Episode 90 - Daddy Issues
Transcript
Ellie: 0:14
Hello, and welcome to Overthink.
David: 0:16
The podcast where two philosophers who have zero psychological baggage of their own talk about issues that maybe other people have.
Ellie: 0:24
I'm Ellie Anderson.
David: 0:25
I'm David Peña Guzman.
Ellie: 0:27
David, I googled daddy issues, and one of the first things that came up was this article from InStyle.com called Think You Have Daddy Issues? Here are eight telltale signs.
David: 0:39
Think I think the answer in my case is yes, but I want to know what the telltale signs are.
Ellie: 0:43
You don't need to, you don't need to go through the eight signs to know?
David: 0:48
Yeah. Yeah. Would be just like think you have daddy issues? Yes.
Ellie: 0:52
Yeah. I mean, me too. Okay. But here are a few of them. So, well, actually, let's, let's take a look at it together.
David: 1:00
Okay. I'm opening the link that you just sent me. I think you have daddy issues. Here are eight telltale signs. Being attracted to older men is just scratching the surface. That's the subtitle.
Ellie: 1:12
Dear Dr. Jen, I have never had a great relationship with my dad. He wasn't abusive, but was pretty absent and emotionally unavailable growing up. I've also never had a longterm relationship and my friends have pointed out that my crappy choice in men perhaps stems from my relationship or lack thereof with my dad. Do I have daddy issues? And what does that mean? I want to better understand why my relationship with my dad is impacting my dating life so I can choose better partners and break out of this cycle. Signed, daddy issues. So I propose, David, that we don't read Dr. Jen's full response because it is long, but maybe we can go through a few of the eight telltale signs that she identifies as like signaling whether or not this person who signed off daddy issues. Indeed has daddy issues.
David: 1:57
Yeah. And for our listeners, you should know that this particular article is specific to father daughter relationships. So it says father daughter relationships, what to know, followed by the eight signs to watch out for.
Ellie: 2:10
Which I do think is a pretty common way of thinking about daddy issues. I think when people talk about daddy issues, they're usually talking about daughters who have problems with their dating life. We will also talk about sons, daddy issues a little bit later in the episode. But yes.
David: 2:23
Yeah. Although I, you know, I live and breathe the gay community. So we talk about daddy issues a lot. I think it really is anybody who is sexually attracted to men and has issues with men. Then like daddy issues kind of applies to them.
Ellie: 2:36
So about this list, which of the eight things are standing out to you?
David: 2:40
Okay. So I'm just going to read them very quickly and then we can, cause I haven't seen this article. So number one, fathers are their children's mirrors. Two, kids are egocentric. Three, kids naturally protect their parent. Four, we form a fantasy bond. Five, we're always trying to heal. Okay, these are like, just like factors. They're not even like signs.
Ellie: 3:02
It's like psychoanalysis 101. Yeah, you're right. They're not even signs.
David: 3:07
Oh, no, no, no. The signs are below. There's first a list of six things to consider. And then the eight signs come after that. So that's where we need to look. So, eight signs you have daddy issues. Number one, you have anxious attachment. You're afraid of being vulnerable. Three, you use sex to feel loved. Four, you have trust issues. Five, you pick unhealthy partners. Six, you have trouble setting boundaries. Seven, you put your partner on a pedestal. And eight, you date people who are much older than you. So Ellie, do you think I have daddy issues?
Ellie: 3:49
You do date people who are a bit older than you. I don't think you put your partner on a pedestal. You definitely do not pick unhealthy partners. I love Rabih. Hello. Can I say that? Can I say his name? You, okay. Do you use sex to feel loved? I cannot answer that.
David: 4:08
I cannot answer that either!
Ellie: 4:11
No, I actually, I really don't think you have daddy issues. I don't think you have anxious attachments. I don't think you're afraid of being vulnerable. I mean, you have a lot of problems, David, but these aren't them.
David: 4:19
So you're right, no, anxious attachment is not one of them. I feel okay being vulnerable. But in many ways, I am the poster child for having daddy issues. Because I'm literally a bastard, like I, I don't, I don't have a father, if you look at my legal birth certificate, it just has my mother's name. But under the father section, it's just a bunch of em dashes, just like a gaping absence of a parental father figure.
Ellie: 4:48
Your mother knows who your father was, but did not have a relationship with him in a sustained fashion.
David: 4:54
That's what she says.
Ellie: 4:56
What do you mean? I mean, valid.
David: 5:01
Yeah, no, she knows who he was and I know who he was, but he was never a part of my life. Yeah. Growing up, I've never met him. I just know his name and I saw a picture of him once. And so,
Ellie: 5:11
Is he hot?
David: 5:12
I don't think so.
Ellie: 5:13
We're talking about daddy issues.
David: 5:16
So I saw a picture of him when he was already older and he died like eight years ago or so. And so my mom showed me a picture of who he was as an. Like older person now, but she says that when he was young, he was very hot. He was a redhead. And so if you look at my beard in the sun, I have a lot of red hair. So I'm like, because he is of Irish descent. So I'm mexican Irish in many ways. Okay. In many ways, like in the biological sense, like inheritance.
Ellie: 5:44
Classic David, just add a few extra words for no reason.
David: 5:47
To deepen the meaning and create the illusion of subtlety and nuance. And so you have here a kid born to a mother who was quite young and It's very expressive of emotion when I was young. So I was like a mama's boy. We'll talk about that later.
