The Kafkaesque Group

Introduction

Kafka made profound critical reflections about the nature of power in social systems and in family relationships. The adjective Kafkaesque was enrolled in the social imagination and became synonymous with power and omnipotent control by obscure groups, sometimes the individual’s own family, who refuse to recognize or protect individuals who oppose their overwhelming supervision, triggering inner experiences of helplessness, intense anxiety and fear of being persecuted and annihilated. With dreamlike writing, close to the literary stream of consciousness style, Kafka’s writing allows us to listen to the voice of the unconscious while maintaining a particular clarity. Therefore it’s possible for the reader to follow internal changes like a nightmare, toward the void, the grotesque and the absurd linked to the suffering process. We consider that Kafka’s work opens a privileged way to understand how the abuse of power in certain types of group, that we have called Kafkaesque Groups, articulates with the destruction of the sense of humanity, of subjectivity and relationships, leading the individual to collapse into a dimension of unbearable pain, because he feels it’s impossible to connect with others (“the human group”).

Kafkaesque Groups

In Kafka’s literary work we identify a type of pseudo-group, where individuals with pathological narcissism are instrumentally associated by bureaucratic power and are without libidinal connection (Freud, 1921). This bureaucratic power (Absolute Law / Dogma) is invested with several elements of the group through the belief that this is the only way for the group to be recognized and for any benefits to be gained. Ultimately this also increases the concentration of bureaucratic power and decreases the autonomy, subjectivity and intersubjectivity of individuals.

This increase of power seems to be developed by:

Similarly, in family group relations we have applied the concept of “black pedagogy” (Miller, 1980) because of the constellation of the characteristics:

Kafka in Group Analysis?

To reverse the experience of contact with a Kafkaesque group could group analysis help? According to Zimerman (2008), Group Psychotherapy and Group Analysis feature very interesting therapeutic possibilities in relation to the problems of narcissism. The group analytic matrix, a complex unconscious network of interactions between individuals, the shared ground of the group, in which every event that takes place within the group’s boundary is meaningful as a communication, promotes the building of identifications, through recognizing and experiencing human contact with an important therapeutic and creative power. The group also works as a “continent” and can help patients regress, particularly those with a “pathology of emptiness”, who often do not support the anxieties of individual psychoanalysis. The group, as well as promoting the capacity to recognize others and their inner world, may also offer an experience of belonging to a group recognized as one-self (the group as a whole) with an inner world.

Bion (1979) in “Making the best of a Bad Job” considered that emotional learning is possible despite cruel and painful experiences; and to Cortesão (2008) a basic fault can become a space for creative illusion, and the negative, hatred and hostility does not only aim at the destruction of the object but also the structure of the object as not-self.

The dynamics of the Kafkaesque group

We elaborate four major themes:

Kafka in “The Hunger Artist” (1922) defends the virtues of anorexia and maintains a disturbed relationship with others to get the food that he truly needs: recognition and emotional nourishment. This expresses how the most primitive of basic human needs, dependence on love / food, leads when severely dissatisfied to destructive power.

David Zimerman (1995) states that when the bond of recognition (R), feels recognized by others, while preserving individuality and identity, clinical manifestations such as self-absorption, narcissistic pathology and false-selves are seriously disrupted. This can promote a strong fear of being forgotten, abandoned and neglected and, in order to handle the anxiety of existential annihilation, can develop an obsessive need for compensatory provisions around being desired and recognized (Zimerman, 2008).

The search for the “right food”, hides a huge “hungry recognition”, that can appear through a transfer of negative acknowledgment (-R) (notable absences) as well as a struggle against dependence.

When communication, the place of intersubjectivity, is interdicted, narcissistic defences like non-elaborative and hostile silence, stay out of interactions and confused dialogues and denial can emerge. This can nurture a fragmented or shattered internal relational matrix, the root of the inability to be attached or linked to something or someone.

Therefore it is important to pay attention to pre-verbal language and to give meaning to expressions of the body, appointed and empathically perceived at the appropriate time. This may bridge the gap and provide internal feelings of sharing, trust and closeness with others, and develop more elaborate channels of communication.

We interpret the paradox of guilt as an absurd and paradoxical psychological state, when the individual is trapped between preserving the object, identified with the self and experienced as essential, and the need to destroy it because it’s experienced as totally evil. The internalized object of love, that coincides with the internalized object of hatred triggers persecutory guilt, so it’s impossible to make reparation (Klein, 1937) as we can observe in works such as “The Castle” and “The Process”.

Azevedo e Silva (2012) conceptualizes this phenomenon as “murder of the psychoanalytic object, essential and imperishable”, a very primitive internalization of the object, existent in strongly obsessive compulsive structures, that reflect the oscillation between passionate and violent love and hate, because the object is at the same time dangerous and essential. This deep ambivalence leaves only one exit: kill oneself, because it’s the only way to kill the inner object (identified with the self) and preserve it (by not actually killing the real object).

This paradoxical state of mind could benefit from detoxifying emotions, which can be promoted by the pattern and the matrix in group analysis. This detoxifying is necessary to preserve the love and creativity in relationships and create a good ideal object, essential to developing hope and the ability to love. It is very important to be careful with interpretations that emphasize guilt, which can function as interpretations focused on self-destruction. It’s also important to use a first approach that emphasizes care and affection rather than immediate responsabilization.

The feeling of shame contains an important element of self-awareness (looking at oneself) and also an element of otherness (the look of others). Therefore it is possible to find the intersubjective matrix - self and other (the intersubjectivity field) in the sense that someone looks at and finds me, and also that I’m aware - associated with mirroring aspects. The analysis of shame is important in narcissistic disorders because this emotion can inhibit relations due to the fear of reliving the experience of being looked upon with contempt, linked to intense narcissistic devaluation (in Kafka’s Metamorphosis the “contemptible insect”). In his paper, Malignant Mirroring (1983), Zinkin makes a very interesting reflection on the concept of mirroring in the group analytic process. The mirroring function is recognized as one of the specific factors of group therapy, but he warns that a vertex that just highlights the beneficial effects of mirroring is not complete. Phenomena such as strangeness, or repulsion - malignant mirroring - can appear, leaving the self with a disapproving look at himself. In this sense, the effects of mirroring, with narcissistic patients in a group, must also be accompanied by a special attention to the appearance of the possible dynamics of shame, to malignant mirroring, at the service of resistance and so impeding change.

Conclusion

The recognition of individuality and at the same time the experience of belonging and sharing are fundamental in the relationship between the individual and the group. Pathological narcissism does not only occur between individuals but also between groups (collective narcissism - Golec de Zavala & Cichocka, 2009) and individuals and their groups of belonging: family, community, etc.

Finally, we suggest it would be of value to study, not only the individual conditions for both healthy and pathological narcissism but also the same for groups.

Maybe Kafka, in his own way, perceived how pathological narcissism in groups (totalitarianism) can damage not only the individuals but also the groups by uncovering “internalized objects as marauders and prohibitionist of subjectivity and desire” (Azevedo e Silva, 2012).