On Franz Kafka

The Judgment of the Father:
Franz Kafka and the Formation of the Ego


The special nature of my inspiration in which I, the most fortunate and unfortunate of men, now go to sleep at 2 a.m. [perhaps, if only I can bear the thought of it, it will remain, for it is loftier than all before], is such that I can do everything, and not only what is directed to by a special piece of work. When I arbitrarily write a single sentence, for instance, "He looked out the window," it already has perfection.


This passage from the diaries of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) gives a concise summation of his adult life, a life consisting of nights spent in his bedroom, isolated from the world, yearning for ecstasy. As this essay will make clear, Kafka's predicament resulted from the fundamentally paralytic state of his being, a paralysis stemming from being caught in a series of contradictions. Firstly, his all-consuming paralysis may be seen as having emerged from two contradictory impulses, impulses which directed his psychic development and which captured him in a double bind. He was imprisoned, not only by the enormity of his desire to write, he was also imprisoned by his inability to write as he desired. Consequently, this predicament reduced his literary activities to a permanently spasmodic process. Caught in the anxious tension of these two impulses, it is no wonder that he became obsessive about writing. For Franz Kafka, each line must be inscribed with complete authenticity, and this authenticity may only be derived from its form, its textual perfection. Also, it is here, during these same late hours, that he came face to face with the impossibility of his goals: he wanted to submerge himself into the form of the text, converting his imperfect being into a more perfect textual being. Blanchot identifies this attempt to change being as indicative of Kafka's despair, for it is in the process of writing that one realizes the sheer hopelessness of one's life.

According to Blanchot, in trying to inscribe the circumstances of his life onto paper, in trying to reproduce his being in text, Kafka realized that he had cause to despair. Accordingly, he composed his diaries in full knowledge that he is alone in the world; no-one, not even his closest relatives, will be able to understand his pain of share in his sorrow. For several years, he continues on in this state of paralysis, tormented by his literary desires and haunted by the prospect of assembling a work which would accurately depict the savagery he experienced at the deepest core of his being, the violent powers he was conscious of from an early age. Simultaneously desiring and fearing these moments of ecstasy where he was able to abandon the self, Kafka was unable to act on these primitive forces. Instead, he chose to repress them, hoping that he would eventually tame them through his literary representations. In this respect his short stories can be read as his attempts to achieve a textual mastery over his emotions. However, although he desired to become a writer, he consistently prevented himself from realizing these dreams. Seeing how he was reluctant to embrace his life in a textual form, one may surmise that he was frightened by the prospect of becoming this alter-ego which was available to him through literature.

Reading over his diaries, it is apparent that Kafka was never able to grant himself the legitimacy he needed in order to write in good faith, for he never felt confident enough in his abilities to label himself as a writer, at least not until he had produced a work of substance, a work whose richness was commensurate with the plenitude of his desires. The despondency he felt comes through when he describes his view of life: he feels he inhabits a life of weakness and gloom, a sickness which has encircled all of existence, both within the body and without, into the external world. Finally, his thoughts drift towards an event which would definitively mark the limits of his existence--suicide. However, Blanchot cautions us from taking him at face-value, for the crisis of Franz Kafka is, undoubtedly, an internal one, a psychological affair which could never be alleviated by re-arranging the circumstances of his material or social existence. Blanchot tells us that, in this respect, he cannot be helped, for "there are no favorable circumstances." Kafka found himself in the process of steady regression, progressively requiring less and less time in the world, while needing more and more time to devote to his literary activities.

The shrinking of Kafka's world may be schematized in the following way: after being born and raised within the structure of the bourgeois family, upon reaching maturity, he came to concentrate all his affectations on a single person, his fiancee, Felice Bauer. Eventually, his desire for this woman sublimated into a desire whose impossibility effectively guaranteed his solitude, as he became fixated on his essentially unshareable spiritual beliefs. As it can be seen, Kafka's professional desires, the desire to lead the life of a writer, contrasted radically with his personal spiritual beliefs, the fundamentally religious law which commanded him to abandon all these goals and, instead, to go into the world, to earn a living, to support a family, to produce children, to become a member of the community. One can imagine the immense guilt he experienced, as the social world around him demanded something which was, again, in direct contradiction to his being. As a result of these contradictions, Kafka found himself condemned to live life as a bachelor, imprisoned in the space of the self without any companions of his own. Closing himself off from the fulfillment of his sexual desires, he came to position writing as the one activity which could affirm his existence.