Ellie: 6:04
Yeah, no, I think that's where, you have a little bit of a little prince mentality, if I'm being honest.
David: 6:10
Oh, yes, definitely. Little prince mentality. No father figure in the house, loving mother cultivates a gay son. It's just like, it's just the recipe for daddy issues.
Ellie: 6:22
Or mommy issues. No offense to your wonderful mother, but yeah. So, okay. I think, I mean, one thing that strikes me about all of these things on the list is that they're really generic, right? You have anxious attachment. You don't have to necessarily have a particular set of problems with one parent in order to have anxious attachment. Yeah, if anything, like traditional attachment theory would focus on the primary caregiver who most often is the mother, but whatever. We'll move past that.
David: 6:51
The vulnerability I do think is relevant because the father figure is often in patriarchal cultures, the one that is laying down the law and getting in the way of the expression of vulnerability. So if you're afraid of being vulnerable, I do think that can be traced to a large extent to father dynamics.
Ellie: 7:08
Okay, well, let's maybe take a quick look more closely at that one. So this says deep connected relationships require vulnerability. Thank you, InStyle Magazine. I needed to hear that. If you have been hurt, neglected or abandoned by your father, your instinct is going to be to protect yourself from being hurt by people you love. Therefore, you are likely to be defended, untrusting. Defended like defensive. Okay. I don't know. Untrusting and closed off while it's important to screen partners over time to determine that they are trustworthy. Once a partner has passed the time test, vulnerability is an important part of the relationship. I'm just going to say, I think like maybe a fear of being vulnerable is part of daddy issues, but I also feel like it's paradigmatically characteristic of daddy issues. that they tend to involve an overexposure, actually, in some cases, too much vulnerability, too much willingness to identify oneself with the male partner.
David: 8:05
I see, but I wonder if this is a perspective that comes from you being a woman, and from me being a man, because when I think about father son relationships, There, there is the expectation that the father will sculpt the son into a man to be, and I think there is more leeway for young daughters to express vulnerability in relation to their father rather than sons. And so maybe there is a gender dynamic there.
Ellie: 8:32
Yeah. And what I'm specifically talking about is an overinvestment of one's emotional energies and identity into a relationship with a man, which I think is definitely gendered.
David: 8:42
I see. I love that we are both actively avoiding the you use sex to feel loved because we don't want to talk about that.
Ellie: 8:51
I don't know. There's a lot there. Your self esteem is dependent on your partner desiring you sexually. On the flip side, you completely shut down sexually. So I do think that's interesting, this sense that you want to feel desired, but might have trouble desiring like a male partner. I think this is in the context of being written for women who date men.
David: 9:13
And it says you don't want to have to depend on another person to meet your sexual needs, so you just don't have them. Wait, so you just don't have sexual needs? And so the idea here is that you think that you're only being loved when you have sex because you don't feel. comfortable exploring the full gamut of your emotional needs? Or is it just about sexual needs? I'm not really sure.
Ellie: 9:36
It's about sexual needs. It's a claim that you tamp down your own sexual needs and in order to like exclusively make space for the other person's sexual needs. And that makes you feel loved to be desired by them.
David: 9:50
Yeah. And so that culminates according to this very scientific diagnostic tool that we have here from InStyle magazine in an, overly sexual comportment, according to the authors, because the opening sentence here for this sign is, you need to have sex and a lot of it to validate your desirability. So daddy issues just means that you sex as a way of getting people's attention to you.
Ellie: 10:18
Today, we're talking about daddy issues.
David: 10:21
How should we understand our father figures?
Ellie: 10:24
How does the father, as it appears in Christian theology, shape our collective imaginary?
David: 10:29
And is civilization itself, as Freud might say, one big coping our most primal issues?
Ellie: 10:42
The writer Catherine Angel has a book from a few years ago called Daddy Issues, which points out that the Me Too movement has overlooked a reckoning with how father figures contribute to patriarchal systems.
David: 10:54
Are we calling this a book? It's really really short. I think it's like 70 pages, no? So I would call it an essay. In fact, I feel very strongly about policing this boundary because when I was reading the e-version after you sent it to me, I was convinced for like a day and a half that I didn't have the full version and I didn't know and I was freaking out and it turns out that I did.
Ellie: 11:17
Well, Verso did publish it as a book and in fact, they often do these short essay style books. And I liked this one because it was short and I'm traveling, so it was super convenient to just bring around with me.
David: 11:28
Okay, fine, fine. But you had us both read this book for this episode and I was at first confused because I thought maybe that I had misunderstood you when it was a book and then, okay, fine, it was, it's published as a book with a binding. But the point here is that...
Ellie: 11:41
I think it has a binding, so I guess I will deign to call it a book. Call it an extended essay, if you will.
David: 11:49
Yeah, it's like an extended response.
Ellie: 11:51
Like Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism.
David: 11:53
Yeah. So, but the starting point for the actual analysis in this essay/book is that the Me Too movement supposedly called upon us to question all the men in our lives and to critique all forms of patriarchal power. But weirdly enough, this didn't really extend to fathers, at least in their role as fathers.
Ellie: 12:13
Yeah, if anything, the Me Too movement held up sentimental dads defending their daughters rights as the ideal of manhood, of non toxic masculinity. And I actually saw a recent example of this in the media where Danny Masterson, who was one of the actors in that 70s show, was sentenced for rape.
David: 12:32
For raping two women.
Ellie: 12:33
And Ashton Kutcher, among others, wrote a character defense of him. So he wasn't denying the accusations or anything of that sort, but he was providing a character letter in terms of the sentencing. And he began the letter by saying, my name is Ashton Kutcher. I am an actor, a business owner, a husband, and most importantly, a father. As though his status as father was the most relevant aspect of his identity when he was thinking about his friend's safety around women. Or his friend being not a threat to society, safety around women sounds weird.
David: 13:08
Yeah, despite two very clear... cases of rape. But also Ashton Kutcher, he also got involved with some political organizing around combating child pornography. So he has really dug his heels into this attempt to derive an identity as a protector of children. That goes beyond just this case.
Ellie: 13:30
Yeah. And Catherine Angel notes in her book that new fathers are often thrust into the position of feminist hero protecting their daughters from the evils of the patriarchal world that they now finally recognize and finally they're disavowing a toxic masculinity.
David: 13:47
Which I mean weirdly bleeds into them defending their daughter on the basis of their sexual purity, which is not exactly a feminist position, but it's like a throwback to the old days when daughters were property.
Ellie: 13:59
And don't get me wrong, we love a feminist dad, but certainly Angel wants to question the free pass that many fathers get in the public eye. She addresses the well known phenomenon of fathers being praised for doing even the slightest amount of childcare, writing that, here's a quote from her, a hands on mother is a mother. The statement is a tautology, while a hands on father is a saint.
David: 14:25
Yeah, and in thinking about the glorification of fathers, I also think about the way in which we sexualize fathers in ways that we don't sexualize mothers as mothers. So I'm thinking here about our recent obsession with things like zaddies and dad bods. You know, we love a dad bod, but we don't equally eroticize a mom bod.
Ellie: 14:43
Or we eroticize mother's bodies in kinky. Ways as almost a fetish. We'll talk about that a little bit in our next episode. Heads up. It's gonna be mommy issues. But The fetishization say of like a nursing mother is a porn category. It's not like...
David: 15:04
Dad bod is not a porn category. But it should be!
Ellie: 15:08
Nor is it a fetishization of a specifically, like really overly sexualized aspect of a physical piece of parenting, right? Like there's just no comparison. It's not a fetish to like zaddies. It's something people talk about in everyday discourse.
David: 15:24
In fact, it's trendy, right? It's a wave of interest where you show how cool you are that you're like dating somebody with a dad bod in the summer, it's like dad bod summer.
Ellie: 15:36
Yeah. And of course dad having a dad bod and being a zaddy or maybe two kind of separate things, separate but overlapping categories. Do you have a favorite zaddy, David?
David: 15:46
Yeah, my favorite zaddy is Anderson Cooper.
Ellie: 15:48
Is he a dad?
David: 15:50
He's probably like a granddad by now.
Ellie: 15:54
No, wait, David.
David: 15:56
Anderson Cooper. Oh, okay. He has two children, ages three and 15 months.
Ellie: 16:06
See, I told you these kids are young. He's not a granddad. He has very small children.
David: 16:12
Okay, you're right about that. But also his status as zaddy doesn't necessarily hinge on whether or not he's a father or a grandfather, right? It's more about him being like a hot older man that gives off the impression of dad vibes. That's a zaddy.
Ellie: 16:29
Yeah. And I've been watching the new Bachelor spinoff, The Golden Bachelor, which is about an older man finding love. The Bachelor decided to have like, yeah, this new spinoff that's about finding love in your old age. And when he was first elected, he was called a grandzaddy. But I think this speaks to the fact that zaddies only appear as such from the outside. No one is calling their own father a zaddy.
David: 16:51
Oh no, that would be creepy.
Ellie: 16:53
It would be super creepy. And on the one hand. This is obvious because zaddy means you're a hot dad, and no one wants to say that their own dad is hot. But I also think there's another point here, which is that glorifying dads, whether by considering them hot or as saints, whatever it might be, makes sense from the outside. Often, the situation, however, is a lot more complicated within the family system, because even great dads can cause Daddy issues. So what are the experiences of the children of these fathers?
David: 17:24
Well, and Daddy issues, as we mentioned earlier with the highly scientific InStyle article, are usually associated with people, typically women who either have absent fathers or fathers who are present but abusive, unavailable, or otherwise troublesome in some way.
Ellie: 17:41
And in that sense, don't we all at least have some daddy issues? One thing I want to talk about is how fathers can regulate the emotional life of the nuclear family without appearing to do so. Because I think we often associate mothers with emotion and fathers with rationality. But I think it's fair to say that many family systems actually revolve around meeting the father's emotional demands and regulating his emotional needs. It's as though the father gets to appear as the arbiter of truth and rationality, his word being law. But actually the father's emotions, whether anger as is most stereotypical, but also ones having to do with vulnerability are often the center of gravity in the family. So maybe the father isn't just the head of the household, but also, the heart of the household, but I think the father's feelings often really dominate family life.
David: 18:35
I think that's a really good point because I was struck in the Catherine Angel book by this one Virginia Woolf piece that she quotes that reminds me of what you're talking about here. Yeah. Woolf writes in a 1939 piece called Memoir, this is a quote from
Virginia Woolf: 18:50
"how the family system tortures and exacerbates. I feel that if father could have been induced to say, I am jealous, not you are selfish, the whole family system would have been cleared and brightened." And the context to this quote is that Woolf's father treated his stepdaughter, Stella, as a kind of substitute wife after his wife died and was very jealous when Stella started having her own life and wanted to get married because she could no longer devote her time to meeting his emotional needs. And so he would accuse her of being selfish and so on and so forth, when in fact it was that he was himself jealous. So the idea here is that the father is disavowing his own emotional needs in the form of jealousy and projecting selfishness onto the daughter, but can't say it. So everybody has to tiptoe around him.
Ellie: 19:45
Well, he says you are selfish. So he says something. He doesn't say I am jealous. And I think the structure of those two statements, I am jealous versus you are selfish is really importantly different. My parents for one were influenced by going to therapy. And always insisting on making I statements, not that they always did a great job adhering to this. Sorry, mom and dad. In part, because speaking about your experience shows that you recognize that you don't have a direct line to the truth, but in saying you are selfish, the father is not only locating the source of his feelings outside himself in a supposed character trait of the other. But it's also presenting his feelings, not as feelings, but as fact. And I think that's actually even more important than the projection onto the other person, is the presentation of the feelings as fact. You are this way. This is core to you. This is just the fact of the matter. And I think that speaks to the kind of power that fathers typically have in our society. And mothers usually have less authority to speak about the truth of who people are. Their role is more the soother than it is the person who tells you the truth of who you are.
David: 20:52
Yeah, the father is definitely the lawgiver. And in psychoanalysis, especially in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the father really appears as, let's say, the means by which the child enters into the symbolic realm, which is the domain of language, the domain of the law, and the domain of norms, and what we could just call objectivity in one word.
Ellie: 21:15
The father traditionally represents the law within the family. He is the one who prohibits and Lacan plays on the French phrase here, nom du père, which means the name of the father. But when you say it out loud, when it's spoken, it also sounds like the no of the father, le non du père. So that the prohibition of the father. And the father's status as lawmaker and prohibitor can be traumatizing. And we'll come back to this when we talk a little bit more about the Oedipus complex in the case of Freud.
David: 21:49
Yeah. For now, let's focus on a different element of the legacy of psychoanalysis for a theory of daddy issues. And that is the disavowed sexual desire between fathers and daughters. And this can seem very woo woo and certainly taboo, but Catherine Angel points out that we often think about desire for women as always triangulated through the father figure. Yeah. She mentions actually that a lot of Fairy tales include incestuous father figures, but when they were codified and especially translated into English since the 19th century, these father figures started getting left out. For instance, versions of the Cinderella myth include an incestuous father just as frequently as an evil stepmother. But over time, we've just maintained the evil stepmother figure as the the nemesis or the villain, and the evil incestuous father has completely disappeared from the narrative.
Ellie: 22:43
Yeah, and more recently, romantic comedy plots often involve, obviously not incest, but some sort of weird relationship between fathers and daughters. Angel notes that in Hollywood, a father's sexual jealousy is always taken for granted. This is the whole plot of the movie Meet the Parents, and in an odd way is also that of Father of the Bride. Angel focuses on a speech that Steve Martin gives in the 90s version of Father of the Bride. There's a few different versions of the film.
David: 23:11
I really liked the Andy Garcia one recently, but that's a different story. There's a speech that Steve Martin gives that I want to play a clip of for our listeners.
Ellie: 24:34
Angel points out that the father acts like a jilted lover throughout the film while acting comically bad toward the fiancé, rolling his eyes when the daughter and the new man kiss. And I think what we see in this speech is that a father's love is revealed in his jealousy, in his anxiety about the daughter individuating from him, where that individuating happens through her relationships with other men.
David: 25:00
There's also an interesting dynamic here of Identification with and disavowal of masculinity, because the father says that what mostly worries him about his daughter is her meeting guys that only want "one thing" from her, especially because he knows what that thing is and why they want it because he was that guy. And so built into the narrative is this sense of moral transformation and like a story of moral growth on the part of the father. Like I was one of those ravenous men, but as a father, now my job is to protect this precious object of mine from the pack. So he identifies, but then like he puts himself above.
Ellie: 25:43
Yeah. Yeah. But also part of that narrative is if you weren't my daughter. I would find you attractive, right? Or at least if you weren't my daughter and I was younger, I would be one of the guys who wanted one thing from you, which is a very weird thing to say.
David: 26:00
Yeah, well, and I think maybe we should talk about also daughter issues in this regard because there is a weird attachment that happens in this case where the father has to come to learn to relate to his daughter. As a woman and right, he seems to be regretting that fact because he doesn't know how to make that transition. And in fact, he seems to cast her transition into womanhood as the condition for his decline. Once you become a woman independent, as you say, individuated from me, I become this guy with crumbles of rice on the couch. And so her ascent is his descent. And it also puts him in the position of a martyr. Yeah. Who sacrificed his life for her capacity to live an autonomous life.
Ellie: 26:48
Yeah. Yeah. And that is his form of distancing from his earlier virile self.
Angel notes or asks: 26:55
is the father's horror at his daughter's sexuality, perhaps a disavowed horror at his own susceptibility to it. And one of the things she points out interestingly about this speech is that he writes his wife out of the fairy tale. You don't see the mother anywhere here. And of course, it's a speech about his relation to his daughter, but it does seem noteworthy that there's no trace of her presence here.
David: 27:23
And that her presence culminates in, well, it not culminates, but begins with him being a hero who then gets displaced, right? So he says, when my daughter was young, she said I was her hero, as if he's the only person in the daughter's life, again, erasing the figure of the mother. And who knows, maybe the mother is not in the picture in this particular case. I'm not familiar with the details of the movie, but it's interesting that his hero status then translates into a fallen victim status and there is no female presence but the daughter.
