This article begins questioning, and yet also making use of, the concept of the father, examining the theoretical space of fathers and fathering in psychoanalytic theory in the light of contemporary gender theory. Using memoir and clinical vignettes, the essay examines the experience of the father in early childhood, the paternal body, the experience of the father through the imagination of others, the father in oedipal and post-Oedipal life for a daughter, fathers and daughters in psychoanalytic history, and the particular traumatic effects of dangerous and absent fathers.