Electra Complex

Electra Complex, in psychoanalysis, sexual desire for the father on the part of the daughter, accompanied by a sense of rivalry with the mother and an unconscious desire for her death.

The term “Electra complex” was coined by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung as a counterpart to the Oedipus complex put forward earlier by Sigmund Freud. Freud considered the Oedipus complex (named after the Greek hero who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother) a fundamental stage in the healthy psychosexual development of the child and said that it occurred between the ages of three and five, when the child experiences intense feelings of love, hate, fear, and jealousy. These feelings are resolved, however, once the child has identified with the parent of the same sex and has learned to repress sexual instincts.

Freud claimed that children who become “fixated” at this, the phallic stage of development (or at any other of the stages Freud outlined—oral, anal, latent, genital), because of undergratification or overgratification of their needs, may experience problems later in life. Such children are said to exhibit characteristics associated with fixation at a stage in their lives—for example, an “oral” personality would be open, chatty, and interested in food and an “anal” personality would be reserved, tidy, and stubborn.

While some evidence exists to support the existence of these personality types, it is by no means clear that they arise as Freud stipulated. Neither have they been found to exist universally, as Freud thought. Anthropological research has suggested that a person’s psychosexual development is heavily influenced by culture and socialization, and that the Electra and Oedipus complexes do not exist everywhere, if they exist at all.

Electra was, in Greek mythology, the daughter of Clytemnestra and her husband Agamemnon, commander of the Greeks during the Trojan War. After returning from the war, Agamemnon was murdered by his wife and her lover, Aegisthus. Electra, fiercely loyal to her father, saved the life of her younger brother Orestes by sending him away from the palace. Despising her mother, Electra nevertheless stayed with her and Aegisthus until Orestes had come of age, returning then to take vengeance for his father’s death. Urged on by Electra, Orestes killed Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.