Oedipus complex
Psychoanalytic theory of child's desire for opposite-sex parent.
The Oedipus complex is a psychoanalytic concept describing a child's unconscious sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent and rivalry with the same-sex parent, first formulated by Sigmund Freud. It is named after the mythological figure Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. The theory became a cornerstone of classical psychoanalysis and has been the subject of extensive debate and criticism.
Quick Facts
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- First named in
- 1910
- Related play
- Oedipus Rex by Sophocles (c. 429 BC)
- Stage of development
- Phallic stage (age 3–6 years)
- Alternative concept
- Electra complex (proposed by Carl Jung, 1913)
Facts from the source article.
Background
The concept draws on the 5th-century BC Greek myth of Oedipus, who unknowingly kills his father Laius and marries his mother Jocasta. Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex, written around 429 BC, dramatizes this story. Modern productions of the play in Paris and Vienna during the 19th century were highly successful in the 1880s and 1890s, and the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud attended them. In his 1899 book The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud proposed that an Oedipal desire is a universal psychological phenomenon innate to humans and a source of unconscious guilt. He believed this sentiment had been inherited over millions of years of human evolution from apes, basing his view on clinical observation of children, his own response to the play, and the play's enduring effect on audiences. Freud wrote that the myth's appeal lies in the possibility that everyone directs their first sexual impulse toward their mother and first hatred toward their father. He also linked Hamlet to the same soil as Oedipus Rex, noting that in Oedipus Rex the wishful fantasy is openly realized, while in Hamlet it remains repressed. Freud emphasized that the primordial urges and fears underlying the Oedipus complex are inherent in the myths themselves, not primarily in the play. Before developing this theory, Freud had held that childhood sexual trauma caused neurosis, a view known as the seduction theory, which he deemphasized around 1897.
The Oedipus complex
Freud initially applied the Oedipus complex only to males, describing it as a young boy’s hostility toward his father and wish to sexually possess his mother; he never fully explained how it might work in girls. The term first appeared in a 1910 paper where Freud discussed a boy’s reaction upon learning about prostitution. Over time, Freud and others expanded the concept into a broader theoretical framework. In classical psychoanalysis, this complex emerges during the phallic stage, roughly ages three to six, though it can start earlier. At this stage, the genitals become the main source of physical pleasure, and children satisfy their curiosity by exploring their own and others’ bodies, discovering anatomical and gender differences. The boy’s psychic energy, or libido, focuses on his mother, while he feels jealousy and rivalry toward his father, even wishing for his father’s death. These urges come from the id, which seeks immediate pleasure, but the ego, aware of reality, recognizes the father as too powerful to overcome and suppresses the impulse. The boy’s conflicting feelings about his father’s role produce an irrational, subconscious fear of castration by the stronger father.
Freudian theoretic revision
In response to Freud's Oedipus complex, Carl Jung proposed that girls experience desire for the father and aggression toward the mother through what he called the Electra complex, named after the Greek mythological figure Electra, who plotted matricidal revenge with her brother Orestes. Like Oedipus, Electra is the subject of a play by Sophocles from the 5th century BC. Orthodox Jungian psychology uses the term Oedipus complex only for boys. Freud rejected the equivalence, arguing that at this stage only the male experiences simultaneous love for one parent and competitive hatred for the other. He believed the Electra complex fails to account for differing effects of the castration complex and the significance of the phallus in the two sexes, and overlooks the girl's preoedipal attachment to the mother. In classical Freudian psychology, the super-ego forms as the infant boy internalizes his father's rules. In the early 1920s, Otto Rank proposed that a boy's powerful mother was the source of the super-ego, using the term 'pre-Oedipal.' This conflict with Freud led to Rank's exclusion from the inner circle, and he later developed object relations theory in 1925.
Criticism
Studies of children's attitudes at the oedipal stage do not show the shifts in positive feelings predicted by the theory. Case studies Freud relied on, such as that of Little Hans, could not be verified through research on larger populations. Adolf Grünbaum argued that the clinical evidence Freud used cannot provide cogent observational support for his core hypotheses. Evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, in their 1988 book Homicide, found no evidence of the Oedipus complex in people and noted the theory yields few testable predictions; parent–child conflict exists but not for sexual possession of the opposite-sex parent. Psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman stated that Freud and his followers resisted subjecting the Oedipus theory to scientific testing, and investigations in cognitive psychology either contradict or fail to support Freud's ideas. In the 1970s, social worker Florence Rush argued that Freud's earlier seduction theory correctly attributed patients' memories of childhood trauma to family members, implying widespread sexual abuse of children. According to Rush, Freud abandoned this theory and invented the Oedipus complex to attribute such stories to children's fantasies, thereby covering up illegal and immoral sexual abuse. This view became known as the Freudian Coverup.
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