By Sari Zeineddine | Staff Writer
Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1924) is commonly regarded as a protagonist of a heartbreaking love life illustrated in his Letters to Milena in which he was deeply expressive towards Milena and himself as well. However, it is barely common to go by his letters to his father, where Kafka might be ignorant of the fact that he was writing his autobiography more than recollecting his memories with his narcissistic father. Besides, note that Kafka died in 1924, therefore the psychoanalysis theory was yet to be popular and the impact of early limbic contact with the parents was ignored.
Kafka as a victim of a patriarch
In the beginning of the letter, Kafka tried to answer the question that his father had asked in previous letters “Why are you afraid of me?”. He was honest about the fact that even while writing his fear from his father is still hampering him. He continued his missive by recalling what his father did to him, how he punished him, mocked his opinions, and showed no mercy to anyone. He recounts a traumatic experience in his childhood when he was crying for water and the reaction of his father was pulling him out of bed, taking him to the balcony and leaving him there alone with the door shut. Kafka’s conclusion of this incident was that he means nothing to his father. Kafka did not bother calling his father the “ultimate authority” or comparing his enigmatic character to the tyrants of his time “For me you took on the enigmatic quality that all tyrants have whose rights are based on their person and not on reason”. In this letter, Kafka described the ultimate form of a narcissistic father (just 5 years after the term narcissism was used by Freud) : A father that dismisses anything that inspires his son, is careless about how his behavior might affect anyone around him “ What was always incomprehensible to me was your total lack of feeling for the suffering and shame you could inflict on me with your words and judgements”, and his double standards in the rules applied in his house. Kafka shares another funny anecdote in his letters that shows the narcissistic tendency of his father “Care had to be taken that no scraps fell on the floor. In the end it was under your chair that there were most scraps”.
The point I am trying to make is that early relations with our first world, the first people we actually interact with, is definitely decisive when it comes to shaping the nature of our future relationships. Kafka, a person that was subject to his father’s narcissistic behavior which didn’t let Kafka attain psychological validation, developed Imposter Syndrome and every sort of hypochondria until tuberculosis took his life.