Franz Kafka’s insomnia haunted him, but it also fueled his creativity

Surreal and saturated with themes of isolation and anxiety, Franz Kafka’s work has a nightmare-like quality. It comes as little surprise that he suffered from insomnia, wrote mostly at night, and was obsessed with sleep and sleeplessness. In a study published in The Lancet Neurology, Italian doctor Antonio Perciaccante and his coauthor Alessia Coralli take a look at Kafka’s life and work through the lens of the literary icon’s sleep symptoms. ResearchGate: What’s your professional background? Antonio Perciaccante: I’m a doctor working in internal medicine at Gorizia Hospital in Italy. Together with my coauthor and wife, Alessia Coralli, I have been interested in the history of medicine and analyzing art through the lens of illness for about two years now. RG: What caused Franz Kafka’s inability to sleep? Perciaccante: It’s difficult to classify Kafka’s insomnia. To identify possible causes, we have to look at his lifestyle and mental disorders. Kafka deliberately did most of his intellectual work at night. In his diaries, Kafka himself tries to analyze the causes of his insomnia and speculates: “My insomnia only conceals a great fear of death. Perhaps I am afraid that the soul, which in sleep leaves me, will not be able to return.” This hyper-arousal, tendency to worry excessively about sleep, and anxiety suggest that Kafka could have suffered from a psychophysiological insomnia. RG: How did Kafka’s insomnia affect him? Is his experience typical for sufferers of insomnia? Perciaccante: Insomnia affected both Kafka’s life and his literary work. He had a complex, obsessive, and conflicting relationship with sleep. He referred to the night as “my old enemy” to sleep as “the most innocent creature there is and sleepless man the most guilty.” Kafka considered insomnia to be a rejection of the natural, and even a sin. But at the same time, he is afraid of sleep, because it represents an area where the consciousness is lost and the contours of his identity are dissolved. Insomnia allows Kafka to write and seek refuge in literature on one hand, but it is not sufficient to placate his demons. In a letter to Milena Jesenská, he tries to explain the relationship between sleep and writing: “Whenever I write to you, sleep is out of the question, both before and after; when I don’t write, I at least get a few hours of shallow sleep. When I don’t write, I am merely tired, sad, heavy; when I do write, I am torn by fear and anxiety.” How insomnia affects the life of a person is variable and subjective. Some people, such as Franz Kafka, “use” the insomnia for their creative processes. RG: How did Kafka use his insomnia for his creative process? Perciaccante: Kafka himself affirmed that writing in a sleep-deprived state provides access to otherwise inaccessible thoughts. He said of the experience, “… how easily everything can be said as if a great fire had been prepared for all these things in which the strangest thoughts emerge and again disappear.” Of his own role in […]

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