Using writing as a means of self-psychoanalysis, Kafka sought to ensure the continuance of his infantile relationship with the world. He did not want to leave his childhood behind until he had discovered the reasons why he was so unhappy. This could most accurately be described as an attempt to preserve a pre-narcissistic relation to the world, that relationship he had come to know in his youth. Seeking to alleviate his pain through his form of the 'talking cure', Kafka hoped that, through writing, he could again make himself psychologically healthy. In this way Kafka continued on in his mode of preservation through abstinence, perpetually seeking to compose that one perfect, transcendent text which would bring him under the sign of the writer. However, when one realizes that this notion of 'the writer' is an essentially mythological sign, it is not surprising that these illusory goals should have tormented him so throughout his life. For this reason Kafka's writing can be seen as his attempt to achieve salvation through textual production.



When my organism realized that writing was the richest direction of my being, everything pointed itself that way, and all other capacities, those which had as objects the pleasures of sex, drink, food, philosophical meditation and especially music, were abandoned. I've thinned out in all those directions. This was necessary because my strength, even when gathered together and devoted to one aim, was so small that it could only half reach the goal of writing.



His love-life, too, was filled with unhappiness and doubt. Although he was engaged to be married on several occasions, each time, when the wedding day grew near, he suddenly changed his mind, breaking off the engagement. The reason why he preferred to remain a bachelor, the reason why he was unable to maintain his commitment to a woman, may be found in his "Letter to His Father" (1919), where Kafka reveals that "the moment I make up my mind to marry I can no longer sleep, my head burns day and night, life can no longer be called life, I stagger about in despair." Each time he decided to marry, Kafka found his mental condition to be endangered, as he was again caught between two desires, the desire to realize his spiritual aims and the desire to write; yet Kafka knew that the realization of either of these desires would not make him sound again, for each of these two choices promises a further retreat into the self, away from the reality of his existence. Regardless of the choices available to him, what Kafka most desired was to degenerate into the bliss of madness; Kafka decided that, rather than put himself at risk by encountering the Real, he would choose to find sanctuary in the Imaginary world of art and literature, for it is only in art that one can gain access to that which is linked 'outside' the world.

Having painted this picture of Kafka's mental condition, let us now turn to an examination of the psychological causes that were responsible for creating this situation. What was the cause for Kafka's lack of confidence in himself, as a son, and as an artist? We may find our answers in a letter to his fiancee, where Kafka explains the psychological turmoil he experienced in his father's house.


But I stem from my parents, I am linked to them just as to my sisters by blood. In everyday life, and because I devote myself to my own goals, I don't feel it, but fundamentally this bond has more value for me than I know. Sometimes, too, I pursue it with my hatred: the sight of the conjugal bed, of the rumpled sheets, the night clothes carefully spread out, makes me want to vomit; it pulls all my insides out. It's as if I were not definitively born, as if I were always coming into the world out of that obscure life in that obscure room; it's as if I had to search there for confirmation of myself, and as if I were, at least to a certain extent, indissolubly linked to these repulsive things. This still impedes my feet which want to run; my feet are still stuck in the formless original soup.



In this passage, we see at once the origin of Kafka's psychological impasse, his lack of independence. It is this situation which was responsible for the erosion of his confidence and his retreat into infantilism. In addition, because this dependence was appalling to him, it made all prospects of family life equally unbearable; any prospects of starting a family of his own became, to his mind, a grim reminder of the struggle within his own family, of his father's subjugation to his mother. Again, this is a bind made up of two contradictory impulses in that, simultaneously, he finds himself drawn to and repelled by this idea of family life. While he would like to be set free from his family, he would also like to commit himself to it irrevocably by starting his own, for that is obedience to the law. Yet his observance of this spiritual truth is also problematic, in that this truth is also the truth of his father, making that which he is most attracted to also that which he is most compelled to resist. This next passage is drawn from a document where Kafka attempts to present the reasons why he becomes entangled in this psychological dilemma:



You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason I am afraid of you, and partly because of an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more detail than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. And if I know try to give you an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you and because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning.



