How is Kafka’s relationship with his father reflected in his works?

Franz Kafka’s complex, oppressive, and traumatic relationship with his father, Hermann Kafka, left a deep psychoanalytic imprint on his works. This relationship is intertwined with themes of authority, guilt, alienation, and power in Kafka’s literary universe. When examined with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts, we can see how the father figure was positioned as an “Other” in Kafka’s unconscious and how it shaped his literary production:

1. The Father’s Symbolic Violence and the Internalization of Authority

Kafka’s “Letter to the Father” (1919) clearly reveals the “symbolic castration” effect of Hermann’s physical and psychological violence (for example, threatening to lock little Franz on a balcony). Considered through Lacan’s concept of the “Name-of-the-Father” (Nom-du-Père), Hermann is embedded in Kafka’s symbolic order as a legislator and prohibitive figure. The bureaucratic systems in his works (e.g., the court in The Trial) and meaningless punishments (The Penal Colony) are abstracted and grotesque reflections of this authority.

2. Neurotic Guilt and Self-Sabotage

Freud’s concepts of the “Oedipus complex” and the superego explain why Kafka’s characters are driven by a persistent sense of guilt. Josef K. in The Trial, despite having committed no concrete crime, internalizes the idea of ​​being judged by a secret court. This is a reflection of the “existential guilt” Kafka feels towards his father (Hermann’s perception of him as “inadequate”). Writing, as a neurotic symptom, becomes both a punishment and a means of liberation for Kafka.

3. The Metaphorical Transformation of the Body

In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa’s transformation into an insect is a metaphor for the “devalued self” in the eyes of Kafka’s father. According to Lacan’s concept of the “Real,” this transformation represents the disintegration of Kafka’s self in the face of Hermann’s rejecting gaze. The body’s evolution into a grotesque form is an expression of a pre-linguistic trauma.

4. The Psychopathology of Power and Obedience

The unattainable authority in The Castle is linked to Kafka’s experience of his father as an “impossible subject” (Lacan). Hermann’s whims (for example, his disdain for Franz’s writings) drive the characters in Kafka’s works to pursue unattainable goals. This is a tragic manifestation of the search for the object petit a: the desire for recognition by the father becomes an endless deferral.

5. Writing: A Kind of “Symptom” and a Striving for Emancipation

The contradiction between anger at his father and attachment in Kafka’s diaries can be read as Freudian “ambivalence.” Writing is an attempt to resolve this conflict on a symbolic level. However, as Lacan said, “everything that enters language is lost”—Kafka’s texts never fully escape his father’s shadow. The inaccessible law in texts like Before the Law (the parabola in The Trial) is a reflection of the linguistic and psychic barriers Hermann imposes on the child.

Conclusion: Kafka’s Works Are a “Father-Narration”

Kafka’s texts are a psychoanalytically pathological enactment of a father-child dialectic. Authority figures (judges, officials, castle officials) are dystopian representations of the traumatic scars Hermann left in Kafka’s mind. The writing functions as a melancholic reproduction of this relationship while also serving as a kind of “talking cure” (Freud). But the unconscious father image, like the authority at the top of the Castle, can never be fully captured.