{"id":173140,"date":"2026-03-20T10:00:40","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T14:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=173140"},"modified":"2026-03-20T17:19:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T21:19:08","slug":"kafkas-misdiagnosis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/03\/20\/kafkas-misdiagnosis\/","title":{"rendered":"Kafka\u2019s Misdiagnosis"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Drawings by Franz Kafka. Courtesy of the Literary Estate of Max Brod, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. Public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

In a diary entry from February 1922, Franz Kafka writes of a deal he made with madness:<\/p>\n

There is a certain failing, a lack in me, that is clear and distinct enough but difficult to describe: it is a compound of timidity, reserve, talkativeness, and half-heartedness; by this I intend to characterize something specific, a group of failings that under a certain aspect constitute one single clearly defined failing (which has nothing to do with such grave vices as mendacity, vanity, etc.). This failing keeps me from going mad, but also from making any headway. Because it keeps me from going mad, I cultivate it; out of fear of madness I sacrifice whatever headway I might make and shall certainly be the loser in the bargain, for no bargains are possible at this level.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Kafkian protagonist (including the \u201cI\u201d of Kafka\u2019s letters and diaries) is a loser who cannot make \u201cany headway,\u201d a schlemiel who secretly cultivates failure as the means of his persistence. The subject must lose, must fail; that\u2019s the deal made with madness. Conversely, does this not imply that a successful Kafka would be not a socially well-adjusted, non-neurotic, even happily married Kafka, but rather a mad Kafka, one forced to pay a high price for not<\/em> sacrificing headway in his pursuit, for going all the way to the end of his investigations? In \u201cInvestigations of a Dog,\u201d the philosopher dog speaks of wanting to feed on the bone marrow of all the dogs, the marrow of truth\u2014but then turns around and avows that this marrow is \u201cno food; on the contrary, it is a poison.\u201d Similarly, what if Kafka nourished himself on failure to avoid being poisoned by the truth he was seeking?<\/p>\n

There is something profoundly unhinged about the Kafkian universe. In the first book-length study of Kafka in English (a rather eccentric work, largely forgotten today), Paul Goodman put it sharply: Relax your vigilance and \u201cthe entire order of the world will fly in pieces.\u201d Kafka himself once called waking up \u201cthe riskiest moment\u201d: \u201cIf you can manage to get through it without being dragged out of place, you can relax for the rest of the day.\u201d It\u2019s as if the interval between sleep and waking were not only a matter of fuzzy consciousness but also an ontological blurriness, threatening to open a rupture in the fabric of space-time where all sorts of demons might appear, like agents coming to arrest you for an unknown\u2014and unknowable\u2014crime, or a giant insect substituting for your formerly human self. Schizo- <\/span><\/i>in Greek means cleft or split, and apart from the moment of awakening, there are many such figures of schizoid rupture\u00a0<\/i><\/span>in Kafka\u2019s universe. <\/span>\u201cA Little Woman\u201d opens with a delirious detail: \u201cI have never seen a hand with the separate fingers so sharply differentiated from each other as hers; and yet her hand has no anatomical peculiarities, it is an entirely normal hand.\u201d The too-finely-spaced fingers signal a subtle breach in the order of things, a breach into which the narrator can\u2019t help but plunge.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many psychoanalytically informed critics (though not all) have judged Kafka to be a writer of schizophrenia. One of the first was Otto Fenichel, who wrote, in a paper published in 1937: \u201cIn Kafka\u2019s case no doubt we are faced with a moving portrayal, drawn from internal sources, of schizophrenic experiences.\u201d Goodman went further, arguing that Kafka \u201casks us what it means to have a consciousness altogether \u2026 he introduces us to problems of psychosis rather than neurosis.\u201d Louis Sass deemed Kafka\u2019s early short story \u201cDescription of a Struggle\u201d to be \u201cperhaps the most vivid evocation of schizophrenic experience in all of Western literature.\u201d Gilles Deleuze and F\u00e9lix Guattari elaborated the most famous schizophrenic interpretation of Kafka\u2019s writings, putting the emphasis on delirious metamorphoses and zoomorphic becomings as forms of \u201cschizo escape.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is true that one of the recurrent motifs or atmospheres in Kafka is a kind of nonchalant absurdity or normal insanity, which gives to his writing much of its dry humor. Like when Gregor Samsa turns into a bug and no one\u2019s really shocked, or when Blumfeld comes home to his apartment to discover a pair of magical bouncing balls, which he finds bothersome but not particularly extraordinary. \u201cBlumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor\u201d would appear to illustrate the schizophrenia diagnosis, with its quasihallucinatory pair of celluloid balls that keep jumping up and down, doggedly following an increasingly exasperated Blumfeld. But within this delirium lies a fundamentally neurotic problem: on the one hand, the lonely bachelor is frustrated and cannot fulfill his desire (to find a life companion); on the other, a strange enjoyment keeps popping up where it\u2019s least expected (the unwanted \u201ccompanions\u201d hopping around him). Such is the paradox of a bachelor\u2019s existence: Loneliness can never be dispelled, and solitude is always interrupted by an intruder. Loneliness is incurable, yet one is never left alone. Likewise, the dog in \u201cInvestigations of a Dog\u201d recounts how he was first launched on his philosophical quest by a psychedelic musical concert he stumbled upon in his youth. However, it\u2019s not the intensities of light, movement, and sound or the violently reality-bursting spectacle (its \u201cdeterritorializing\u201d force, in Deleuze and Guattari\u2019s language) that grip the dog; rather, it\u2019s the silence of the musicians, their refusal to answer his questions. This silence triggers something in him, destining the rest of his life to repeat this primal scene. His adult quest is a philosophical neurosis, organized around the posing of questions and the nonreception of answers.<\/p>\n

Another example: the digging animal in \u201cThe Burrow,\u201d with his constant fear of predators and obsession with defense, might easily be taken for a paranoid psychotic. But rather than being possessed by the certainty of persecution, he is riven by doubts, admitting that he doesn\u2019t know what the enemy knows or if he\u2019s plotting against him; near the end of the story he even claims, \u201cI have reached the stage where I no longer wish to have certainty.\u201d As the psychoanalyst Darian Leader has argued, if there\u2019s one thing that separates neurosis from psychosis, it\u2019s certainty. What \u201cThe Burrow\u201d brilliantly illustrates is the warped neurotic logic by which one clings more to one\u2019s defenses than to the life they are supposed to be defending. Indeed, many of Kafka\u2019s abiding themes point to neurosis rather than schizophrenia: the ambivalent relation to authority and the ever-frustrated desire for official permission and status; delay, deferral, postponement, and procrastination; compulsive overthinking (Kafka makes virtuosic use of the word but<\/em>\u2014the Belgian Germanist Herman Uyttersprot once dubbed him the Aber Mann<\/em>); misunderstanding and the equivocations of interpretation; a floating sense of guilt, whose cause is unknown; the tortuous intricacies of grievance and complaint; and above all, failure\u2014the failure to reach one\u2019s goal or simply to make it from point A to B.<\/p>\n

Samuel Beckett held a similar view. In a 1956 interview, Beckett underlined a certain serenity in Kafka\u2019s writing: \u201cThe Kafka hero has a coherence of purpose. He\u2019s lost but he\u2019s not spiritually precarious, he\u2019s not falling to bits.\u201d He continues: \u201cYou notice how Kafka\u2019s form is classic, it goes on like a steamroller\u2014almost serene. It seems<\/em> to be threatened the whole time\u2014but the consternation is in the form. In my work there is consternation behind the form, not in the form.\u201d Beckett reprises this point in a letter to the critic Ruby Cohn: \u201cWhat struck me as strange in Kafka was that the form is not shaken by the experience it conveys.\u201d Unlike Beckett\u2019s writing, which tends toward disintegration, language collapsing into oblivion, in Kafka the form holds steady, despite the \u201cconsternation\u201d it conveys. Now, Beckett may well have more in common with Kafka than he\u2019s willing to admit, but his point stands: Kafka does not engage in the same kind of formal innovations and experiments as do other modern writers, making him the odd man out of the literary avant-garde. He adheres to the classical forms of the fable, chronicle, epic, and parable. Yet it\u2019s not exactly that \u201cthe form is not shaken.\u201d Kafka does something to the old forms: he twists them from the inside, riddling them with hesitations, gaps, and silences, but without abandoning them or splintering them apart.<\/p>\n

