Kafka and Freud: Totem and Taboo

Two things are often said of Kafka. One, that he is uninterpretable; and two, that he is understood best through the lens of Freud. The question is, can both things be true? According to Kafka, they can. He once said that everything he’s done can be interpreted psychoanalytically, except that this interpretation would in turn require further interpretation ad infinitum.

With that being said, a Freudian interpretation is precisely what I’ll attempt. This is usually done with reference to the Oedipal Complex (since his texts all seem to revolve around father-son conflicts), but I’m going to approach this from the perspective of Freud’s later text, Totem and Taboo.

Totem and Taboo

In this text, Freud attempts to explain modern neuroses through the prehistory of man. The topic and the title reminded me of something Walter Benjamin said of Kafka, that his interest in his ancestors was like ‘the totem poles of primitive peoples… the world of ancestors took him down to the animals’. This is, of course, a reference to his frequent use of anthropomorphic animals. This corresponds with one of Freud’s arguments in Totem and Taboo, that just as ‘the child displaces a part of its feelings for the father upon some animal’, so too do primitive religions idolise an ancestor in the form of a totemic animal: