Oedipus Complex, Oedipus Complex

According to Freud, the Oedipus complex is a universal phenomenon, built in phylogenetically, and is responsible for much unconscious guilt. Speaking of the mythical Oedipus, Freud put it in these terms: Classical theory considers the successful resolution of the Oedipus complex to be developmentally desirable, the key to the development of gender roles and identity. Freud posited that boys and girls resolved the conflicts differently as a result of the male's castration anxiety (caused by oedipal rivalry with the father) and the female's penis envy. He also held that the unsuccessful resolution of the Oedipus complex could result in neurosis, paedophilia, and homosexuality.

This however is expected to arouse the father's anger, and the infant surmises that the most probable outcome of this would be castration. Although Freud devoted most of his early literature to the Oedipus complex in males, by 1931 he was arguing that females do experience an Oedipus complex, and that in the case of females, incestuous desires are initially homosexual desires towards the mothers. It is clear that in Freud's view, at least as we can tell from his later writings, the Oedipus complex was a far more complicated process in female than in male development.

This theory catapulted Rank out of the inner circle in 1925 and led to the development of modern object-relations therapy. (Rank coined the term "pre-Oedipal".) While Freud regarded boys' and girls' and adults' relationships to the father (and the father's phallus) as central to their psychosexual development, Melanie Klein focused more on the early relationship with the mother. Her insistence that oedipal manifestations can even be seen during the first year of life was a feature of the so-called "Controversial Discussions" which took place in the British Psychoanalytical Association between 1942 and 1944. In Klein's work the Oedipus complex is also "de-throned" to some extent, its central role in development being usurped by her concept of the depressive position. Charles Rycroft: A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London, 2nd Edn, 1995) Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism. Ed Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995 While Freud held that both sexes initially experience desire for their mothers and aggression towards their fathers, Carl Jung argued that females experienced desire for their fathers and aggression towards their mothers. He referred to this idea as the Electra complex, after Electra, the daughter of Agamemnon. Electra wanted to kill her mother, who had helped plan the murder of her father. Thus, in orthodox Jungian thought, the term "Oedipus complex" properly refers only to the experience of male children. The "Electra complex" is not part of classical theory, and not usually accepted by those in the Freudian fold. In practice, the concept is rarely used, even by Jungians.

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