With this passage, Kafka begins his "Letter to His Father" (1919), a fifty-page correspondence whose overriding theme, according to Erich Heller, is "the fearful disproportion between guilt and punishment"; Heller finds this theme to recur throughout Kafka's work. Describing his relationship with his father, Kafka reveals the circumstances which were responsible for his psychological and emotional development. He tries to help his father understand the reasons why he appeared to be so ungrateful for his life of middle-class prosperity, why he abandoned the family business and retreated into a world of books, and why he became so estranged from the rest of the family. Recounting his family history, he reveals a fact which had tremendous effects on his childhood. Franz Kafka was not the first child to be born to his parents: earlier, Herman and Julie Kafka had two other children, who would have been Kafka's older brothers, had they not died in infancy. A few years later, a new child was born, whom they named Franz. Just how deeply Kafka's mother had been hurt by the deaths of her children may be inferred that she was so eager to spoil her new child: "Mother was illimitably good to me," Kafka writes. For whatever reasons, most probably ones deriving from his own family history, Kafka's father did not engage in his son's life the way his mother did. As this critic finds no direct evidence which shows that he was unaffected by the deaths of his children, one might suppose that he simply preferred to take a more matter-of-fact attitude towards the birth of his new son.

Kafka write that, as a child, he was filled with love and admiration for his father; he felt proud of the strength his father displayed, in his body, his mind, and in the way he stated his convictions; to him these things were "dazzling." Yet despite all of this admiration, the relationship between father and son became difficult and tense. Although Kafka's father should not be seen as being wholly at fault, he may be criticized for his poor communication skills; it was only on rare occasions that there was a conversation between father and son. Most of the time, the conversations they did have consisted of little more than short, deprecatory sentences in which the father belittled his son and all that which the younger Kafka felt to be important. To illustrate this point, Kafka gives a number of examples of such comments from his father, such as "Is that all you're worked up about?" or "Such worries I'd like to have!" or "The things some people have time to think about!" or "Where is that going to get you?" Reflecting on this method of communication, Kafka remarks that is father acted as if he had no conception of the role he played in directing the psychic development of his child. He then says that most of which his father handed down to him was in the form of rules for good behavior at the dinner table. The irony inherent in this statement is very appropriate for Kafka's discussion of his father, for his father was a man who brought up his children in an ironic manner, addressing them in such a way that he always retained his status of superiority over his children. One might suppose that one of the contributing factors to Kafka's damaged personality was his deep disappointment with this relationship.

The case of Franz Kafka indicates the potential results of having a father whose prime function in child-rearing is to intrude on the child from time to time, making various 'belittling' comments. In this case, the implementation of this method of child-care resulted in the formation of a subject who constantly felt as if he were being judged by his father's troublesome physical presence. This had significant effects on his physiological development, as Kafka's eating habits became extremely poor for most of his early life. Kafka records how he viewed himself in comparison with his father: "There was I, skinny, weakly, slight, you strong, tall, broad." In such a poor physical condition he grew up, a timid and intimidated child. Upon arriving at 'manhood', by this point Kafka's guilty conscience had developed to such an extent that all of his relationships with the outside world became colored by this flawed relationship with his father: "I felt a miserable specimen...not only in your eyes but in the eyes of the whole world, for you were to me the measure of all things."

As a result of his poor relationship with his father, Kafka eventually became completely unable to communicate with his father at all, as he could neither think nor speak in his presence. Although his father never harmed him physically, he did abuse him psychologically by threatening him with the prospect of becoming a failure at whatever he put his hand to; this, too, would do great damage, for "my veneration of your opinion was so great that the failure became inevitable." These prospects of failure gradually loomed larger as he grew older and, ultimately, his problematic relationship with his father led to the complete and total erosion of his confidence. Even after reaching adulthood, he was still unsure about his own body. "What I needed was a little encouragement," he declares, but unfortunately, such encouragement was not forthcoming. As the years passed, he came to be immersed in weakness and hypochondria; he became a prisoner in his own home, often running from his father to find sanctuary in his bedroom. Seeing how, from the time of his early childhood into his adult life, Kafka sought to annul his presence in his own home, one is not surprised to learn that he came to see himself as an exile from the reality.

His mother's over-protective style of child-rearing prevented her son, not only from engaging with the outside world, but with the world of his father. Kafka notes that he came to see his mother's boundless love as way of preventing his father from establishing a significant presence in his life. This may be seen in the passage where he says that, although his mother did so many good things for him, these same things only served to create more and more distance between the two men. These conditions led to the development of an overwhelming guilt-complex, in that he came to see all those good things his mother did for him in relation to his father's non-involvement. The shame he felt for living in a way that was unlike the way his father lived was greatly intensified by his father's reproachful statements: his father caused him to feel guilty for living in warmth and abundance, lacking nothing, thanks to his hard work. Kafka felt extremely guilty for living a life among the middle-class which was nothing like his father's life, who had lived in a financially impoverished state. As the above shows, this disparity between the social stations of father and son led to the distortion of Kafka's image of himself, to his self-castigation in a variety of pernicious terms.

