Franz Kafka’s Odradek, that strange, inexplicable figure from The Cares of a Family Man, offers a compelling way to think about something many of us sense but struggle to name: the persistence of something within a family line, something that endures without clear reason, renewing itself in each generation. Kafka’s creation, a small, lifeless yet animate object that resists definition, has often been read as a figure of the uncanny. Freud’s essay The Uncanny provides a way of thinking about this sense of unease, something at once familiar and alien, something we cannot quite rid ourselves of. When applied to the family, Odradek becomes a way of thinking about transgenerational transmission, those unconscious inheritances that refuse to disappear.
Odradek: A Thing Without Origin
Odradek is described as a tangle of thread, a spool-like object with no clear function. It speaks, yet it has no apparent life. It laughs in response to questions, suggesting a knowingness that remains inaccessible. Kafka’s narrator, a family man, is disturbed by its continued presence, yet Odradek does not seem to threaten him in any direct way. It simply is, persisting on the margins of his home, refusing to be discarded or understood. He wonders if it will outlive him, a thought that unsettles him deeply.
This persistence, its resistance to explanation, echoes what many experience in relation to family history. There are elements within a family that do not dissolve with time. They are not necessarily memories or conscious narratives, but something more elusive: a recurring pattern, an unspoken tension, a silence that shapes the atmosphere. Something that should not exist anymore yet continues. Like Odradek, it does not declare itself a problem, yet its endurance is troubling.
The Uncanny Return of the Past
Freud describes the uncanny as the return of something repressed. What was once familiar but has been forced into the unconscious, often in a distorted or fragmented form, finds its way back. Within families, this return is rarely straightforward. A traumatic event may not be spoken of, yet it finds expression in later generations through symptoms, repetitions, or unconscious identifications. What is not processed by one generation may persist in another, not as a memory, but as something felt, something acted out.
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s work on transgenerational transmission expands on this idea. They describe how unspoken traumas, secrets, losses, and shame can be passed down not through direct communication but through an unconscious crypt. In this psychic structure, something remains buried yet active. The descendants may experience an unease, a compulsion, or a gap in their sense of self without knowing its source. They inherit something they cannot name.
Odradek captures this strange presence. It is a thing without clear history, yet it remains. It is not fully alive, but not entirely absent. It carries a trace of something unresolved outside of direct experience yet impossible to erase.
The Family as a Structure That Remembers
Families are not only made up of individuals. They are structures that persist beyond the lives of their members. A surname, a lineage, a place of origin hold a continuity that exceeds personal identity. But this continuity is not always smooth. It can carry repetitions that no one consciously chooses: a tendency toward withdrawal, a pattern of broken attachments, an anxiety that seems to have no clear source. These repetitions often emerge when history has not been fully spoken.
The psychoanalyst Francoise Davoine, drawing from her work with war survivors and their descendants, describes how traumatic histories live on in unexpected ways. A child may experience overwhelming anxiety at a certain age, only for it to be later revealed that this was the age at which a grandparent experienced a catastrophe. What was never discussed remains active, appearing as an inexplicable disturbance in a later generation.
Odradek reminds us that the past is never fully past. It survives in forms we do not always recognise. It may appear in a joke, a turn of phrase, or an inexplicable habit. It may be felt as a vague dread or as a compulsion to repeat what one does not understand. Its presence is not always ominous, but it resists disappearance.
Breaking the Cycle, or Learning to Listen
If something persists in a family, does that mean it must always continue? Psychoanalysis suggests that what returns does so because it has not been given a place. The uncanny is what has been denied but seeks recognition. In families, what is left unspoken does not disappear, it seeks another way to be known. This is not necessarily about uncovering a hidden story, though sometimes that is part of it. It is about making room for what has not yet been given space.
Odradek unsettles the father in Kafka’s story because it does not belong in the order of his home, yet it cannot be removed. This is how certain aspects of family history function. They do not fit into the official story, yet they remain. They are not fully acknowledged, yet they shape what follows. The question is why they persist and how we relate to them.
To recognise an inheritance does not mean to be bound by it. But to deny it often means to repeat it without knowing. At its best, psychoanalysis offers a space to hear what has been silenced. Where what seems nonsensical, like Odradek’s laughter, may reveal its logic. What persists may finally find its place, not as an unwanted ghost, but as something that can be thought about, spoken of, and transformed.
The question remains: what is it that persists in your own family, and what might it be trying to say?