The ways in which Kafka twists traditional forms according to his own disturbance are what introduce a new universal dimension for the Freudian age, the dimension of neurosis. Kafka invented a mythology for the twentieth century by neuroticizing the ancient myths: my own private Greece, my own private Judaism, even (given Kafka\u2019s returns to Don Quixote<\/em>) my own private literary modernism. The Abraham who can\u2019t recognize himself in God\u2019s call, or is just too busy to answer; the tardy messiah who arrives only the day after he\u2019s needed; the not-so-great Alexander who cannot cross the Hellespont, arrested by the mere weight of his body (his warhorse, Bucephalus, makes more progress\u2014studying hard, he becomes a lawyer in an age when there are no more Alexanders, when the reign of the master has been eclipsed by anonymous administration); the Sirens who don\u2019t sing but rather silently gawk at an ear-plugged Odysseus; the office-comedy Poseidon turned into the harried supervisor of the seas, having exchanged cruising on the waves and his trident for paperwork and a pen\u2014this<\/em> is how Kafka revivifies the old myths, makes them speak to us again.<\/p>\n

The case of Moses is particularly revealing: in a passage from his diary dated October 19, 1921, Kafka compares the Jewish prophet\u2019s fate to the conclusion of Sentimental Education<\/em>. Kafka\u2019s Moses is like Flaubert\u2019s hyperneurotic Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Moreau, with his desperately unconsummated, self-sabotaging love for Madame Arnoux: at the end of the novel, just at the moment he senses she\u2019s about to give herself to him, and despite his \u201cfrenzied, rabid lust,\u201d Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric turns away and rolls a cigarette, repulsed by a feeling of (incestuous) disgust, and a general sense of fatigue\u2014\u201cBesides, what a nuisance it would be!\u201d This is how Kafka pictures Moses, not prohibited by God but stopping himself at the edge of Canaan, perhaps also muttering (prophetically) under his breath, \u201cThe promised land, what a nuisance!\u201d Is there a truer theology? Kafka recasts mythical heroes and exalted religious figures as neurotically divided subjects, not wanting what they want and thriving on the obstacles to their thriving. Even more, they are characters who cannot be located in their traditions, who are adrift in their myths. By continuing to write in the traditional forms while subverting them in this way, Kafka depicts our own broken relation to the modern world\u2014as something we must yet cannot inhabit<\/em>. The inhibitions, hesitations, and gaps that Kafka insinuates into ancient stories reflect the angst of a subject who both belongs to a certain history and context and does not, who cannot find its place where it is \u201cplaced.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHesitation before birth. If there is a transmigration of souls, then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth,\u201d Kafka writes in his diary, shortly before the entry on madness. One of Kafka\u2019s most remarkable modernizations of mythology is his take on the ancient doctrine of metempsychosis. Plato\u2019s myth of Er, which concludes The<\/em> Republic<\/em>, describes the cycle of reincarnation whereby dead souls return to the underworld to decide on their next lives. In Kafka\u2019s version of the myth, the soul does not choose a new incarnation, but rather wavers before this choice, vacillates before being. Another fateful interval: not, this time, between sleep and wakefulness, but being and nothingness. To be or not to be? Hold on, wait a second \u2026 <\/em>In Plato, the focus is on the content<\/em> of the choice (tyrant or recluse, lion or swan); in Kafka, it\u2019s the act<\/em> of choosing that has become problematic, \u201cimpossible.\u201d For moderns, reincarnation concerns not so much what we\u2019re going to be (our identity) as it does how or in what way we won\u2019t entirely manage to be (our mis-identity or internal otherness). Freud called it the \u201cchoice of neurosis.\u201d Extending the image of Kafka\u2019s wavering soul, our subjectivities might be defined, in a formal manner, as so many ways of failing to be born or of bungling the choice of being: neurotic hesitation that dithers in the face of choice; perverse disavowal that avoids or sidesteps the necessity of decision; psychotic self-negation that chooses the impossible option not to be. The idea of an underworld may not be viable for us, but a disenchanted adherence to the immanence of this world is not the sole alternative. Instead, this world is fractured from within, so that it no longer falls together with itself yet without being redoubled in some kind of beyond (heaven or hell). The Freudian unconscious is a reinvention of the Platonic underworld.<\/p>\n

At one point, Blumfeld considers crushing the troublesome magical balls into tiny bits, then wonders whether the fragments will keep jumping, a possibility he wryly dismisses: \u201cEven the unusual must have its limits.\u201d This might be read as an ironic metacommentary on Kafka\u2019s fiction, but it is also a kind of neurotic joke about madness, the wit of a neurotic on the edge of psychosis whose abyss he knowingly pulls back from. The world still holds together\u2014not due to its having a strong enough center but, funnily enough, because of a failing or weakness that prevents it from falling apart.<\/p>\n

This is a clinical insight we can take from Kafka: What grounds neurotic existence is not a better grip on socially consensual reality than that of psychotics, or a well-installed symbolic law, as in the classic Lacanian account. It rather consists of a certain flair for cultivating weakness\u2014a capacity for turning lack into bounty and failure into success, and, conversely, for snatching failure from the jaws of victory and finding the absence in every plenty. The trick is spinning fast enough around the void to avoid falling into it. To use another image, neurotics can almost magically conjure a ground from its absence, like the flight of stairs generated by the very feet climbing upon them: \u201cAs long as you don\u2019t stop climbing, the stairs won\u2019t end, under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards,\u201d concludes the story \u201cAdvocates.\u201d Schizophrenics might see this as \u201ccheating\u201d; having a clearer insight into the precarious nature of things, they would expect the climber to glimpse the abyss beneath him and plummet. Kafka\u2019s losing bargain is a trick on madness. From a classical diagnostic perspective, there is something confounding about Kafka\u2019s neurosis on the edge of madness, or neurosis that saves itself from breakdown via failure. The schizophrenic interpretation of Kafka is not completely mistaken: reality is fractured, and strange animals, crossbreeds, and uncanny nonhumans rush in through the gaps. What Kafka instructs us about, however, is a mode of psychic coherence that is made up of gaps, the paradoxical perseverance of a system that subsists in and through the ways it undermines itself. Kafka\u2019s heroes are maestros of self-sabotage; they do it to themselves. But this self-sabotage is also sabotaged\u2014it doesn\u2019t manage to do itself in\u2014and so they can only keep on \u201cclimbing.\u201d His characters live by failing to not-live. (This wayward negation is the mainspring of Kafka\u2019s comedy, or what might be called his screwball tragedy.) One of the lessons of Kafkian neurosis is that human beings are the astoundingly resourceful architects of their own cages\u2014yet the very ingenuity by which we entrap ourselves points to a freedom that remains untamed. In Kafka there may be no exit, no way out, but there is no absolute closure either, only an evermore exacting working through of their strange loop.<\/p>\n

Jacques Lacan once called Hegel the \u201cmost sublime hysteric.\u201d Kafka, the most sublime obsessional neurotic? The point is not to pathologize the author, to reduce him to his sickness, but to appreciate how literature can lift psychopathology to the level of a style\u2014transforming it, to use the parlance of Kafka\u2019s dog, into a field of \u201cinvestigation.\u201d This is not a matter of romanticizing mental illness but of exploring its dynamics and complexities, showing it to be not merely ailment and dysfunction but also a means for grappling with essential human problems, and for constituting different ways or even styles of being. Kafka raised neurosis to the level of a style. \u201cThere is a goal, but no way,\u201d he writes in his notebooks. \u201cWhat we call a way is hesitation.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Aaron Schuster is a philosopher and writer who lives in Amsterdam. <\/em>He is the author of The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis <\/em>and\u00a0How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka\u2019s New Science.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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