Kafka's image of his father was similarly distorted as well. When he was a child, he lived in constant fear of his father and the terrible authority he represented, the commanding way he wielded his power, cleaving the younger Kafka's world into three parts. These divisions demarcate three separate spaces: one being the lonely and isolated space of the self, where a childlike Franz Kafka hid from his father; a second space, where his father propounded a merciless judgment, subjecting his son to a continual repentance; and a third space, wherein the rest of humanity existed, that portion of the world which Kafka envied, seeing it as being liberated from the power of the father. For many years, Kafka remained frozen in this space of the self, living his life in a state of perpetual disgrace. He includes in his letter a point which indicates that he has noticed a change in his father's behavior: although he now appears to be "a kindly and softhearted person," the original impression his father made refuses to be altered. Remembering an incident from childhood which left him with an indelible image of his father, Kafka tells of a time when he was calling out for a drink of water when, suddenly, his father appeared like a massive silent monster. Instead of getting him the water, his father tried to teach him a lesson about poverty by taking him to the veranda and, for a brief moment, locking him outdoors. Years later, even as he composes his letter, the now mature Kafka is unable to relinquish the terror he felt at the time:



Even years afterward I suffered from the tormenting fantasy that this huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come for almost no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the pavlatche, and that meant I was a mere nothing to him.



Kafka spent much of his life in flight from the awesome and terrifying figure of his father, attempting first to escape his father through Judaism. While he has not successful in his first attempt, when Kafka discovered literature, he discovered a space where he could take refuge from his father's presence, as his father, perhaps because of his boorishness, did not intrude on his son's writing. However, although Kafka was able to find some brief solace when he was writing, nevertheless, he remained tied to his father, for the prime subject of his writing was this same defective relationship. Summarizing his attempts to write when he had yet to liberate himself from his family, Kafka categorizes these pages as "an intentionally long-drawn-out leave-taking from [my father]." This psychic inability to confront his father had significant effects on his ability to write, for he was never able to bring the texts he worked on to completion.



June 21, 1913. The tremendous world I have in my head. But how to free it without being torn to pieces? And a thousand time rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or to bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me.

January 16, 1922. This past week I suffered something very like a breakdown; the only one to match it was on that night two years ago; apart from that I have never experienced its like. Everything seemed over with, even today there is no great improvement to be noticed.

June 12, 1923. More and more fearful as I write. It is understandable. Every word, twisted in the hands of the spirits--this twist of the hand is their characteristic gesture--becomes a spear turned against the speaker. Most especially a remark like this. And so ad infinitum. The only consolation would be: it happens whether you like it or no. And what you like is of infinitesimally little help. More than consolation is: You too have weapons.



As these selections from his diaries show, Kafka was a man who suffered deeply at the central core of his being. In fact, he suffered to such an extent that it caused him to lose his ability to perceive the world through the senses. His inability to view his situation accurately prevented him from experiencing the joy of being alive, the health, the prosperity, the certainty of his future. In a real sense, the erosion of Kafka's confidence may be seen as a disease of the spirit as, for many years, Kafka existed in a state where he was unable to make the connection that his life and all of the proprioceptive sense-data which he received from the outside world did, in fact, belong to him. In the case of Franz Kafka, an individual who was unable to locate himself in the world, this phenomenon could be called a 'disembodiment'. Perhaps the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would have chose to study this case, the case of the disembodied Franz Kafka, as proof of the necessity for both parents to play an active role in the formation of the child's ego, raising them up to the 'mirror' of the external world, to the ideal-ego that is glimpsed in the image.

Reading Mikkel Borch-Jacobson's essay on Lacan's mirror-stage, one sees the extent to which this concept represents a break with classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory, which saw the child's world of primary narcissism, the infantile world of immediate gratification, as concluding with the introduction of the child's awareness of itself as an image. In The Ego and the Id, Sigmund Freud schematized the formation of the ego through a series of connections and withdrawals, either with various objects or with the progenitor in the individual's history, the original father-figure. Lacan represents a new development in psychoanalytic theory, for he saw Freud's theory of primary narcissism as too ambiguous to be retained. In opposition to Freud, who saw the state of primary narcissism as coming to an end with the introduction of the specular image, in the Lacanian theory of ego-formation, it is the double which comes first. Inverting the Freudian theory which saw the primal ego-split as having been initiated by the birth of the image, Lacan felt that the image of the self precedes the formation of the ego; the ego is the image of an image, in that it is positioned outside itself from the very start. It is only later, after this moment in the child's development, that the self is ecstatically relocated into the image which has been prepared prior to the child's experience in the self.

