Kafka's Letter to His Father

In this episode, I spend time with Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father—one of the most intimate and unsettling texts he ever wrote.

Kafka famously tells his father, “My writing was all about you.”

And it’s hard to deny the profound psychic impact fathers can have on their sons: the shaping of authority, judgment, fear, and the inner critic.

But this episode doesn’t stop there.

Drawing on postmodern sociology, attachment-adjacent insights, and reflections on power and masculinity, I explore a more difficult question:

What if the father is sometimes less the sole cause and more the carrier of something larger—culture, authority, masculinity, and expectation?

We look closely at Kafka’s memories of watching his father speak to employees in the family shop, his identification with the humiliated rather than the powerful, and how authority becomes internalized as inhibition rather than confidence.

This is an episode about fathers—but also about power, shame, internalized judgment, and how entire worlds get inside us long before we know how to name them.

If you’ve ever struggled with authority, self-doubt, or the voice inside that tells you you’re already in the wrong, this episode is for you.

🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts.