Psychology is an abstract discipline that helps us understand thoughts, emotions, and behaviors on a cognitive level. Many of these concepts were brought up to the table by the Father of the Psychodynamic theory, Sigmund Freud. Among all the wonders that Freud discovered, he also pointed out some rather unpleasant concepts. One of them is based on an ancient Greek tragedy that can be too f*cked up to be real: Oedipus.
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The name Oedipus might ring a bell to many. If not, here’s a quick history recap: Oedipus is the tragic hero of Sophocles’s play. He’s Thebes’s prince who slayed his father and unknowingly married his mother. The fact that his wife was actually his mother and that his children were… basically his siblings too, inspired psychologists to interpret this scandalous story on a humanitarian and cognitive level. Who would ever, in their fair sense, marry one of their parents? The moral dilemma of this story is further analyzed to a psychoanalytical approach by Sigmund Freud in his book The Theory of Dreams. Here is introduced a concept, later called the Oedipus complex, “a psychoanalytic theory proposing that children have possessive sexual desires for their opposite-sex parent while viewing their same-sex parent as a rival and that the complex is resolved when children overcome their incestuous and competitive emotions and begin to view their same-sex parent as a role model”. (Britannica, 2020). Freud considers this as part of the psychosexual stages of development. He states that “[t]he Oedipal complex occurs during the Phallic stage of development (ages 3-6) in which the source of libido (life force) is concentrated in the erogenous zones of the child’s body” (Freud, 1905). Hereby, this signifies that before learning how to properly write and many years before reaching sexual maturity, some toddlers and young children present some sort of sexual instinct. Isn’t that f ’d up? Signs of this phenomenon in children are:
- Envying the parent of the same sex
- The male child is possessive of his mother and does not want his father to touch her
- The boy demands to sleep between his parents
- The boy wants his father to go away, so he can take his father’s place in his mother’s life
Similar to the Oedipus complex, there’s the Electra complex which was established by Carl Jung. They are fundamentally the same, but in Electra complex, it is a girl who has unconscious sexual desires or attraction for her father. Some suggest that little girls that experience Electra complex, and claim that they want to marry their father and develop “penis envy.” Here’s an insight about the term:
“Because she [the child] wants to sexually possess a parent and she can’t possess her mother without a penis, she tries to possess her father instead. At this stage, she develops subconscious sexual feelings toward her father.”
During Freud’s and Jung’s time period, there was poor knowledge regarding female psychology. Therefore, “penis envy” might or might not be accurate at all. However, here are some Electra complex signs:
- Disliking your mother for no obvious reason
- Fixating on only what her father does
- Wanting to be overly involved in everything your father is doing
Oedipus complex? Electra complex? You might think to yourself that you would never do such a thing. Unfortunately, there’s something called infantile amnesia, which is “the inability of adults to recollect early episodic memories… associated with the rapid forgetting that occurs in childhood” (Alberini, 2017). This phenomenon increases the possibility that you might have experienced this horrifying Freudian theory and not remember a single thing.
But hey, take a breath! Currently, there isn’t a firm base to state that every human indefinitely goes through the Oedipal or Electra complex. So, you can relax. For now…
References:
Alberini, C. M., & Travaglia, A. (2017). Infantile Amnesia: A Critical Period of Learning to Learn and Remember. The Journal of neuroscience: the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 37(24), 5783–5795. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0324-17.2017
Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia (2020, October 2). Oedipus complex. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/Oedipus-complex
Freud, S. (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. Se, 7.
McLeod, S. A. (2018, September 03). Oedipal complex. Simply Psychology. www.simplypsychology.org/oedipal-complex.html
What Is the Oedipus Complex? Study.com. (n.d.). Retrieved March 23, 2022, from https://study.com/learn/lesson/what-is-oedipus-complex-freud.html