Kafka and the Narcissistic Parent

Maria Popova has a well-known piece in her blog The Marginalian about Kafka's (1883-1924) written depictions of his narcissistic father. Reading it recently, I was struck by the similarities between Kafka’s relationship to his father and Pete’s relationship to our father. Or mine. Or my mother's. The universality of a turn-of-the-last-century, extremely-highly-regarded writer's family experience resonating with Pete's, well, he'd appreciate that.

Pete and I never spoke much about his experience of our father. I know Pete loved him very much. Pete's friends recall him being terrified of my father's judgement. There were many years of Pete's adult life that he and our father didn't speak, but in the last year of Pete's life, some ten years after our father passed, Pete would mention emotionally, briefly and without much explanation that he missed him. Almost all of my memories of their interactions I witnessed included my father negatively criticizing Pete.

My father was both charming and a tyrant. The tyrannical aspect got more showtime than the charming, caring aspect, at least within the family home. The form of attack was a rant - a scream-fest of arbitrary origin, complete with the physicality of aggressive gestures, stomping, storming about, war-like shouting, and typically of long duration counted in hours. Although the instances were intermittant, they were frequent and the threat was continuous. The topic of the tantrum generally focused on a single person's error (as perceived by my father) or shortcoming, very often my brother's or my mother's, and the dissection of the crime would be summarized in roughly 10 minute increments, over and over again. It was very frighting to children.

Kafka knew what that was like, Popova writes:

His father’s continuous threats, Kafka argues, were in a way more painful than the actual harm they promised but rarely delivered. “One’s feelings became dulled by these continued threats,” he laments, but more than that, they conditioned the twisted sense that his father’s choice not to administer the promised punishment was some great act of generosity:

"One had, so it seemed to the child, remained alive through your mercy and bore one’s life henceforth as an undeserved gift from you.”

Pete had a special role in my father's world (and it was all my father's world at that time) - his whipping post. Rev. Sheri Heller, LCSW (“Sons of Narcissistic Fathers”, Medium, August 16, 2021), a specialist in counselling sons of narcissistic fathers, says that they serve a role as either the scapegoats/whipping posts or a favored golden child, an extension of the father's ego. With only two children in our family, you can guess my role; my brother and I were opposite ends of most spectra. (There is a finer-grained interpretation of those roles that had us swapping positions on a per-category basis; we will get to that at some point I imagine.)

Popova and Kafka write eloquently about the whipping post role:

Writing only five years after Freud introduced the concept of narcissism and half a century before Narcissistic Personality Disorder came to be classified in psychiatry’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Kafka offers a perfect and prescient diagnosis of his father:

"What was always incomprehensible to me was your total lack of feeling for the suffering and shame you could inflict on me with your words and judgments. It was as though you had no notion of your power.... But you struck out with your words without much ado, you weren’t sorry for anyone, either during or afterwards, one was utterly defenseless against you."

With my father, it wasn't that we were defenseless, it was that we learned that defense made things worse - increased the volatility or expanded the duration of the attack. We had no evidence that suppressing a defense helped, but it was worth a shot in light of the clear cause-effect otherwise.

Popova and Kafka continue:

Anyone who has shared life with a narcissist recognizes, of course, the chronic dispensation of such double standards and its many manifestations across all areas where rules are applied. In describing how Hermann [Kafka’s father] disciplined his children at the dinner table, Kafka illustrates this narcissistic tendency with the perfect allegorical anecdote:

“The main thing was that the bread should be cut straight. But it didn’t matter that you did it with a knife dripping with gravy. Care had to be taken that no scraps fell on the floor. In the end it was under your chair that there were most scraps.”

The most heartbreaking effect of these disorienting double standards is that the child grows utterly confused about right and wrong, for they seem to trade places constantly depending on who the doer is, and comes to internalize the notion that he or she is always at fault. Instead of holding up a mirror to validate the child’s experience of reality, such a parent instead traps the child in a fun-house maze of mirrors that never reflect an accurate or static image. Those who have lived through this know how easily it metastasizes into a deep-seated belief that one’s interpretation of reality, especially when reality is ambiguous or uncertain, is always the wrong one, the faulty one, the one fully invalidated by the mere existence of another’s interpretation.

Indeed, I suspect Pete learned that everything he did was wrong, and beyond that, that HE was wrong. As a being. The repeated undercutting of his personal character and everything that mattered to this boy told him that his existence was wrong on some level. I can say that with some authority because I know I contain the same belief deep within me.

In psychology, my father's parenting style would likely be labelled a "coercive style", that is, "use of domination, intimidation, and humiliation to promote obedience and success, with less concern for the child's emotional well-being." A child raised by a coercive parent is more vulnerable to anxiety, depression, behavioral and academic difficulties, and diminished success in the working world as an adult. (De Li et al, "Coercive Parenting and Adolescent Developmental Outcomes: The Moderating Effects of Empathetic Concern and Perception of Social Rejection", International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, May 2020.)

I would say my brother suffered from all of those effects. And, those effects are closely correlated with increased vulnerability to subtance use disorder.