Ellie: 27:57
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David: 28:24
Time for the Oedipus Complex, because no Daddy Issues episode would be complete without it.
Ellie: 28:30
This is right. Okay, so this influential theory, as you may know, comes from Freud. We know you've heard about it. And here's a quick rundown of it as we get into our discussion. Freud first used the term in a September 1897 letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess. In this letter, he speculated that a key component of neuroses was a death wish that boys have toward their fathers and girls toward their mothers. Then a month later in October, Freud wrote another letter to Fliess where he self-owned. He wrote, I have founded my own case to the phenomenon of being in love with my mother and jealous of my father. And I now consider it a universal event in early childhood. Real quick move there from being like. I was in love with my mother and wanted to kill my father to being like, this is a universal event. So he came to see being in love with one's mother and jealous of one's father as ubiquitous.
David: 29:22
Yeah. For boys at least. Naturally. His main focus. We all know the universal only applies to the boys.
Ellie: 29:29
So Freud associated the Oedipus complex as well with the genital stage of development. First is the oral stage, then the anal stage, and then genital for him. And the genital stage of development is the one in which sexuality and autoerotic pleasure come to the fore. It happens around the ages of three to five.
David: 29:46
Yeah. And here the idea is specifically that the boy wants to kill his father so that he can have a, let's say, sexual relationship with his mother. And the term Oedipus complex, of course, comes from the ancient Greek myth of Oedipus, the king of Thebes, who was doomed to fulfill a prophecy to kill his father and marry his mother.
Ellie: 30:06
Yeah. And he finally names this theory as such in 1910. So I think I said he first used the term in September 1897. I actually can't remember if the term Oedipus complex comes up there. It's just the first instance of the theory, but he really names this theory as such in 1910 where he says that the boy begins to desire his mother and to hate his father as a rival. For Freud though, the Oedipus complex isn't just some permanent feature of our consciousness. It's something that we overcome and the little boy overcomes it by identifying with the father that is seeing himself in the rival and thus neutralizing the rival as a threat.
David: 30:46
So the little boy overcomes his daddy issues by seeing himself in dad.
Ellie: 30:52
Exactly. We mentioned that this is obviously focused on boy children. So then Carl Jung comes along and introduces the Electra Complex, which is like the Oedipus Complex, but for the ladies. Freud, however, never accepted this term. Jung didn't even really end up making much of it. I kind of like it though. I feel like we end up using the term Oedipus Complex for both boys and girls. I always joke that I get out of the dynamics of the Oedipus Complex because my dad is gay, although maybe that explains like how many times in my life I've had crushes on gay men, present company excluded.
David: 31:30
Oh my God, rude. By that standard, I'm also exempt from the Oedipus complex because my father was not even there to begin with.
Ellie: 31:39
So he was never a rival.
David: 31:40
And it's like, if I kill my mother, I'm an orphan here. Like I need to protect my mother. I mean, I'm actually, I'm actually the guy from the movie, like trying to protect my mother from men. So they don't take her away from me.
Ellie: 31:51
Conservatives are going to say, that's why you ended up gay, David.
David: 31:54
Oh my gosh. I mean, I basically say that. And so some people see the Oedipus complex as the essence really of Freudian psychoanalysis because it is where a lot of other Freudian concepts converge. So the concept of the sexuality of children, the concept of castration, all of them converge in this phenomenon. But it's also because it explains a lot of neuroses that individuals develop later in life. It also could be used to explain large scale cultural phenomenon. So it does a lot of work in Freud's system, actually.
Ellie: 32:31
For instance, hysteria, which was the condition that Freud got his start working on and, you know, is like a fraught term that we don't use anymore, but refers to women who experienced a lot of psychological problems and were, that were traceable back to like early childhood, I don't know, what would we say?
David: 32:52
Traumatizing experiences. Memories. Because early on, Freud believed that they were just reminiscences.
Ellie: 32:58
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Often that actually had to do with incestuous experiences with fathers or other male figures in their lives.
David: 33:05
Yeah, correct. And you can see why once there is a triangulation of desire, it becomes really complicated for the child to know how to navigate and balance, especially when the child comes to see that they are effectively competing with the parents for each other's attention. Although Freud rejected the notion of the Electra complex that we get from Jung because he thought that even though there are different dynamics that apply to boys and girls, just because of the sex difference, ultimately the Oedipus complex cuts across the board. It just, um, because the boys and the girls for Freud have different anatomies and their recognition of their anatomy relative to the anatomy of the parents guides their psycho sexual development, it just puts them on slightly different tracks. But that that's just a clarification.
Ellie: 33:50
What do you mean? The claim is that we wouldn't need the electric complex because the oedipus complex in, already includes girls desires to kill their mothers and marry their fathers?
David: 34:01
Yeah, just that there are different psychological dynamics at play. So one central aspect of the Oedipus complex is that boys identify with their fathers, right? And the reason that they can do that is because the boys become aware of being anatomically like their fathers rather than their mothers. And that's something that cannot happen in the same way with daughters. Rather daughters recognize that there are more like their mothers than their fathers. And in the case of daughters, this is what leads them according to Freud, to hate their mothers because they see their lack of a phallus as something that they inherit from their mother, and that they equate with powerlessness. And so the daughter comes to disdain the mother, not only for her lack of a phallus, i. e. the mother's, but for having bequeathed upon the daughter that same absence. It just takes a slightly different tack.
Ellie: 34:57
Yes, so it's not, it's not that we apply the desire to marry the mother and kill the father to girls as desire to marry the father.
David: 35:06
It ultimately amounts to the same triangulation, but with sex specific dynamics leading to it.
Ellie: 35:15
And of course, the question of whether people's anatomy and how that relates to their gender actually is so pervasive as like a developmental characteristic of childhood is a huge question. I mean, this is a problem that a lot of people have with psychoanalysis. In the mommy issues, we'll talk a little bit about this too, this like strange assumption that people with particular anatomies like automatically identify with the gender characteristics that are associated with those. It doesn't seem at all evident to me that that's the case. But okay, so that's like, that's Freud at least.
David: 35:47
Yeah, and that's the Oedipus complex. But another place in the Freudian corpus where the father comes to the foreground is in Freud's book, Totem and Taboo. And here, the father in question is not the father of the family, but rather the father in the historical sense, like the founding father of a community. And in Totem and Taboo, Freud is trying to understand totemism by using psychoanalysis. A totem is an animal that is often venerated in certain cultures, in totemic tribes. And it is an animal that a particular tribe identifies with. So for example, I might say I am a member of the bear tribe, or I am a member of the serpent tribe. And so the animal as totem comes to represent the principle of unity of the tribe. Because it is seen as the founding figure or the ancestor of the tribe. And in debates in the 19th century about totemism, people realized that this introduced into a particular tribe, a specific prohibition, which is the prohibition to marry within the same tribe. So if you and I, Ellie, are both like, let's say, of the wolf tribe, we can't really, that's why you're not attracted to me. That's why you said present company included earlier, excluded, sorry. And so the two important things about totemic cultures is that there is. an important role for animals to play. And then there is this prohibition of incest, or what is called exogamy. Now, in the late 19th and very early 20th century, there were a lot of debates about totemism. There were sociological theories, psychological theories, linguistic theories. And if you look at the state of the field, Freud says, it's honestly just like a goddamn mess. Nobody knows what they're talking about. And he thinks that approaching the question from a psychoanalytic lens will help us clarify what's going on. First, he says most neuroses that he has seen in the clinic involving animals, like people having dreams of animals or having phobias about animals are always about the father. So whenever you're talking about animals, deep down, you're talking about a father figure playing a role. And so with something like totemism at the cultural level, chances are there is a kind of father figure hovering somewhere in the background. And we need to figure out what that is. The second thing that Freud points out is that when you're dealing with the father, you're already in the domain of Oedipal conflict. And so we have to remember that tension, that mix of love and jealousy that defines the Oedipal complex, as we talked about earlier. And then he turns of all places to the writings of Charles Darwin to talk about what he calls the primal horde of our evolutionary past. And so this is the famous myth at the center of Totem and Taboo, Freud says. Imagine that there was an original clan of men who were our evolutionary ancestors.
Ellie: 39:05
All right. I guess I will.
David: 39:07
Imagine that this is happening and they are competing for access to women, right? All the men, very typical evolutionary narrative. There's always going to be a father figure in that clan that is the most powerful. So the father takes all the women for himself, leaving the brothers without any access to the women. So then all the members of the clan get together to plot their revenge against the father who has taken all the women. So again, this is why it has an oedipal structure.
Ellie: 39:41
Yeah. My anthropology 101 class is coming back to me now.
David: 39:45
Yes. And so they get together and mythically kill the father, so they murder the father.
Ellie: 39:54
In the myth they kill the father.
David: 39:56
Yeah. And like Freud, honestly, like he seems to think that it did happen in some evolutionary past, but then the language is a little bit vague about whether this is a myth, an evolutionary myth or an evolutionary reality, but he uses language that suggests that this is very far back in our evolutionary past. Now, all the people who kill the father, the brothers, then feel guilty for the murder of the father and they try to atone for their murder by expressing respect for this totemic animal that they now use as a substitute for the father. So you know, they feel guilty about killing the father and they're like, Oh, we honor bear and bear is our original father from whom we all descended. And so what you see is that totemic cultures come into their own. Essentially through a cultural rather than individual staging of the Oedipal complex.
Ellie: 40:56
And whether it's on an individual or a cultural level, you see there that love for the father. and hatred of the father are entangled. We honor, respect, and love the bear as a response to the hatred and envy of the father that led us to mythically kill him.
David: 41:20
And what motivates that rage is ultimately a desire to possess women.
Ellie: 41:24
Yeah. Women always blamed by the men for their male on male violence.
David: 41:53
Nobody does daddy issues better than the Christians.
Ellie: 41:58
No lie there.
David: 41:59
Think about Isaac, whose father was ready. to sacrifice him because God told him to. Or think about Jesus himself, poor guy, his all powerful father sends him to earth to expiate the sins of humanity through his own crucifixion.
Ellie: 42:17
I know, I know. Why have you forsaken me? Also in Christian theology, it's not just God, but God the father, right? Like that sort of puts the daddy issues right up front in a way that is like particularly obvious. Also that kind of love, the love of God, the love of the Father is up front. But there is also this sense of all of us being like Isaac and Jesus in that we have to suffer the sovereign will of the Father, even when it makes no sense.
David: 42:49
Yeah, even when it's literally absurd. And interestingly, there have been Christian feminist critiques of that interpretation of God the patriarch, since that humanizes and anthropomorphizes God too much and actually limits his omnipotence by excluding the feminine from his essence, right? So if God is everything, there is no way that he could not also be the feminine, but in general, this is the accepted interpretation of the Judeo Christian God that he is a he and he is all powerful, inscrutable, and irreproachable.
Ellie: 43:26
You know, like many literal fathers think they are.
David: 43:30
Yeah, no kidding. And this figure is so exorbitant and so overwhelming that Once we internalize got the father, it cannot but leave a pretty deep mark in our psychology. I mean, what kind of relationship can we have to a God that is so far out of reach for us? And what kind of relationship can then we foster to our own fathers? If we model our relationship to them after our relationship to this infinitely powerful divine, and one philosopher who tackles this issue is the feminist psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, who wrote an article in 2006 entitled A Father is Being Beaten, in which she talks about how Christianity gives us such intense complexes around the figure of the father that over time, we start fantasizing about our own fathers being beaten and potentially even killed.
Ellie: 44:30
Yeah, we couldn't have a Daddy Issues, Mommy Issues, Two Episode combo without mentioning Kristeva at least once. I haven't read this piece, but I suspect the title, A Father is Being Beaten, is an allusion to Freud's essay, A Child is Being Beaten.
David: 44:46
Yeah, that's correct. So the paper is a reference to that essay from 1918 where Freud talks about how children, when they are around five or six years old, start having fantasies of other children being beaten and being beaten by the child's own father. So sometimes they will go to school and say, my daddy will beat you. You know, we're like, Oh, my daddy beat my bully from the neighborhood. And Freud takes these fantasies to be a kind of perverse wish fulfillment on the part of these children. Because if my daddy is beating all the other kids for being naughty, then that means that he cannot love them, and he can only love me. So it's a way of fulfilling that wish to be desired by one's father.
Ellie: 45:33
Yeah, classic Freud. And for him, this fantasy of the father beating the child that you hate, then ultimately becomes about the father is beating me, and then a child is being beaten. So there are like three different phases that this goes through in the essay. But I don't want us to get too sidetracked by Freud here, because I want to talk about Kristeva, because she's an interesting figure in the history of psychoanalysis, especially when it comes to the mother figure. I think that's more her main focus, although I don't think we ended up having time to plan to talk about her in the mommy issues episode, which we're going to record after this.
David: 46:12
I don't remember.
Ellie: 46:13
Okay. Well, in any case, we're talking about her now and her take on God the father. So tell us about that.
David: 46:18
Well, she argues that Christianity puts us in a fundamentally incestuous relationship with God. God, the father, we are on the one hand supposed to love God unconditionally and give ourselves over to him in body and soul. But at the same time, we do think of him as our father. So when you put those two things together, it means that we are expected to enter into this fusional, amorous passionate dynamic with our own dad in order to be good Christians, right? So, like we are being incestuous. Within the universe of Christianity, there is no problem necessarily with that. The problem is that we live in cultures where for a number of reasons there are very strong cultural and psychic prohibitions against incest, right? There is a taboo against being incestuous.
Ellie: 47:13
Yeah, which, as you mentioned before, Freud talks about in Totem and Taboo.
David: 47:16
And so Kristeva picks this up and suggests that the combination of the religious demand that we love our father passionately and the cultural prohibition against incest create an inner psychic conflict in each of us that culminates in a profound feeling of guilt. We desire God. We want God to be inside us. We feel like, I've seen people say, like God enter me or like you want to be in God, but I mean, that's the point of the psychoanalysis of religion that Kristeva is giving us. And at the same time, we feel guilty and we fear being punished for the incestual nature of this very desire. And if you're a Christian, at the end of the day, who do you feel like you're going to be punished by? Well, you're gonna be punished by God himself, who would then be both the cause and the object of our incestuous desire, but also the hangman/executioner who makes us pay for our sins. And so what happens is that we end up sublimating, Kristeva says, our incestuous desire for our father into a fantasy of that father being beaten or being killed.
Ellie: 48:34
Huh. And just to clarify a key point here for listeners who might not be familiar with the terminology, sublimation is a psychoanalytic concept that refers to the rechanneling of sexual energy into higher order purposes. So if you have a lot of pent up sexual frustration. You can sublimate it into creating a painting or a poem, a work of art. So it's about giving our desires an outlet when the outlet they seek is forbidden by society. But that outlet can be a fantasy too, as in this case.
David: 49:03
And so to back up this claim that we fantasize about our father as being beaten, she notes that many psychoanalytic patients have a very ambivalent relationship to their fathers when they show up to the clinic involve a duality of love and hate at the same time. And on a cultural religious level, she points out that this is why the central fantasy around which Christian theology is organized like the core of Christianity is the image of the suffering father, right? We crucify our father.
Ellie: 49:39
But do we crucify the father? We crucify the son.
David: 49:42
Well, she talks about this and she says, in fact, this is the essence of the principle of the Trinity that we crucify the son definitely, but we crucify the son as the father, she explicitly talks about.
Ellie: 49:55
What does that mean?
David: 49:56
She says that when Jesus becomes crucified and is hanging on the cross, symbolically, he ceases to be the son of God and becomes God as such. And that's where our guilt comes from that we're like, Oh, look at what we did. to our Father to whom we owe everything.
Ellie: 50:15
Sounds a little sus to me, but we'll go with it.
David: 50:16
Well, I mean, if you accept the Trinity, then the Son is the Father, and the Father is the Son, so there's no distinction.