According to Lacan's theory, beginning at about six months, the infant first becomes cognizant of its own body as an image, as a separate being, and as an other. Lacan calls this moment in the child's psychic development the mirror-stage, for this process takes place as if the child were gazing at itself in a mirror. This stage is constituted in the moment when the child comes to identify his own image, differentiating it from all of those images it received from those other objects that enters its field of vision. It is at this point that the child forms what Lacan terms the Ideal-I, an immature form of the I which has yet to be identified with the image of the other, and which has yet to have its consciousness infiltrated by language. With his concept of the mirror-stage, Lacan provides an understanding of how the self is organized on the basis of an ideal ego through the unification of signifier and signified. From a Saussurean viewpoint, the mirror stage contains the principle ingredients for the composition of the sign: the first time the infant, Franz Kafka, a material form, as a signified, conceptualized himself as an image, as a signifier, marks the beginning of the process which laid the foundation-structure for his ego.

Perhaps as a result of his difficult relationship with his father, not only did Kafka come to idealize this image of the self, he also became a neurotic, consumed in his attempts to actualize this ideal ego, this fabrication. As one might expect, this had tremendous consequences on his ability to relate to the world, for his life came to be dominated by the quest for this unattainable goal. Successfully completed, the mirror-stage is a time when the child finds a wholeness and unity in its being, a completeness which springs from its immediate cognizance of itself as both material presence and absent image; the child who recognizes himself in the mirror experiences a reaction of pure exultation. However, in the case of Kafka, his inability to successfully complete the mirror-stage led to an inappropriate identification of the self with its ideal image in such a way that it caused this child, who would eventually compose "The Metamophosis", to become hypersensitive to his father's (lack of) judgment. If Lacan's thesis is accepted, then a number of answers to the many questions we have raised about Kafka's life become available.

A critic could draw a number of interesting relations between Lacan's theory and Kafka's situation. For instance, one might suppose that Kafka felt as if he were in the presence of something most unheimlich whenever his father stood before him, as this image of the father embodied "an ego standing outside itself in order to view itself, a figure estranged and alienated from reality." In addition, one might suppose that Kafka experienced a reaction similar to what Lacan called meconnaissance, confusing the ideal image he experienced at the beginning of his proprioceptive development with the reality of his Being. As one may have guessed, the towering, authoritarian image of the father which Kafka was deluded into believing is a feature of the imago, was a simulation of Kafka's desire to establish a reconnection between image and reality. Nor is it unreasonable to suppose that the reason why Kafka hesitated from categorizing himself as a writer may also be attributed to this unfortunate moment in his childhood, for this obstacle may have called his attention back to his inability to master this stage of psychic development. Lastly, as Lacan states, the fact that the image in the mirror shapes the ontological structure of the human world may be responsible for the strength of Kafka's spiritual ideals, which themselves grew out of this meconnaissance. Eventually, this led to Kafka's retreat from the world, pulling in all of his proprioceptive mechanisms for gathering information about himself and about the world; truly, Kafka had become a sheltered individual.

Prevented from gaining access to the world by a mother who hermetically sealed him from every form of social reality, and shamed into isolation by a father who idea of child-care consisted of irony and ignorance, Kafka was forced to organize his ego on the basis of what he saw before him, in the world which was his mirror. Knowing that the infant's gaze is established on the basis of what it sees, one realizes that, because his father remained distant and cold, it was inevitable that Kafka formed a weak ego-structure, and was unable to establish himself in the world, as his psychical development ended at some point prior to its fullest maturation. Furthermore, these initial difficulties led to the development of a series of obstructions, all of which served to block Kafka's journey to a healthy psychological development: his inability to experience the unity of the ego led to an inability to engage with the imaginary self, leading to his fundamental inability to elevate the ego up to a height from which it could look down upon him in his magnificent completeness, a deficiency which led to the creation of his neurotic character. As Borch-Jacobson explains, although it is only a simulation, the erection of the ego is an all-important event, for it eventually will come to manifest a solid presence in the individual's life--"triumphant, unshakable, eternal, fixed."