On Franz Kafka's “Letter to my father”

Abstract

Based on the Freudian point of view as regards the psychic sources of the writer's material, the author examines Kafka's “Letter to my father” as an example of a text that did not aspire to literary pretensions when it was written. Such a text, in spite of its heavy content, which expresses suffering, frustration, rage, and humiliation, still produces pleasure in its reading. The ideas of Derrida, Bakhtin, and Barthes are used as approaches to the structure of a text in order to understand the reasons for which it can be considered artistic and, despite its heavy content, still evokes the pleasure of the reading.

Keywords:

• Kafka
• pleasure in reading
• structure of the text

Notes

¹This essay was presented at the II Congresso Internacional de Psicopatologia Fundamental (2nd Fundamental Psychopathology International Congress), Belém do Pará, Brazil, September 2006.

²An expression of Lacan to refer to the unconscious: “where I think I do not exist,” which lies in clear contrast to the Cartesian cogito – “I think, therefore I am.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

José Durval Cavalcanti de Albuquerque

José Durval Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, MD, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He is a full member of the Sociedade de Psicanálise Iracy (Iracy Doyle Society of Psychoanalysis), which is a Member Society of the IFPS