SOURCE: Hughes, Kenneth. “A Psychoanalytic Approach to ‘The Judgement.’” In Approaches to Teaching Kafka's Short Fiction, edited by Richard T. Gray, pp. 84-93. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1995.

In the following essay, Hughes employs psychoanalytic theory in his reading of “The Judgement.”

By definition, the psychoanalytic approach to literature takes as its object some psyche involved at some point of the literary process. The most convenient objects to have offered themselves to date are the mind of the author, the mind of a text's narrator or of a character, and the mind of the reader. This sequence, which recapitulates the natural order of literary mediation (an idea occurs to the author's mind; the author “embodies” the idea in his narrator or in a character; the reader perceives the character's emotion and divines the author's intention as the motivating force behind it), also charts the three-stage...