Oedipus complex

The Oedipus complex is a set of unconscious and deeply ambivalent desires that a child feels toward its parents: amorous or sexual attraction to the parent of the opposite sex and rivalry or hostility toward the parent of the same sex. It is one of the central concepts of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis.

Freud took the name from Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus Rex, in which the hero unknowingly kills his father, Laius, and marries his mother, Jocasta. For Freud, the power of the play lay in staging desires that, in his view, everyone has harboured in childhood. The idea appears in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), and the term itself was introduced in 1910. Earlier, he had believed that childhood sexual trauma caused neurosis, a view he later qualified in favour of the Oedipal conflict.

In classical theory, the complex emerges around the ages of three to six, during the phallic stage of psychosexual development, and is resolved through identification with the same-sex parent, which would allow the child to take on social norms and a sexual identity. Freud distinguished the positive Oedipus complex, the negative one (love for the same-sex parent) and the complete Oedipus complex, which combines both. To explain girls, he relied on notions such as penis envy and castration anxiety, which are now widely debated.

The concept has been criticised from within and beyond psychoanalysis. Critics question its claim to universality and its heavy weight in explaining development, its difficulty in accounting for girls and for same-sex parenting, and its roots in Freud's own experience and that of his middle-class Viennese patients. Some have also argued that abandoning the seduction theory may have diverted attention from real child sexual abuse. Even so, it remains a key reference for understanding the history of psychoanalysis and the idea that desire and prohibition shape personality.