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In a study that might serve as a guide in psychography the author discusses his thesis that Franz Kafka was a normal if not a supranormal man. His theory is supported by several literary critics and by the personal observations of Kafka made by Jan Frank, M.D., a psychoanalyst. His study was prompted by the
widely accepted assertions that the works of Kafka were largely the products of a diseased mind. Three critics are cited who speak of Kafka as being sickly, schizophrenic, paranoiac, an obsessional neurotic, and an anal type 'who suffered from a combination of castration and Oedipal complexes'. Kafka, to those who knew him, was shy and quiet and one of the most amusing of men. A summa cum laude barrister, he was a section chief in an excellent national health organization where he worked smoothly with other employes.
The author accounts for the portrayal of Kafka as sickly by suggesting that his works are ambiguous enough to be used as a kind of Rorschach projection and that thus the critics themselves are the sickly ones and do not know the difference between regression in the service of the ego and an ego that is regressing.