Oedipus complex

In classical psychoanalytic theory, the Oedipus complex is a son's sexual desire for his mother and concomitant hostility toward his father, first formed during the phallic stage of psychosexual development. A daughter's sexual desire for her father and hostility toward her mother is referred to as the feminine (or female) Oedipus complex. The general concept was considered by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), although the term itself was introduced in his paper "A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men" (1910). Freud's ideas of castration anxiety and penis envy refer to the differences of the sexes in their experience of the Oedipus complex. The complex is thought to persist into adulthood as an unconscious psychic structure which can assist in social adaptation but also be the cause of neurosis. According to sexual difference, a positive Oedipus complex refers to the child's sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent and aversion to the same-sex parent, while a negative Oedipus complex refers to the desire for the same-sex parent and aversion to the opposite-sex parent. Freud considered that the child's identification with the same-sex parent is the socially acceptable outcome of the complex. Failure to move on from the compulsion to satisfy a basic desire and to reconcile with the same-sex parent leads to neurosis. The theory is named after the mythological figure of Oedipus, an ancient Theban king who discovers he has unknowingly murdered his father and married his mother, whose depiction in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex had a profound influence on Freud. Freud rejected the Electra complex, introduced by Carl Jung in 1913 as a proposed equivalent complex among young girls. Some critics have argued that Freud, by abandoning his earlier seduction theory (which attributed neurosis to childhood sexual abuse) and replacing it with the theory of...