Oedipus complex

In plain words

The theory says that around the age of three to six, a child's feelings about its parents become intense and mixed: love and wanting for one, jealousy and hostility toward the other. Growing up means giving up the wish and identifying with the parent one rivalled. Freud thought how this goes leaves a mark on conscience and on later choices in love.

Where the idea comes from

In an 1897 letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud wrote that he had found in himself "a constant love for my mother, and jealousy of my father". He described the idea in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899, dated 1900), drawing on Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, and the term itself appeared in his 1910 paper "A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men". The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy relates the theory to his self-analysis after his father's death.

Classically it is a son's desire for his mother and hostility toward his father in the phallic stage (about ages 3 to 6). A parallel pattern for daughters was described, though Freud rejected Jung's term "Electra complex". The resolution produces the superego (see the id, ego and superego).

Jacques Lacan kept the complex central but read it as an entry into language and law: the "ternary relation" of the Oedipus complex frees the child from a dual relationship with the mother and introduces the symbolic order (see the big Other).

How it shows up

Outside the consulting room the term often appears as shorthand for a person's feelings about their parents or about authority. In clinical writing it is a lens: how a person relates to rivalry, to a third person in a pair, and to being judged. It overlaps with the father-imago.

TwentyThird does not apply the Oedipus complex to members. Oneli, the AI agent, asks about parents in the member's own terms and does not assign them a complex.

What it is not

It is not a universal law of development. Bronisław Malinowski's anthropological critique argued it is not universal, and Pierre Bourdieu suggested its success depends on the prestige of Greek culture. Studies of children's attitudes toward parents at that age do not show the predicted shifts (Fonagy and Target, 2006), and Daly and Wilson (1988) found few testable predictions and no evidence of sexual possession of the opposite-sex parent, though they did find parent-child conflict. Many contemporary clinicians use the idea loosely or not at all.