunks”, and then “stand upright with their legs stretched out”, and “a long hot steam rises from their bodies”. The image is of a phallus, freed from its confined space, with a vigorous erection. However, the coachman refuses to accompany the doctor and instead decides to stay with his maid Rosa. The doctor immediately realizes the coachman’s intentions and replies that if he does not go with him, he will not go either. However, he is not very sincere in this statement, for he “climbs into the carriage with a joyful heart”, thinking that he “never rode in such a fine carriage before”. Rosa, “foreseeing her inevitable fate,” flees into the house and locks all the doors, but her sexual desire, once unleashed, is not easily controlled. At the sound of a man’s clapping hands, the carriage lurches forward, and she hears the man break down the front door.
The carriage quickly arrives at the patient’s home. At first, the doctor dismisses the young man as a cranky patient who wants him dead, but on a second examination, he discovers a palm-sized wound on the patient’s right hip, a “pinkish wound” that is “darker in color the farther in you go, thinner the farther out you go. There is an irregular, bloody, narrow rice-shaped rash, and the wound is exposed like an open pit.” It is reminiscent of a woman’s genitals. Furthermore, inside the wound are worms the size and length of a “pinky finger, pink in color and stained with blood, clinging to the inside of the wound, moving their white heads and myriad legs, wriggling to get out into the light.” This seems to suggest male sperm. Furthermore, the pink color of the wound, rasa, is the same as the maid Rosa’s name. The wound, then, suggests that Rosa was sacrificed to the coachman’s lust. The doctor calls the wound a flower, a rose, and thinks that the patient will die from it.
But the patient says she can’t bear to live with this wound and asks him to save her. But this is not something that a doctor can do; only priests and shamans could heal such wounds long ago. But people have lost their faith. Instead, they demand the role of priests from doctors, who only know how to pick up a scalpel and treat the wound. When scientific methods can no longer heal them, the villagers strip the country doctor naked and lay him down next to the patient. It’s reminiscent of ancient shamanistic healing practices. But doctors aren’t priests, and they can’t heal patients. Now the country doctor thinks of his own salvation instead of his patient’s, and decides to run away. The patient here seems to be a mirror image of the doctor. The patient is the doctor’s doppelganger, who carries the wounds of sexual desire and hopes for salvation. In this respect, the novel is like a psychic drama created by a dream of sexual desire.After fleeing from the patient’s house, the doctor tries to return home in a carriage. Just as quickly as he came. But the horse won’t listen. “The reins were loose and jerked on the ground, the two horses were disconnected from each other, the carriage lurched and swayed behind him, and his coat flapped in the snow at the very back of the carriage.” The spell that had enabled him to teleport, “Iya!”, no longer worked. Now his old body, naked, “wanders aimlessly through the bitter cold of this unhappy age in a carriage of this world drawn by horses of another world,” where the other world is the world of animal instinct (Freud’s id) that exists at the back of our consciousness, and this world is the world of the ego, which controls and represses that instinct with consciousness. But while the super-ego appears to turn off the id, in reality, the animal instincts at the bottom of our consciousness are what drive us. In the end, when we strip away the pretense of a country doctor, we are wandering aimlessly through this world in a carriage drawn by the horse of desire…..
