In Freudian psychoanalysis the Oedipus complex is a crucial process in the normal psychological development of infants.
It centres on the male infant’s unconscious sexual desire for the mother. Occurring between the ages of three and five years, the complex is initiated with the infant’s realisation that he is competing with the father-figure to be the object of the mother’s desire. This competition breeds feelings of hostility and rivalry in the infant toward his father. It causes the infant to fear he will lose his power to possess the love-object (his mother) because of the presence of the father-figure. (Freud called this fear “castration anxiety”.) This is the source of the infant’s unconscious wish to eliminate the father.
According to Freud, resolution to the complex occurs when the infant realises and accepts the father-figure to be the true object of the mother’s (sexual) desire. Because the father has won the mother’s desire, the infant views the father as an ideal object. This ideal view of the father is what shapes the infant’s super-ego. The super-ego is the conscious part of the mind. Its motivations are dictated by cultural and social convention, and it emulates the behaviour of the ideal object (the father). The super-ego counteracts what it judges to be inappropriate desires in the “id” (unconsciousness), such as sexual attraction toward the mother. If the Oedipus complex fails to operate normally (e.g. if a father-figure is missing) then the super-ego will be malformed, and will be incapable of repressing the desires of the id, resulting in forms of mental illness such as neurosis.
How does the complex apply to girls? Freud’s research on women was restricted due to the social climate of his time; hence the details of the feminine Oedipus complex are vague. However, a basic role reversal can be applied. As with the boy, the female infant is initially attached to the mother. The girl comes to realise that the father-figure has something that she is lacking- a penis (not a penis in the literal sense, but rather the qualities symbolically associated with a penis, such as masculine authority). She therefore attaches herself to the father-figure, seeing him capable of satisfying her desire (providing her with what she lacks). She becomes hostile towards the mother because, seeing that the mother lacks a penis, she blames the mother for her own lack.
Confusion arises as to how resolution occurs in the feminine Oedipus complex. One accepted possibility is that the female infant fears losing the love of her mother, so she revokes hostility and re-attaches herself to the mother, who forms her super-ego. Personally I place more credence in the theory that resolution occurs when the female infant accepts she cannot possess the “penis”, and forms her super-ego on the model of the father-figure, who she sees as the ideal object because it possesses a “penis”.
