ABSTRACT
Franz Kafka grew up in an upper middle-class Jewish family as the surviving eldest son of six children. He had a difficult relationship with both of his parents. His mother, Julie, was a devoted homemaker who was thought to lack the intellectual depth to understand her son’s dreams to become a writer. Kafka’s father, Herman, had a forceful personality that often overwhelmed his son. He was a successful businessman. Kafka was very intelligent, did well in school, and finished with a law degree. He had a lengthy career as assistant to an executive in an insurance company. The iconic tale from the Old Testament, The Binding of Isaac, can be seen as the standard for a Jewish father’s relationship with his son. Abraham, the Father of the Jews, is asked to go through a harrowing experience with his son Isaac in order to test his loyalty and devotion to God. Abraham and Isaac’s prototypical relationship will be compared to the relationship between Franz and Herman Kafka, a Jewish father and son in modern times whose traumatic relationship can be understood by the Confusion of Tongues paradigm. Herman Kafka demanded that his son observe Judaism in his way. His father’s expression of power, control, and status over his son to be Jewish like him became a dimension of the emotional trauma that developed between them. In a remarkable literary and psychological exposition of their relationship, the Letter to His Father, Kafka spelled out the areas of conflict between them. Kafka’s book, Metamorphosis, can be seen as the phenomenological description of Kafka’s subjective experience with his father and the damage he suffered as a result of the abuse. Kafka’s literary contributions offer the world the psychology of trauma, expressing his insights about human beings suffering from the oppression of authority.
