Abstract
Kafka's writings are frequently interpreted as representing the historical period of modernism in which he was writing. Little attention has been paid, however, to the possibility that his writings may reflect neural mechanisms in the processing of self during hypnagogic (i.e., between waking and sleep) states. Kafka suffered from dream-like, hypnagogic hallucinations during a sleep-deprived state while writing. This paper discusses reasons (phenomenological and neurobiological) why the self projects an imaginary double (autoscopy) in its spontaneous hallucinations and how Kafka's writings help to elucidate the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms. I further discuss how the proposed mechanisms may be relevant to understanding paranoid delusions in schizophrenia. Literature documents and records cognitive and neural processes of self with an intimacy that may be otherwise unavailable to neuroscience. To elucidate this approach, I contrast it with the apparently popularizing view that the symptoms of schizophrenia result from what has been called an operative (i.e., pre-reflective) hyper-reflexivity. The latter approach claims that pre-reflective self-awareness (diminished in schizophrenia) pervades all conscious experience (however, in a manner that remains unverifiable for both phenomenological and experimental methods). This contribution argues the opposite: the "self" informs our hypnagogic imagery precisely to the extent that we are not self-aware.
Highlights
The Natural vs. Human Sciencesi Cognitive and clinical neuroscience face very real problems about the nature of the human self, how we define and study “self,” and treat individuals when the mind, or brain, becomes so disordered that the experience of self becomes disrupted
The current exclusive focus on self as object ("self-representation,” rather than subject of the experience) in neuroscience has its roots in the 19th century division between the natural and human sciences
Kafka’s stories and novels often depict this sort of single mindedness which we find in dreaming
Summary
The Natural vs. Human Sciencesi Cognitive and clinical neuroscience face very real problems about the nature of the human self, how we define and study “self,” and treat individuals when the mind, or brain, becomes so disordered that the experience of self becomes disrupted. In his stories Unhappiness and The Warden of the Tomb, Kafka’s writing gives rise to ghostly doubles This process may reflect the excitation of brain areas responsible for social experience of others and possibly, hypnagogic hallucinations. In remarkable interweaving, this story contains the various leitmotivs we have discussed up till : duplication of the author’s self in the animal-narrator who builds the burrow, Kafka’s writing as work or building reflected in the animal’s construction of the borrow, the relation between literary writing and the transformed mental-state during dreaming,xxii the withdrawal from sensory/social stimulation, reflected in the animal’s desire for “stillness” and removal from others xxiii which eventually reverses into a paranoid-state,xxiv and a theme, which so far has remained implicit, the yearning for rebirth of self. The double (as in Kafka’s initially hypnagogic narratives) symbolizes the embodied self precisely as a process which in its very nature is a self-transcending [2,3,18,39,53,62,67,68,78,95]
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