The Electra Complex was proposed by Carl Gustav Jung to adapt the famous Oedipus Complex to the case of women, while the Oedipus Complex refers to the love, perhaps the obsession, that children have for their mother, the Electra Complex indicates that same love, but that of the girls towards their parents.
Freud believed that depending on how we control our sexual impulses in childhood, the more repressed they are, we may or may not have psychological problems in adulthood. Therefore, for early psychoanalysis, this complex would not only exist, but would be the primary. causes many seemingly unexplained problems in adulthood.
- When Jung focused on the Oedipus complex to discover his daughter-father variant.
- He had to travel through Greek mythology to seek answers and give a name true to his definition.
- And in doing so.
- Discover Electra’s story.
According to Greek mythology, Electra was Agamemnon’s daughter and Clitemnestre. Se believes her mother and lover killed her father on her return from the war in Troy. When Electra discovered this, she contacted her brother to kill both her mother and her. lover of the father. .
This led Jung to choose the right term for the complex he had described, a complex that develops and manifests around the age of 3 and 6, however, although it is believed to last a lifetime, most commonly it stays present for another 2 or 3 years, then disappears.
Although the Oedipus complex and the Electre complex may seem similar in the parallelism of their thinking, they are very different from each other.
It is true that while it may seem pathological, most children tend to show attachment to their parents, this does not mean that it is a negative thing, but it is necessary to know how to deal with it so that as children grow up they can become independent from their parents.
It is believed that the degree of attachment is much higher for girls than for boys. The most notable features of the Electra complex are:
Here are some of the features that can draw attention to identifying this community, but why is it growing?Because, as Freud said, the girl did not pass the stage of her sexual development, the so-called factual phase.
The curious thing about the Electra Complex is that at first girls feel closer to their mother than to their father, the problem arises when they realize the differences between male and female, they recognize that the father is different from her and her mother. Is this where the rivalry with your mother begins, to receive the affection of your father, that person so different from her?It makes her feel protected and that’s authority for her.
What is the biggest difference between the Electra complex and the Oedipus complex?That the children who suffer from the Oedipus complex fear their father, because they see him as someone superior to them, so they try to hide the desire for their mothers because I do not want to be discovered It is not the same with girls, who clearly become rivals of their mothers and are not afraid to face them.
All these situations can be normal, as long as they do not exceed time, the problem arises when kept in time, generating obsessions and a constant search for the perfect partner that resembles the desired parent. Thus, in the complex of Electra, the woman seeks to feel protected, as she would feel with her father.
This complex belongs to the origin of psychoanalysis and currently has insufficient clinical relevance to be understood with the importance it had in initial psychoanalytic theory; however, it is part of the revolution that has proposed psychoanalysis, emphasizing the importance of child sexuality and, above all, the transcendence of attachment ties that form at a younger age.