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Concept
Oedipus complex
Summary
The Oedipus complex (also spelled Œdipus complex) is an idea in psychoanalytic theory. The complex is an ostensibly universal phase in the life of a young boy in which, to try to immediately satisfy basic desires, he unconsciously wishes to have sex with his mother and disdains his father for having sex and being satisfied before him. Sigmund Freud introduced the idea in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), and coined the term in his paper A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men (1910).
Freud later developed the ideas of castration anxiety and penis envy to refer to the differences of the sexes in their experience of the complex, especially as their observations appear to become cautionary; an incest taboo results from these cautions. Subsequently, according to sexual difference, a positive Oedipus complex refers to a child's sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent and hatred for the same-sex parent, while a negative Oedipus complex refers to the desire for the same-sex parent and hatred for the opposite-sex parent. Freud considered that the child's identification with the same-sex parent is the socially acceptable outcome of the complex. Meanwhile, 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, whose depiction in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex served as a reference point for Freud's idea. Freud rejected the term Electra complex, introduced by Carl Jung in 1913 as a proposed equivalent complex among young girls.
Critics have charged that, by attributing sexual desire to children, the theory has served as a cover-up for sexual abuse of children. Scholars and psychologists have criticized it as incapable of applying to same-sex parents, and as incompatible with the widespread aversion to incest.
Oedipus refers to a 5th-century BC Greek mythological character Oedipus, who unwittingly kills his father, Laius, and marries his mother, Jocasta. A play based on the myth, Oedipus Rex, was written by Sophocles, ca.
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