Who’s your daddy? Episode 90 is all about daddy issues. Ellie and David investigate father-child relations and the sexual, emotional, and familial worlds they create. From summer zaddies and sexy dad bods to hero feminist dads, your hosts travel from psychoanalysis all the way to theology to explore the expansive world of father figures. Do we all, as Julia Kristeva says, harbor unconscious fantasies of seeing our fathers “beaten”? Could civilization itself, as Freud suggests, be rooted in an archaic act of patricide for which we still feel guilty without realizing it? Ellie and David tackle hard questions about how parenthood, gender, and vulnerability interact. They even wonder whether they might have “daddy issues” of their own!

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed

Katherine Angel, Daddy Issues
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, and "A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men"
Carl Jung, A Theory of Psychoanalysis
Julia Kristeva, A Father is Being Beaten
Jenn Mann, "Think You Have Daddy Issues?"
Father of the Bride (1991)
The Golden Bachelor (2023)

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