Oedipus and Electra Complex

11 Key excerpts on "Oedipus and Electra Complex"

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  Asian Culture and Psychotherapy

  Implications for East and West

  • Suk Choo Chang, Masahisa Nishizono, Wen-Shing Tseng(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • University of Hawaii Press

    (Publisher)

  It aims to explore theoretically the potential cultural variations of the parent-child complex that may exist universally throughout the East and West and to examine their implications from psychotherapeutic perspectives. In the psychoanalytic view, the Oedipus complex is a common issue at the core of neuroses that needs to be worked out in psychotherapy. It is relevant to investigate such a well-defined and important emotional com-plex cross-culturally. Parent-child relationships are commonly dealt with in psychotherapy. Even if they are not directly related to clinical matters, they are often at the root of an emotional complex that indirectly contrib-utes to the presenting problems. Understanding possible parent-child con-flicts broadly and cross-culturally will provide insight for therapists and guide them in developing culturally relevant therapies. It is based on this premise that the present study is carried out. Review of Available Literature An interest in cross-cultural comparisons of cultural products is not new. Along with the rise of psychoanalytic theory, there was a trend among cul-tural anthropologists and cultural psychiatrists to collect and study folk-lore and fairy tales cross-culturally. Some of these studies focused on the Oedipus theme (Edmunds and Dundes 1995; Johnson and Price-Williams 1996; Murphy 1982). In the available literature, variations of the Oedipus complex in vari-ous cultures are presented according to different family systems (More-head 1999). After examining the matrilineal family system of the Trobriand Islanders in Melanesia, Malinowski (1927) reported that it is not a boy’s father who is the key decision maker in his life, but his maternal uncle. Ilechukwu (1999) pointed out that, among the Nigerians in Africa, past custom allowed a man to have multiple wives, who could function as sur-rogate mothers to his son or, upon his death, as potential wives.

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  Sensuality and Sexuality Across the Divide of Shame

  • Joseph D. Lichtenberg(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 2

  The Oedipus Complex in the 21st Century

  INTRODUCTION

  After 100 years of psychoanalytic theorizing about the Oedipus complex, is reconsideration either necessary or valuable? What new perspectives or developmental processes warrant a revised conception? I cite seven changed perspectives that I discuss in detail:

  1. The distinction between sensuality and sexuality and the role of culture presented in chapter 1 .

  2. The complex interplay among interactive, intersubjective, and self-regulation. 3. The continuity since birth (and before) of triadic relationships. 4. The pull exerted on oedipal sexuality by attachment motivations and strategies. 5. The subversive, pernicious, and transgressive influence potential in sexual motives and desires. 6. The role of power, possessiveness, and envy. 7. The maturational influence of a time line of past, present, and future; of an autobiographical organization; and of reflective capacity.

  In this chapter, I challenge the view that the oedipal phase is driven by repressed universal unconscious fantasies of sexual possession of the parent of the opposite gender, murder of the rival parent, fear of retaliative castration, or penis envy. I regard the romantic love of the 4- to 6-year-old child as an emergent experience of body sensation and emotional relational desires that takes its form from existent and developing patterns of intrafamily relatedness. The child’s patterns of relatedness form as expressions of his or her nonsexual motivations and sensual and sexual desires in the context of continuous influence (regulation) by parental responses both to the child and to each other. At any moment, past patterns of relatedness and present desires congeal into affectively charged lived experiences comprised of patterns of behavior, conscious thoughts and emotions, and elaborations into conscious and unconscious beliefs and fantasies. I describe explicit patterns of intrafamily relationships and the child’s implicit modes of relational knowing that develop in sensual and sexual intimate exchanges. Although fantasies importantly elaborate the relatedness patterns of lived experience, neither intrafamily relatedness patterns nor fantasies alone determine the path taken during the oedipal phase. Both explicit and implicit relational patterns and conscious and unconscious fantasies contribute to forming expectations that propel the child into each next moment of lived experience. That said, as I discuss, fantasy elaborations of sexual desires inevitably play out as more or less problematic subversive and transgressive conflicts.

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  Core Concepts in Classical Psychoanalysis

  Clinical, Research Evidence and Conceptual Critiques

  • Morris N. Eagle(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 The Oedipus Complex Does the Oedipus complex exist? Introduction The main issue I address in this chapter is the question of the evidence for the existence of a universal Oedipus complex, defined by Freud (1900, p. 262) as incestuous wishes toward the opposite sex parent and rivalrous and hostile wishes toward the same sex parent. Although the existence of a universal Oedipus complex may no longer be uniformly posited as a core assumption of all psychoanalytic “schools,” there is little doubt that it occupied a central place in Freudian theory and continues to occupy a central place for many analysts. Freud (1905) writes: “With the progress of psychoanalytic studies the importance of the Oedipus complex has become more and more clearly evident; its recognition has become the shibboleth that distinguishes the adherents of psychoanalysis from its opponents” (p. 226, fn. 1, added in 1920). He also writes: “I venture to say that if psychoanalysis could boast of no other achievement than the discovery of the repressed Oedipus complex, that alone would give it a claim to be included among the precious new acquisitions of mankind” (Freud, 1940[1938], pp. 292–293). For many years, acceptance of the assumption of the universality of the Oedipus complex, along with the positing of its central role in the development of neurosis, gender identity, the formation of the superego, and the degree of integration between love and sexual desire was viewed by many in the psychoanalytic establishment as an essential bona fide for being seen as a true analyst (Simon, 1991). As for contemporary psychoanalytic theorists, in a recent issue of an Italian psychoanalytic journal, Psicoterapia e scienze umane, leading psychoanalysts were asked to respond to 13 questions regarding the current status and future of psychoanalysis. One of those questions concerned the respondents’ views regarding the centrality of the Oedipus complex for current psychoanalytic theory

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  Theories of Adolescent Development

  • Barbara M. Newman, Philip R. Newman(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  , the child’s desire to have the parent of the opposite sex all to himself or herself. The child has a strong, sexualized attraction to the parent of the opposite sex and views the same-sex parent as a fantasied rival. The same-sex parent may become a target of hostility. At the same time, the child fears that amorous overtures toward the desired parent may result in hostility or retribution from the parent of the same sex. The child also worries that the beloved, same-sex parent will withdraw love. Parental threats or restrictions intended to prevent the child from masturbating and fantasies of the possibility of castration or bodily mutilation may lead to the child’s fears that sexualized and aggressive fantasies are going to result in punishment or withdrawal of love. Whereas Freud referred to the family dynamic as the oedipal complex for both genders, Jung is credited as having proposed the term Electra complex to refer to the dynamic as experienced by girls.

  As the child’s superego and ego ideal become more fully established, the child becomes increasingly aware of the unacceptability of fantasies for an exclusive relationship with the opposite sex parent and aggressive wishes toward the same-sex parent. Awareness of these unacceptable wishes is accompanied by anxiety and guilt. In the successful resolution of the Oedipal/Electra complex, the superego emerges as a strong structure that aids the ego in controlling unacceptable impulses. The ego works to resolve the conflict by identifying with the same-sex parent and engaging defense mechanisms to push unacceptable wishes and drives into the unconscious. Through a process of identification with one’s parents’ moral and ethical values, the child achieves a new level of autonomy, and at the same time receives the admiration and approval of both parents who see the child moving in the direction of maturity and self-control. Most of the intense conflicts of this period are repressed, and the child emerges with a new degree of self-esteem and confidence about his or her place in the family structure.

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  Introduction to Psychotherapy

  Its History and Modern Schools

  • J. A. Hadfield(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  We are on the side of Sophocles, whose version we find truer to life than Freud’s. It was in fact a Laius complex which was the root of the trouble. As regards the Electra complex it is true that Electra took part in the murder of her mother, Clytemnestra, because of her mother’s unfaithfulness to her father Agamemnon ; but it was at the instigation of Orestes, her brother. That does not look like a mother fixation or Oedipus complex, on the part of Orestes! Indeed, when you look at the original story, the Oedipus complex is basically one of insecurity, not primarily of sex. As an infant, Oedipus was abandoned by his parents and slung up by his foot (Oedipus = swollen foot) on a tree to die at the instigation of his father. It was the basic insecurity derived from this experience which dogged him all his life and led to his neurosis. It is no wonder if unconsciously he sought to revenge himself on his father for the wrong he had done him, and sought his mother for security. The fact of his having sex relations with his mother is symbolic of a need for her protective love. There are, in fact, two types of mother complex, one sexual the other protective. Certainly the sexual involvement of the child with the parent in the ways mentioned is often a cause of arrest of development and consequently of a neurosis. But equally excessive dependence upon the mother for other than sexual reasons, such as illness, suffocation and terror from outside sources, gives the child the sense of insecurity and so arrests the child’s development. This produces neurosis owing to a fear of life. We find that most neuroses are due to insecurity not to sex. It was this sense of security of which Oedipus was deprived in infancy. It is that insecurity which produced his neurosis. This is borne out by the parallel story of Perseus, whose jealous grandfather cast him and his mother out to sea in a barrel, where one could assume they had ample opportunity for incest

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  Personality: A Topical Approach

