A daughter's attitude of desire for her father and hostility toward her mother is referred to as the feminine Oedipus complex. Freud's ideas of castration anxiety and penis envy refer to the differences of the sexes in their experience of the Oedipus complex.
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. 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 for the mythological figure 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 term Electra complex , [ 7 ] introduced by Carl Jung in [ 8 ] 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 the Oedipus complex, instigated a cover-up for sexual abuse of children. Some scholars and psychologists have criticized the theory for being incapable of applying to same-sex parents, and as being incompatible with the widespread aversion to incest.
Oedipus refers to a 5th-century BC Greek mythological character Oedipus , who unknowingly kills his father, Laius , and marries his mother, Jocasta. A play based on the myth, Oedipus Rex , was written by Sophocles , c. Modern productions of Sophocles' play were staged in Paris and Vienna in the 19th century and were phenomenally successful in the s and s. The Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud — attended.
In his book The Interpretation of Dreams , first published in , he proposes that an Oedipal desire is a universal psychological phenomenon innate phylogenetic to human beings, and the cause of much unconscious guilt. Freud believed that the Oedipal sentiment has been inherited through the millions of years it took for humans to evolve from apes. Freud describes the Oedipus myth's timeless appeal thus:.
