“Strip his clothes off, then he’ll heal us, If he doesn’t, kill him dead! Only a doctor, only a doctor” (Kafka).

This quote from “A Country Doctor” is significant because it shows the doctor getting stripped of his clothes and forced into bed with the patient which parallels Rose being raped earlier. Both Rose and the doctor were taken advantage of with no consent and dehumanized, revealing the dreamwork mechanism: latent content. Freud states, “latent dream-thoughts… patient’s hidden complexes from his associations to his symptoms and memories”, meaning that it’s the hidden message of the dream (Freud 2222). In this case, because the doctor failed to save Rose, he had lapsed into self-absorption that prevented him from being able to take control of the events and himself. In addition, the doctor can only do as much as his medical knowledge allows him, but the villagers expect him to make the impossible possible as if he was God, which highlights the villagers’ repression and the application of displacement.

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