Ellie: 50:22
That's a, you know, complicated theological question, but I think Jesus is, in Christian iconography, still very much shown as the Son on the cross. And, like, his last words are My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Which is a reference to like the father having forsaken him.
David: 50:40
Yeah. And so take this up with Kristeva. But the reason for Kristeva about that, this figure of the suffering father on the cross is a fantasy...
Ellie: 50:51
Okay. I'm sorry. That's not Jesus's final words. They're some of the last words... Oh, wait, no, this is even this even more interesting, David. I'm so sorry. Just a quick thing. Jesus's last words are actually, Father into your hands, I commit my spirit. Even more straightforwardly, a reference to the fact that Jesus is not showing up in his capacity as father on the cross.
David: 51:11
Well, in his unification with father and therefore the becoming one. And so anyways, whatever, you know, like the whole Trinity thing raises a lot of logical questions.
Ellie: 51:19
And he also says it is finished. I'm sorry, David, you're trying to get us through Kristeva. I'm like on Jesuitsglobal.net trying to see.
David: 51:29
Let me just put this in the simplest words that I can. I can't help you, Ellie. If you think Jesus is a son, that's fine. Okay. Kristeva insists.
Ellie: 51:36
I'm just saying these are some of the last words of Jesus because it has, I used to be a real Bible girl and I'm not anymore. So now I'm just like relying on my searching online while David is trying to talk. So I'm going to remove myself from the situation and just say for the record that I'm a little bit in disagreement with Kristeva on that point.
David: 51:52
Okay. And so she then says, why don't we experience this image of the suffering father as a nightmare? Why are we, why am I calling it a fantasy? And she says, it's because it ultimately allows us to relate to God passionately, i. e. with some kind of like erotic passion feeling without feeling like we are breaking the incest taboo of our culture. And so we relate to father without wanting father to be in us, you know, like to go back to that image, but we rather relate to father through our shared suffering. I a human, suffer. But God, my father, also suffers. And that's why I fantasize about a father being beaten.
Ellie: 52:39
Well, and even if I disagree with Kristeva on the status of Jesus as father on the cross, the suffering Christ is central to Christianity. And you're right that broadly speaking, according to the doctrine of the Trinity or the dogma, Jesus is also like unified with God the Father. But I think the emphasis on suffering does change the meaning of fatherhood to a certain degree because it's very different from the God the Father figure as sovereign, omnipotent, or angry. We have here God the Father as a receptive and suffering symbol. It's less menacing, less patriarchal and masculinist in its attributes.
David: 53:19
And, and this is precisely where Kristeva wants to take her feminist reading of the father figure in Christianity because she says that the suffering father is ultimately a feminized father. And the fantasy of the suffering Christ actually helps women who are Christians, she says, identify with the father figure who has himself been feminized by his own suffering. But then she adds that it is also kind of a perverse fantasy altogether because it means that women and their fathers can only come together through a shared experience of suffering, which kind of incentivizes suffering and makes it seem as if you can only connect through maybe violence. And she calls it a marriage under the whip.
Ellie: 54:10
I think she lost me there.
David: 54:13
With the marriage or the whip?
Ellie: 54:14
With the feminization, like the suffering, the feminization. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I haven't read this article, but it seems sus to me. And I really like a lot of Kristeva's early work.
David: 54:24
But you did say that the, got the father suffering is more receptive and potentially feminized.
Ellie: 54:32
That's the picture, yeah, that she phrased. Yeah, I didn't say it was feminized, I said it's just less patriarchal and masculinist.
David: 54:37
Okay, so fair enough. And she ends up making a French pun in her article that I think is relevant here if we're thinking about this perversity of the marriage under the whip, because perverse in French is pervers, but if you split the syllables of pervers, you get père and vers. And if you switch them around, then you get vers le père, which means in the direction of the father. And so we are all perverse toward the father. Perversion is always this fantasy of violence toward the father.
Ellie: 55:17
This does bring us a little bit back to Catherine Angel, who, toward the end of the book, mentions the philosopher Susan Bordo, who writes about how she grew up under a tyrannical and abusive father. And it wasn't until he was suffering, lying on his deathbed, weak, vulnerable, that she brought herself to have physical closeness with him, without him pushing her away.
David: 55:40
If I remember correctly, she says that in that moment when she was attending to her ailing father, he was so weak and so dependent that he became like a child again. And this is what made possible a kind of expression of love between them or like a touching moment. And it just happened for a brief moment and at the very end of life. But I do find interesting this idea that. For many people, closeness with their literal fathers requires illness, death, or some kind of impairment.
Ellie: 56:14
And in my own case, I have a father who's pretty comfortable with expressions of emotion, but I think the most touching moment that I've ever had with my dad is when I was leaving to go to college all the way across the country, and we just like, we're about to part for a long time. And the kind of vulnerability that he showed just expressed itself in this big hug where he was also crying. Oh my god, I'm gonna like start crying just thinking about it. It was so sad. Um, and I just started sobbing too and we're just like at LAX airport, like hugging each other and crying. But. Now I get to see my dad a lot because we live close by.
David: 56:52
No. Okay. So that's good. You can have many of those expressions.
Ellie: 56:55
And I started doing a little bit more care work. And now that he is older and lives alone and doesn't drive anymore and stuff like that. Definitely. Yeah.
David: 57:05
It reminds me of my mother telling me that the first time that she ever saw her father's back was when he was dying and she had to change him. And she felt such an overwhelming feeling of closeness because for the first time she saw him as a vulnerable, embodied being.
Ellie: 57:24
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