SOURCE: “The Literature of Truth: Kafka's “Judgment,” in Kafka and the Literature of Truth, 1965, pp. 4–22.

In the following essay, Greenberg provides a psychoanalytic reading of “The Judgment” and deems the novella as “the true starting point of his work.”

Reality's dark dream! Coleridge

Kafka's imagination is a “psychoanalytic” one. Not because he studied Freud but because he grasped intuitively the split in the self and the struggle of the unacknowledged part against the public part. The single images unfolded in his dream narratives reveal the primitively literal at the heart of the abstract. Of all his stories “The Judgment” furnishes perhaps the clearest demonstration of his psychoanalytic vision—clearest because least complicated by other considerations. The true starting point of his work, it is primarily a psychological story; although even here, at the start, his utterly simple images seem to suggest an unlimited depth of significance and not...