  Theories, Research, Major Controversies, and Emerging Findings

  • Robert B. Ewen(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  He wishes to possess her physically in such ways as he has divined from his observations and intuitions about sexual life, and he tries to seduce her by showing her the male organ which he is proud to own. His early awakened masculinity seeks to take his father’s place with her… His father now becomes a rival who stands in his way and whom he would like to get rid of. (Freud, 1940/1969a, p. 46.) All human beings are inherently bisexual, so the boy also behaves like a girl and displays affection for his father together with jealousy toward his mother. This double set of attitudes toward both parents constitutes the Oedipus complex, named after the legendary Greek king who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. Oedipal feelings are extremely powerful. They include all the aspects of a true love affair: heights of passion, jealous rages, and desperate yearnings. However, the Oedipus complex ultimately leads to severe conflicts. The boy fears that his illicit wishes will cost him his father’s love and protection, a child’s strongest need (Freud, 1930/1961b, p. 19; see also Freud, 1909, 1905/1965d, pp. 92–93, 1924/1963o). He also discovers the differences between the sexes, and draws a terrifying conclusion: that girls originally possessed a penis but had it taken away as punishment, and the same fate will befall his own prized organ if he persists in his Oedipal wishes. To alleviate this intense castration anxiety, the boy abandons his Oedipal strivings and replaces them with a complicated set of attitudes. He intensifies his identification with his father, wishing to be like him rather than replace him. The boy also recognizes that he may not do certain things that his father does (such as enjoy special privileges with his mother), and learns to defer to authority

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  Collected Works of Charles Baudouin

  • Charles Baudouin(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Such werethe mechanisms of which I was thinking when, at the close of the first chapter (in which I discussedthe Cain complex), I pointed out that the feelings of sympathy indispensable to social life are far more strongly buttressed by filial than by fraternal affection. There are two points of intersection between the Oedipus complex and the spectacular complex (inspec- tionism, etc.). Adler describes a girl of sevenwho had a keen sense of rivalry with her mother (imitating the latter, for instance, by sufferingfrom attacks of headache). Adler also found indications of the aforesaid rivalry in the child's questions about birth; she could not bear that her mother should know more about it than she did. z In my own patient Karl, who originally had a passion for the concrete sciences, but in whom this interest was subsequently annulled by the growth of curiosity concerningforbidden topics, the position was complicated by a parallel repression founded upon the Oedipus complex. When Karl was a very little boy, he had wanted to be a doctor like his father, but somewhat later this profession seemed to him the most undesirable in the world. The Oedipustabus had come into action, one of thesebeing a prohibition to behave like his father 1 cr. Pfister, Love in Children, pp. 200-201. 2 Adler and Furtmiillcr, Heilen und Bilden, pp. 44-54. o 210 THE MIND OF THE CHILD or to take his father's place in any conceivable way. Over and above this, the doctor is a person who knows forbidden things. Medicine, pre-eminently, is concerned with the concrete sciences of life. Here, then, in the prohibition of the concrete sciences, we recognise an interlocking of the two systems (Oedipus and curiosity). In Jean Paul, who furnished a fine example of the weaning complex, we came to the conclusion that his stammerwas a resultant of the weaning motif and the curiosity motif.

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  The Restoration of the Self

  • Heinz Kohut(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  Two principles will guide us in our task of re-evaluating the Oedipus complex from the point of view of the psychology of the self: that we are not questioning the data of Freud’s discovery, but the adequacy of the theoretical framework into which they were put and, thus, their significance; and that we are not necessarily denying the truth of the classical theory of the central position of the Oedipus complex, but only the universal applicability of this theory. We are, in other words, employing the approach I referred to earlier (p. xv) as the psychological principle of complementarity, a term meant to indicate that the explanation of the psychological field may require not one but two (or more) theoretical frameworks. 2 The classical theory of drives and objects explains a good deal about the child’s oedipal experiences; par excellence it explains the child’s conflicts and, in particular, the child’s guilt. But it falls short in providing an adequate framework for some of the most important experiences of man, those that relate to the development and vicissitudes of his self. To be explicit: notwithstanding the admirable effort by generations of psychoanalysts to extend the theories of drives and defenses and of the structures of the psychic apparatus to their utmost limits—including the ultimate heroic attempt by Freud (1920) to give the drive theory a cosmological dimension—these theories fail to do justice to the experiences that relate to the crucially important task of building and maintaining a cohesive nuclear self (with the correlated joy of achieving this goal and the correlated nameless mortification [cf. Eidelberg, 1959] of not achieving it) and, secondarily, to the experiences that relate to the crucially important striving of the nuclear self, once it is laid down, to express its basic patterns (with the correlated triumph and dejection at having succeeded or failed in this end)

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  White Men Aren't

  • Thomas DiPiero(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  ∫ Instead, Freud’s Oedipus com-plex and the various discursive structures it implicates bu√er the mas-culinity they describe from the emptiness, antagonism, and hysteria on which they are actually based. Despite the fact that it hinges on castra-tion, the Oedipus complex actually produces a unified narrative of male wholeness that, as we will see, masks a more fundamental set of cul-tural conflicts, conflicts involving sexuality as well as other forms of social and political identity, including national and ethnic identity. Even though Sophocles’ tragedy does not necessarily represent what Freud believed it did—that Oedipus killed his father and slept with his mother—conventional (mis)interpretations of that tragedy can help us understand the production of a single and unified narrative of mas-culine gender identity, particularly as that identity has been staged in Western culture. To identify as a male in Western culture is to be held in the thrall of diametrically competing forces. To be masculine is to at-tempt identification with a figure that is itself designed to be inimitable. That figure, commonly referred to as the father, incarnates an image of stability, mastery, power, and knowledge. Ω The reading of Oedipus the King to follow demonstrates that in its attempt to provide a taxonomy of gender identification through the use of the Oedipus complex, Freud-ian psychoanalysis not only reproduces the very forms of acculturated gender identification it claims to be cataloging, in the process inadver-tently naturalizing a highly fragmented, multiply articulated identity, but it also defends against fundamental personal antagonisms at the heart of nearly all complex human identities. Put quite simply, one man can be the same as many, in marked contradistinction to Oedipus’s claim; in fact, that multiplicity is virtually impossible to avoid. Contem-porary psychoanalysis, however, works to produce a more or less single narrative of a unified masculine identity.

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  The Reproduction of Mothering

  Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Updated Edition

  • Nancy J. Chodorow(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  In order for a girl to have the oedipal experience she supposedly has, she would have to know her own gender (and about gender differ- ences) in order to connect herself to her mother, to be vulnerable to differences in sexual morphology, and to think these matter. In fact, what occurs for both sexes during the oedipal period is a product of this knowledge about gender and its social and familial significance, rather than the reverse (as the psychoanalytic accounts have it).* Freud's differential evaluation of male and female genitals and masculine and feminine character, his androcentric view of devel- opment, and his equation of that which is female with heterosexuality *This interpretation of the genesis of the oedipus complex receives some support from recent psychoanalytic clinical findings. This research suggests an early genital phase in the child's second year, which connects the development of a gendered body- ego and classically "oedipal" conflicts about castration, and penis envy, to the earliest development of sense of self separated from mother. 48 152 The Reproduction of Mothering and resentment at not being male, all have significant implications for therapy and for assumptions about "normality." In looking at these implications, it is important to keep in mind that psychoanalytic ac- counts tend to agree about a clinical picture likely to characterize women. "Dissidents" (Klein, Horney, Jones, Thompson, more re- cently Chasseguet-Smirgel, Stoller) like "orthodox" Freudians (Bo- naparte, Deutsch, Brunswick, Lampl-de Groot, more recently Green- acre) agree that many women patients express "penis envy," and that analysts meet with masochism (aggressiveness turned upon the self and pleasure in pain), narcissism (the need to be loved), and passivity in women.

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  The Logic of Sexuation

  From Aristotle to Lacan

  • Ellie Ragland(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  Lacan gives Freud credit for seeing a structural logic here. The logic of the two sexes is not analogous. There is no “Electra complex,” no symmetry of the sexes. In other words, Freud ascertained that the difference between the sexes would not exist if the difference did not make a difference. The logic of this “find” has the same structure as Lacan’s understanding that the postulation of a supreme being, exception to human law, gives grounding to the law, just as Zeno of old understood that the concept of limit is made possible only in reference to infinity. Stuck in biology, Freud did not think in terms of a logic implicit in his discoveries. Rather, he retained reductionist ideas of the Oedipus complex as typical only of male children who love their mothers and feel negativity, even hatred, toward the father, whom they view as a rival. In trying to figure out the larger ramifications of how males ever get cured of their violence toward each other enough to work together in a social body, he advanced another simplistic biological answer: Males see the female genital, judge women as castrated, and, thus, as corporally deficient or lacking (in the Lacanian imaginary), and, perforce, bond together. In other words, Freud equated the logic of structure—which lies outside the world of the visible—with the visible in the world. In this, he was an empiricist before his time. Lacan’s more sophisticated account of the Oedipus complex, based on a recon- ceptualization of Totem and Taboo (1912–1913), 20 depicts the Ur-father of the primal hoarde as Freud’s mythic effort to designate a real father of jouissance.

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