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Acknowledged one of the twentieth century's greatest writers, Franz Kafka elaborated the Angst of modern man. His best-known works, “Metamorphosis,” The Trial, and The Castle starkly depict the alienated individual's futile attempts to communicate with family and society. A related theme in Kafka's life and work is his obsessive brooding on life's adventitiousness and the ubiquitous threat of sudden, violent death, which provides the motif for many of his great novels and short stories. Kafka scholars agree that he regarded his father, Hermann, as the malevolent agent who wished to destroy him: his diaries, short stories, and famous unsent Brief often point this out. However, it is doubtful whether the father was the sole source of his anxiety and fear of violent death.
It is necessary to reassess Kafka's interaction with his mother Julie, going beyond those interpreters who see her as a sympathetic fellow victim of his father's tyranny (Hoffman, 1945, pp. 239-240) or the passive, obedient wife who ignored her son (Miller, 1984, pp. 257, 263; Pawel, 1984). Employing Rheingold's theory of the “catastrophic death complex” (1967), which posits traumatic exposure to maternal destructiveness of the fetus, neonate, and infant as the source of the fear of death, we may better comprehend the origins of Kafka's obsession with death and dying, presented in his novels, stories, and autobiographical writings.
Existing in a family in which the mother submitted to the father (Miller, 1984) and displaced frustrated aggression, anxieties, and insecurities onto the child by subtle emotional (though not physical) violence, Kafka unconsciously magnified introjected terrors. Unable to rely on his mother for support, he felt threatened and isolated, perceiving that unconsciously she did not care enough about his well-being to protect him against his father's outbursts and perhaps even desired his death as a means of escaping an untenable situation or as an object on which to vent repress