Preview

Analysis Of The Judgement By Franz Kafka

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
766 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Analysis Of The Judgement By Franz Kafka
Freud is often considered the father of psychology so it’s not unusual that Kafka, a writer just a few years younger than Freud, would be influenced by his findings. Further in journal entries by Kafka, Freud is mentioned several times. Due to this we can deduce that Freudian psychology influenced Kafka’s writing. In “The Judgement by Franz Kafka the father character represents the superego, a freudian concept outlined in Civilization and its Discontent by Sigmund Freud furthermore the father in Kafka’s work shows aspects of Adler's theory of compensation, resignation and over-compensation.
The superego is responsible for “harsh aggressiveness against the ego that the ego would have liked to enjoy against others.” This means that the superego
…show more content…
This is one of the final blows to Georg because it is his father saying Georg’s own subconscious fears. Freida is someone he is clearly invested in considering that he was willing to tell his friend in Russia who he fears is far too fragile simply at Frieda’s request. He is excited by the prospect of his friend meeting her which outway the neurosis he feels for his friends mental health because he is dependent on her for support. It is very clear that Georg has daddy issues, not unlike Kafka’s own life, and he speaks of how much of a loss his mother was for him. So in some sense he is replacing his mother with Frieda, which makes it as though he’s threatening to take away the only 2 people what we know Georg cares about therefore causing him to become …show more content…
However the two did part ways as Freud focused on the more risque part of the psychodynamic perspective which is the sex. In this case we will be using his individual psychological ideas which is compensation, essentially the idea of making yourself live a better life; resignation, when one just accepts a poor lifestyle and does nothing to change it; and over-compensation, or humoring oneself by living outside of their means. While the Father mostly demonstrates resignation and over-compensation but that is because those are extremes that the superego goes to, however, the ego usually cancels it out with rationality and causes us to act with simple compensation. However, as we have established that the father represents the superego it is not unusual that he represents the two polar of the

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” is a nightmarish tale with a very straightforward, matter-of-fact style, and this style enhances its nightmarish quality. An example of this is found in paragraph, which states, “His many legs, pitifully thin when compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.” When describing this scene, the narrator definitely uses illustrative words, but does not have the disgusted tone one would expect from a story like this. The narrator speaks in an emptier way, which helps magnify the eerie feeling of the work. Both it and Gregor act very removed from the events, not how a normal human would react. Another instance of this is, “So then he tried to get the top part of his body out of bed…

    • 239 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In the Metamorphosis,Gregor must work to support his family after they lost the company and lost all their money. One morning he wakes up and discovers he is a vermin. The first thing that occurs to him when he discovers this is how will he get to work and that his boss will come to his house and demand that Gregor come to work, meanwhile Gregor is locked in his room unable to get out of bed because he is a bug. Finally he is able to get out of bed, but the boss is gone the time he gets up. His family sees him and is disgusted and shocked by his transformatio. His sister brings him food and cares for him like no one in his family ever has, but even she becomes disgusted with him after a while. They all ignore Gregor. At one point Gregor is…

    • 329 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Lately, 5-year-old Liam has been acting strangely. He clings to his mother and expresses jealous feelings towards his father, almost as if his father is a rival for his mother's love. Freud would suggest that Liam is experiencing:…

    • 880 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In “The Metamorphosis” By Franz Kafka, the style enhances the nightmarish quality of the work in many ways. This quote from line 304-306 can be used to illustrate this when Gregor says, “I’ll open up immediately, just a moment. I’m slightly unwell, an attack of dizziness. I haven’t been able to get up.” These lines from the text show that Kafka describes this nightmare in a simple style. Gregor has completely transformed from a human into a vermin yet he treats the situation as if it could happen to anyone, and he still attempts to complete his normal responsibilities. Gregor thinks his transformation is simply a cold, and Kafka describes it very blankly, leaving it open to interpretation by the reader which in turn shows how horrifying the…

    • 254 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Superego comes to be through learning morals of society, and what society deems to be acceptable, therefore limiting a person’s true desires and keeping projections of The Id away from social settings. The Superego gains knowledge through life experiences and restricts the behavior of The Id through what has been told to the person in their lifetime. What the Superego limits in a person can reflect their life and experiences, therefore giving us a better understanding of ourselves and possibly…

    • 532 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the “Kafka’s fantasy of punishment”, Author Kaiser reveals and scrutinizes more insightfully the significant meaning of the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa. In Kaiser’s point of view, Gregor’s transformation is a “self-punishment for his earlier competitive striving aimed against his father.” His unintentional emotions toward his father are beyond hatred, which is interpreted by Kaiser as an oedipal jealousy intended for the mother. However, that is not the manifest struggle between the son and father. It is Gregor’s bold ambition costs him to suffer. Before his catastrophic metamorphosis, the son takes up the position as head of the family as a result of business failure of his father. He begins to work assiduously to sustain the whole family;…

    • 214 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    I find the reasoning of the daughter coming out of the raft first was for maximum exposure. Kafka could have used other words, but this is evident and suggest that Grete will be the prospect for the parents and she will use her body to provide for her…

    • 973 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Gregor's parents do not come into his room, and his sister reports on his activities to them after she cleans the room every day. Gregor's mother eventually begs to see him, but the others hold her back even though she begs to be let in. Gregor thinks that he wants to see his mother because she can understand things better than his sister. In the meantime, Gregor had discovered, as he was losing interest in eating and found lying down all night doing nothing boring, that he enjoyed climbing on the walls and ceiling. Noticing this by the tracks he left, his sister decides to remove all his…

    • 108 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Gregor Samsa

    • 1474 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Parallels exist between the two men beneath solely literary text, influencing a reader to meet Kafka on a personal level. With general insight, one may quickly notice a concurring theme in his life and his work, identified as an abusive and manipulative relationship with…

    • 1474 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Most people might have trouble seeing fasting as an art form. Fasting is commonly seen as a way to show devotion to God. Often art can be a way to share our suffering with the world. The hunger artist is no different. The virtuosity of the hunger artist was his devotion to God and bringing his audience closer to God by making them suffer with him. The commercialization of his art over time makes it lose its meaning which leaves him starved both physically and spiritually. A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka displays the negative effects business can have on art in a story of an artist futile quest for spiritual fulfillment.…

    • 1407 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Franz Kafka's Themes

    • 1324 Words
    • 6 Pages

    This short passage in the opening paragraph of his German biography gives any reader of his work insight to the hardship he faced as a child, and understandably how he would focus this abuse into his writing. The Judgment is regarded as Kafka’s breakthrough work, where it establishes his trend of “conflict between father and son that produces guilt in the younger character and is ultimately reconciled through suffering and expiation. (2)”…

    • 1324 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Freud and Bataille

    • 1452 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Freud’s principle idea for writing his paper is found in his very first statement: “The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious things in life” (p. 2). The term “impression” in this statement is used to imply a falsehood of interpretation amongst those who place more value on “forms,” something that Freud disbelieves deserves much value. In other words, there are other elements in life that Freud believes are far more valuable than the force of mental influence that places value on “things.” Hence, Freud in this particular essay thinks on the grounds of a scientist, he is a materialist in the sense of a psychologist first then a philosopher. In other words, he takes a scientific method approach when determining…

    • 1452 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Employing the styles of Modernism in his novel, Kafka uses Gregor’s transformation into a bug as a means of manifesting Gregor’s psychological condition. Gregor feels worthless and is unappreciated by his family. They view him as only a workhorse who provides for their needs. Following his transformation into a bug, Gregor realizes that he cannot continue to be run down by his work and abandons his job; Gregor’s abandonment of his job and alienation by his family, contributes to his life in…

    • 582 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Derrick Johnson English 1020 Mrs. Halpin 10 September 2008 Letter to His Father: Franz Kafka’s traumatic experience with his father as a child led to Kafka’s confused development. Say one of your earliest memories as a young child was that of your father answering your most basic pleas with what you thought was the most horrific punishment of your life. Well this is similar to what happened to Franz Kafka when he asked for water early in the morning as a young child, partly because he was thirsty and partly to amuse himself as most children do when they want to receive attention from their parents. To control this incident his father proceeded to take the young Franz out of bed and placed him outside on the pavlatche and left him there that night. According to Kafka “…it did me inner harm.” which would lead Kafka to never fully connect why such a menial task of asking for water would suffer the outrageous reprimand of being left alone, outside at the middle of the night as a young child. This would create a certain message to Franz that his father was the ultimate righteousness, so to him all the things that made his father right, were the things he could not compete with because of his age, which would lead to his belief that he was the ultimate wrong. Franz Kafka describes his father as a “True Kafka” in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, knowledge of human nature, a certain way of doing things on a grand scale, along with his hot temper. These are things that a young child would not be able to compete with at the time. This would lead to constant criticism by his father and lead Kafka to never feel that he was adequate enough to be his fathers equal, which he was not because no child under ten has the appetite of their 30 year old father. Most of the time Franz spent with his father was at the dinner table. This would lead to the most distinguished internal battles…

    • 611 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Franz Kafka, der bedauerlicherweise kurzlebige Schriftsteller im Zeitalter des Expressionismus, der aber nicht unbedingt in irgendeine Strömung einstufbar ist, hinterließ eine im größten Teil nur in Fragment übriggebliebene, davon unabhängig aber ein sehr bedeutungs- und wertvolles Lebenswerk. Ich möchte mich mit seiner Schrift „Die Verwandlung”, die er 1912 geschrieben hat, beschäftigen. Ich dachte an sie, weil Kafka in diesem Fall, abweichend von seinen anderen Schriften, die konventionelle Struktur einer Geschichte ausgewählt hatte, doch im Gegensatz zur einfachen Form ist die Auslegung des Inhaltes komplizierter und mehrdeutig. In meiner Hausarbeit werde ich die Interpretationsmöglichkeiten anhand des Textes aus verschiedenen Aspekten erörtern.…

    • 3517 Words
    • 15 Pages
    Powerful Essays