Kafka's Experiencing in Text: A Person-Centered Reading of Letters to Felice

Abstract

Franz Kafka's (1967/1999) Letters to Felice is instructive for the therapist/reader because it provides a first-person narrative of Kafka's immersion in a fundamentally relational-experiential process. It is argued that the underlying We of Kafka's letters implies that their correspondence expressed and constituted their relationship. Significant aspects of his experiencing are discussed from a person-centered perspective. It is argued that his experiences were initially subceived prior to awareness, in the moment, bodily felt, and process-like. The parallels that exist between the experience of reading Letters to Felice and being in a person-centered therapeutic relationship are discussed. Both endeavors are experiential and phenomenological, and from a contemporary person-centered perspective, are based upon a refinement of Carl Rogers’ original formulation.

Notes

¹I quote from these primary sources: Letters to Felice (Kafka, 1967/1999) and Kafka's diaries (Kafka, 1949/1992). Because they have been published in multiple languages and revised editions, page numbers will not be cited. Instead, the dates of quoted extracts will be cited to enable easiest access for those readers who wish to refer to these sources.

²Similarly, Starr (2012, p. 431) argued that the “authority” of Montaigne's essays resides in his experience, not in his knowledge. She argued that the humanist essay highlights the gap between theory and actual therapeutic practice.

³Kafka worked as a senior civil servant. Contrary to the impression he gave Felice, he was highly valued by superiors (see, e.g., Pawel, 1984; Stach, 2005, 2013).

⁴Dialogue is an “ontological given. … Human beings, understood as persons, are not only in dialogue; they are dialogue” (Schmid, 2013, p. 73). Kafka's dialogue with Felice reflects Buber's dictum: “All real living is meeting” (Buber, 1937/2007, p. 17).

⁵See Corngold (2004, pp. 84–93).

⁶Stach (2013) argued that Kafka “was never content simply with conveying information; every observation he communicated, every event went through a process of linguistic and visual distillation, became a miniature, a metaphor, a minor tragedy, or, more frequently, an anecdote [p. 296]. … Kafka did not mean to say that these were accurate descriptions of reality. … Only an image or parable allowed him to say why the realm of the imaginary gained such power over life” (p. 298). Stach was referring specifically to Letter to father (Kafka, 1919/2011), but his analysis also applies to Letters to Felice.

⁷See, for example, Madison (2010), Moreira (2012).

⁸cf., the terms mimesis and alterity (Rosan, 2012). Mimesis refers to the “seeming equivalence or resemblance between him/herself and the other and … spontaneous mirroring of the other's expressive life;” and alterity “invokes a kind of othering, differences echo between subject and other … [with] a reciprocal mirroring of these differences” (Rosan, 2012, pp. 128–129).

⁹Mendelowitz (2006) contended that Kafka's primary concern was related to whether he could remove himself from the authority of his family and establish greater autonomy (see also Canetti, 1969/1974, pp. 80–90). Citing Ernest Becker, Mendelowitz defined Kafka's problem as an existentialist's version of an Oedipal struggle that was more ontological than sexual.

¹⁰Authenticity, acknowledgment, and comprehension are refined versions of Rogers’ (1959) core therapeutic conditions of congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding respectively. Rogers had emphasized these conditions from the perspective of the individual therapist's attitudes whereas Schmid (influenced by Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, Romano Guardini) focused upon the core conditions from an “encounter philosophical perspective” (Schmid, 2002a, p. 63; see also Schmid, 2001, 2002b, 2013). Further, congruence, unconditional positive regard and empathic understanding are regarded by Schmid and others (e.g., Friere, 2013; Mearns & Cooper, 2005) as highly interrelated aspects of the one attitude, one way of being.

¹¹Mearns and Thorne (2007) argued that the person-centered therapist “who never reads a novel or never opens a book of poetry is neglecting an important resource for empathic development” (p. 50). The same applies to the conditions of authenticity (genuineness) and acknowledgement (unconditional positive regard).

¹²Kafka's predilection for literary pursuits was at odds with how his father expected him to live, and was anxiety-provoking; see Kafka's letters, diaries, and his unsent but posthumously published letter to his father (Kafka, 1919/2011). His struggle with the Jewish question asked by Gentiles (what is to be done with the Jews?) and by Jews (what do I have in common with Jews?) reflected the conflicted drama of assimilation and cultural dislocation that coexisted with the discord with his father. In a letter to Max Brod he wrote: “Most young Jews who began to write German wanted to leave Jewishness behind them, and their fathers approved of this, but vaguely (this vagueness was what was outrageous to them). But with their posterior legs they were still glued to their father's Jewishness and with their waving anterior legs they found no new ground” (June, 1921; Kafka, 1959/1977). His anxiety was experienced within his immediate social milieu as a middle-class Prague Jew and German writer/speaker surrounded by Czech nationalists and anti-semitic activists (Arendt, 1955/1992; Begley, 2008; Pawel, 1984).

¹³Felice's letters to Kafka have not survived. But, Stach (2005) provides hitherto little known details of several scandalous events involving Felice's family members that could have affected her relations with Kafka and his parents. Stach's fascinating and sympathetic portrait of Felice notwithstanding, he tells us that Felice probably withheld from Kafka some of these details, and almost certainly took steps to hide information from private investigators hired by Kafka's parents.

¹⁴Barrett-Lennard (1998) observed: “It is not the other's actions but their self or ‘personhood’ that … I prize. I do not wish to critically judge or evaluate the experiencing self of the other” (p. 100).

¹⁵Kafka's behavior has, in specific instances, been described as disingenuous and disloyal by Begley (2008, pp. 82, 104), dishonest (Canetti, 1969/1974, pp. 115–118), cunning and self-serving (Pawel, 1984, pp. 269–282), manipulative (Preece, 2002, pp. 118–127) and “downright cruel” (Stach, 2013, p. 219).

¹⁶Mearns and Thorne (2007) argued that it is the therapist's willingness to submit to manipulation that communicates the therapist's determination to stay with the client and to “fight for the relationship” (p. 55) which may ultimately deepen the therapeutic relationship.

¹⁷The therapist communicates the client's “core meaning that is being expressed beyond the words, or between the lines … [to] help the client listen to themselves more fully and to integrate those parts of their organismic experience that have been alienated and relegated to the fringe of their consciousness” (Friere, 2013, p. 169).

¹⁸cf., Spinelli's (2006) term un-knowing that “refers to the attempt to remain as open as possible to whatever presents itself to our relational experience” (p. 6) and Rosan's (2012) term regarding the knowing naivete of the therapist seeking to possess both an intimate knowledge of the Other and an awareness of the limits of knowing.

¹⁹Of his own personal experiences, Rogers (1961) wrote: “What is most personal is most general … for which there is resonance in many other people” (p. 26; original italics).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ross Crisp

Ross Crisp is a registered psychologist in Australia, employed as a rehabilitation consultant and psychologist with CRS Australia. He has published numerous articles on disability and rehabilitation, rehabilitation counseling; and more recently on Carl Rogers’ person-centered counseling/psychotherapy. He is a member of the Australian Psychological Society and of the World Association of Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies.