Oedipus complex 208495 224815149 2008-07-10T15:18:55Z Lightbot 7178666 Units/dates/other {{Expert-subject|Psychology|Article|date=February 2008}} {{cleanup|date=July 2008}} The '''Oedipus [[complex (psychology)|complex]]''' in [[Sigmund Freud|Freudian]] [[psychoanalysis]] is named after the Greek mythical character [[Oedipus]], who unknowingly kills his father, [[Laius]], and marries his mother, [[Jocasta]]. Appearing between the ages of three and five, the child feels sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex and desires the death of the parent of the same sex.<ref>Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism. Ed Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi. New York: Comulbia University Press, 1995.</ref> As understood today,<ref>[http://changingminds.org/disciplines/psychoanalysis/concepts/oedipus_complex.htm Oedipus Complex<!-- Bot generated title -->]</ref> the Freudian Oedipus complex has two poles. The "positive pole" implies hatred and a ''death wish'' for the parent of the same sex (father for boys and mother for girls), and love and attachment towards the parent of the opposite sex. The "negative pole" implies the hatred and death wish directed at the parent of the opposite sex, and love for the parent of the same sex. A common misunderstanding of the Oedipus complex is "hatred for the father and love for the mother" in both sexes. In fact, most individuals lie somewhere between the two poles of the Oedipus complex, rather than on a single pole. The Oedipus complex is manifested only in very young children. While Freud regarded boys' and girls' relationships to the phallus as central to their psychosexual development, influential psychoanalyst Melanie Klein argued that a greater importance should be attached to the preoedipal phase, focusing on the mother-child relationship.<ref>Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism. Ed Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi. New York: Comulbia University Press, 1995</ref> In [[Carl Jung|Jungian]] thought, the Oedipus complex tends to refer only to the experience of male children, with female children experiencing an [[Electra complex]] in which they regard their mothers as competitor for the exclusive love of their fathers. [[Sigmund Freud|Freud]] considered the successful resolution of the Oedipus complex to be key to the development of gender roles and identity. He posited that boys and girls resolved the conflicts differently as a result of [[castration anxiety]] (for males) and [[penis envy]] (for females). Freud also held that the unsuccessful resolution of the Oedipus complex could result in [[neurosis]], pedophilia, and homosexuality. Most Freud scholars today agree that Freud's views on the Oedipus complex went through a number of stages of development. This is well exemplified in the Simon and Blass (1991) publication, which documents no fewer than six stages of development of Freud's thinking on this subject: *Stage 1. 1897–1909. Following the death of his father in 1896, and his later seeing [[Oedipus Rex]] by [[Sophocles]], Freud begins to use the term "Oedipus" but does not, at this stage, use the term "Oedipus complex". *Stage 2. 1909–1914. Freud refers to Oedipal wishes as being the "nuclear complex" of every neurosis, and later uses term "Oedipus complex" for the first time in 1910. *Stage 3. 1914–1918. Incestuous wishes in relation to the father as well as to the mother are now considered. *Stage 4. 1919–1926. Stage of complete Oedipus complex, in which considerations of identification and bisexuality become more evident in Freud's work. Freud now begins to use the term "complete Oedipus complex". *Stage 5. 1926–1931. Applies the Oedipal theory to religious and cultural themes. *Stage 6. 1931–1938. Gives more attention to the Oedipus complex in females. It can be seen from this model that Freud's writings on the Oedipus complex in females date primarily from his later writings, of the 1920s and 1930s. He believed that the Oedipal wishes in females are initially homosexual desires for the mother, and in 1925, raised the question of how females later abandon this desire for their mother, and shift their sexual desires to their fathers (Appignanesisi & Forrester, 1992). Freud believed that this stems from their disappointment in discovery that their mother lacks a penis. It is noteworthy that, as Slipp (1993) points out, "Nowhere in the Standard Edition of Freud's Collected Works does Freud discuss [[matricide]]" (Slipp, 1993, p95). Freud's final comments on female sexuality occurred in his "New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis" in 1933 (Slipp, 1993) and deal with the different effects of [[penis envy]] and [[castration anxiety]]. While Freud argued that both sexes experience desire for their mothers and aggression towards their fathers, [[Carl Jung]] believed 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. The Electra complex is not part of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Although common usage refers to 'suffering from an Oedipus complex', psychoanalysis does not consider the complex a pathology, but instead a normal stage that all children go through. Oedipal desires are thought to remain heavily repressed and unconscious in the minds of all functioning adults. == Theory of the Oedipus complex == Relying on material from his self-analysis and on [[anthropology|anthropological]] studies of [[totemism]], Freud developed the Oedipus complex as an explanation of the formation of the [[super-ego]]. The traditional paradigm in a (male) child's [[psychology|psychological]] coming-of-age is to first select the mother as the object of [[libido|libidinal]] investment. This however is expected to arouse the father's anger, and the infant surmises that the most probable outcome of this would be [[castration anxiety|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. The infant internalizes the rules pronounced by his father. This is how the [[super-ego]] comes into being. The father now becomes the figure of identification, as the child wants to keep his [[penis]], but resigns from his attempts to take the mother, shifting his libidinal attention to new objects of desire. In contrast, [[Otto Rank]] theorized in the early 1920s that the powerful mother was the source of the super-ego in normal development, a theory that 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.) ===Little Hans: a case study by Freud===<!-- This section is linked from [[Sigmund Freud]] --> "[[Little Hans]]" was a young boy who was the subject of an early but extensive study of castration anxiety and the Oedipus complex by Freud. Hans's neurosis took the shape of a [[phobia]] of horses (''[[Equinophobia]]''). Freud wrote a summary of his treatment of Little Hans, in 1909, in a paper entitled "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy." ===Human universals=== Oedipus complex is on the list of [[Human Universals|human universals]] compiled by [[Donald Brown]].<ref>[http://condor.depaul.edu/~mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm List of human universals]</ref> ==References== {{reflist}} [[Category:Freudian psychology]] [[Category:psychoanalytic theory]] [[ar:عقدة أوديب]] [[bs:Edipov kompleks]] [[ca:Complex d'Èdip]] [[da:Ødipuskompleks]] [[de:Ödipuskonflikt]] [[et:Oidipuse kompleks]] [[es:Complejo de Edipo]] [[eo:Edipa konflikto]] [[fr:Complexe d'Œdipe]] [[gl:Complexo de Edipo]] [[hr:Edipov kompleks]] [[id:Kompleks Oedipus]] [[is:Ödipusarduld]] [[it:Complesso di Edipo]] [[he:תסביך אדיפוס]] [[lt:Edipo kompleksas]] [[jbo:me la .OIdipus. stura]] [[nl:Oedipuscomplex]] [[ja:エディプスコンプレックス]] [[no:Ødipuskompleks]] [[pl:Kompleks Edypa]] [[pt:Complexo de Édipo]] [[ro:Complexul Oedip]] [[ru:Эдипов комплекс]] [[sr:Едипов комплекс]] [[fi:Oidipuskompleksi]] [[sv:Oidipuskomplex]] [[tr:Oedipus kompleksi]] [[uk:Едіпів комплекс]] [[zh:恋母情结]]