Electra Complex - Background

Background

As a psychoanalytic metaphor for daughter–mother psychosexual conflict, the Electra complex derives from the 5th-century BC Greek mythologic character Electra, who plotted matricidal revenge with Orestes, her brother, against Clytemnestra, their mother, and Aegisthus, their stepfather, for their murder of Agamemnon, their father, (cf. Electra, by Sophocles). Sigmund Freud developed the female aspects of the sexual development theory — describing the psychodynamics of a girl’s sexual competition with mother for sexual possession of father — as the feminine Oedipus attitude and the negative Oedipus complex; yet it was his collaborator Carl Jung who coined the term Electra complex in 1913. Freud rejected Jung's term as psychoanalytically inaccurate: "that what we have said about the Oedipus complex applies with complete strictness to the male child only, and that we are right in rejecting the term 'Electra complex', which seeks to emphasize the analogy between the attitude of the two sexes".

In forming a discreted sexual identity (ego) a girl's decisive psychosexual experience is the Electra complex — daughter–mother competition for possession of father. It is in the phallic stage (ages 3–6), when children become aware of their bodies, the bodies of other children, and the bodies of their parents that they gratify physical curiosity by undressing and exploring each other and their genitals — the erogenous center — of the phallic stage; thereby learning the physical differences between "male" and "female" and the gender differences between "boy" and "girl". When a girl's initial sexual attachment to mother ends upon discovering that she has no penis, she then transfers her libidinal desire (sexual attachment) to father and increases sexual competition with her mother.