Using Freudian and Reichian psychoanalysis, Goodman assesses the philosophical and religious significance of Kafka's aphoristic statements and three novels.

Goodman used the book, published by Vanguard Press, to grapple with the religious implications of psychoanalysis and transition from a career writing on Jewish concerns to a period that would culminate in his collaboration on the founding work of the gestalt therapy movement.

Many reviewers and commentators felt that Goodman overanalyzed Kafka and overextended specific symbolism, with farfetched or reductive speculation and obscure personal referents.

[1] Goodman, the critic, holds that Kafka, as a "sick consciousness", used his literature as a prayer to lift from near-psychotic, self-punishing fear.

Goodman encourages Kafka to be read as a procession of self-release, to find life in the escape from misery and repression.

[4] Goodman contends that Kafka's most successful work combines "prayer" (expression of need and guilt) and "dream" (psychic conflict resolved through projection).

He began a self-analysis in 1946, the year before he published Kafka's Prayer, and came to view psychoanalysis as his religion, preferring its explanations for "animal nature, ego, and the world".

Kafka's Prayer was his synthesis of those experiments[12] and one of his early, major works in his psychoanalytic period that would culminate in his collaboration on Gestalt Therapy (1951).

[15] Rahv wrote that this was not the role of the literary critic, and Goodman's own idiosyncrasies exacerbated his interpretation of Kafka's,[16] already a complex figure whose writing did not follow a simple formula.

[7] In some cases both Goodman's personally charged reading and his compression of detail worked against him, as The New York Times found, obscuring his many cultural allusions across religion, philosophy, education, and psychology.

For example, how Goodman extended the "paranoiac dream" of The Trial into one of "repressed homosexuality", and turned "The Burrow" into a story of the mother's body and the threat of the father's penis.

[5] Minding these stretches of interpretation, the New York Herald Tribune reviewer wondered why Goodman omitted stories with clear psychoanalytic material such as "Description of a Struggle" and "Sorrows of a Family Man".

[24] Goodman concluded: In principle the dilemma of the shut-in will and ego is not natural and inevitable; it is not man's fate as certain new theologians of the absurd declare it.