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Oedipus: Oedipus Complex
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The Oedipus complex in Freudian psychoanalysis refers to a stage of psychosexual development in childhood where children of both sexes regard their father as an adversary and competitor for the exclusive love of their mother. The name derives from the Greek myth of Oedipus, who unknowingly kills his father, Laius, and marries his mother, Jocasta. Further, for girls Freud came to regard the relationship with the mother as of great importance in understanding her psychosexual development, which affects her entry into the Oedipus complex.
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Everything you wanted to know about Freud but were afraid to ask You've heard of the id, the ego and the Oedipus complex, but what does the father of psychoanalysis have to offer you 2? As a new English translation of Sigmund Freud's work is about to be published, Gyles Brandreth interprets the jargon
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Although common usage refers to 'suffering from an Oedipus complex', psychoanalysis does not consider the complex a pathology, but instead a perfectly normal stage that all children go through. Oedipal desires are thought to remain heavily repressed and unconscious in the minds of all functioning adults.
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Freud believed that this Oedipus complex is a core element of the human psyche. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" href="/index.pl?node=%3Cem%3EThree%20Essays%20on%20the%20Theory%20of%20Sexuality%3C%2Fem%3E" class='populated' >Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he wrote, "The Oedipus complex is the nuclear complex of the neuroses...Every new arrival on this planet is faced with the task of mastering the Oedipus complex; anyone who fails to do so falls a victim to neurosis" (290). To Freud, 'neurosis' is anything from anxiety to "homosexuality" (644). The overcoming of this complex, according to Freud, is something common to all human experience. Because literature describes and represents human experience, it has long portrayed the Oedipus complex, often unconsciously.
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"Little Hans" was a young boy who was the subject of an early but extensive study of castration anxiety and the Oedipus complex by Freud. Hans' neurosis took the shape of a phobia of horses (Equinophobia). Freud wrote a summary of his treatment of Little Hans, in 1909, in a paper entitled "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy." This was one of just a few case studies that Freud published.
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There have been numerous critics of Freud's interpretation of the Oedipus complex. Some of them come from the Marxist camp, others from the feminist or post-structuralist. Criticisms of Oedipal theory... serve to complement Freud's original insights; they provide new and fresh perspectives on the circumstances and consequences of the Oedipus complex and their function in literature.
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Oedipus Complex