What is the Electra complex?

Women seem to be "in love" with their parents. Why does this happen?

The Electra complex is one of the most famous concepts proposed by Carl Gustav Jung.

As a member of the psychodynamic movement and a disciple of Sigmund Freud, Jung looked at the development of personality during the early stages of childhood and, from there, proposed ideas on how these experiences leave an imprint on the way human beings behave and think once they have become adults.

The Electra complex, linked to the theory of psychosexual development, is Jung's way of adapting Freud's Oedipus complex to the case of women. However, it is posited as something more than a simple adaptation of the Oedipus to the female case. Let us see what it is all about.

Beginning with the precedent: Freud's theories.

As we saw in the article on Freud's theory of psychosexual development, the father of psychoanalysis came to attach great importance to the way in which sexuality is managed during the first months and years of our life.

Freud's idea was that, depending on the way in which we give vent to our sexual impulses during childhood and early adolescence (and the success we have in the task of regulating the libido correctly), we will develop more or less psychological problems when we reach adulthood.

Thus, if we do not correctly satisfy that part of our unconscious mind which, according to Freud, governs the way we behave, we will develop fixations that can lead to the development of a fixation, we will develop fixations that can give way to mental disorders and to behaviors that were considered sexually aberrant. From the psychoanalytic point of view, sexual energy acts as one of the main sources of motivation, so that if it is not given an outlet, it leads to the accumulation of this energy, to the pressure of the rest of psychic instances, and to aberrant ways of behaving.

The Oedipus complex

The Oedipus complex is one of the phenomena which, according to Sigmund Freud, appears in the so-called phallic stage, appears in the so-called phallic stage of psychosexual development, between 3 and 6 years of age.between the ages of 3 and 6 years.

In this stage, male children go through the following phases:

• They begin to develop a strong desire for their mothers They begin to develop a strong desire for their mothers (or for women in the role of mothers).
• They observe that the mother has a strong emotional and intimate bond with her husband, i.e. the with her husband, i.e., the father, and that they spend time alone.
• They develop jealousy towards their fathers and begin to think of him in hostile terms. But, at the same time, they fear them, as the father figure is seen as a superior and stronger version of themselves.
• At that moment, each child fears that his father will discover the feelings he has for his mother..... The way in which the greatest possible punishment is symbolized is castration.

Carl Jung's Electra complex

Despite the fact that most of the people he dealt with in the clinical setting were female patients, Sigmund Freud developed a theory of psychosexual development that basically focused on the case of what happens in men, leaving aside the development of women.

Carl Jung attempted to solve this "theoretical vacuum" by developing his theory of the Electra complex around 1912.

Who was Electra?

Jung was a scholar very focused on the study of symbology, as this had a lot of weight in his ideas about the way in which the human mind is, in part, collective and subject to the symbols used in culture. (see his theory on archetypes). That is why, among other things, in order to define the Oedipus complex he looked at the part of Homeric Greek mythology in which the life of Electrathe daughter of Agamemnon y Clytemnestraking and queen of Mycenae.

Legend has it that it was Electra's own mother, or Electra's lover, who killed Agamemnon after he returned from the Trojan War. Electra then decided that her mother and the lover must die, and encouraged her brother Orestes to avenge their father by carrying out the murders.

The characteristics of the Electra complex

The Electra complex can be understood as the female version of the Oedipus complex.but it is not exactly the same as this one. While it is true that the initial situation is similar, the attraction towards the father on the part of the daughter, and that this infatuation with the father causes a rivalry towards the mother to arise, there are differences between the theory of the Oedipus complex and that of the Electra complex.

The bond with the mother

Carl Jung believed that the emotional bond between the daughter and her mother is closer than that between the son and the father, so that the Electra complex is usually more concealed, since the degree of attachment is greater and compensates for the rivalry between mother and daughter.

An incipient Oedipus

According to Jung, girls are initially attracted to both their fathers and their mothers, although shortly thereafter they come to focus only on the father as a result of a mechanism of conservation of the species.

Fear of punishment

Whereas in the Oedipus complex the male child is afraid that his father will castrate him, in the Electra complex the daughter comes to the conclusion that she has already been castrated.

The resolution of the Electra complex

According to both Freud and Jung, the passage through the Oedipus and Electra complexes, respectively, are phases that are part of the normal development of most children.. In a way, they point out how the psychic development of human beings takes place from their first years of life.

That is why they believed that both phenomena were resolved within 2 or 3 years, while in a few cases the rivalry between sons and fathers and daughters and mothers remains entrenched and causes their relationship to deteriorate.

A reminder

It is worth remembering that both the Electra complex and the Oedipus complex are part of totally outdated ideas and widely rejected in contemporary scientific psychologyThis means that no parent should be afraid of developing a bad bond with their children because of a mismanagement of these processes which, in reality, only exist in the theories of Freud and Jung.

The theories proposed by these two authors use soft thinking and metaphors as ways of understanding the human mind, a fact that led philosophers of science, among them Karl Popper, to reject the approaches of these authors as being too interpretable and ambiguous, of little use for analyzing concrete cases.

However, this does not mean that it is not useful to be familiar with these theories, since are deeply embedded in the cultural legacy of Western countries.. Thus, the Electra complex has been used in literature, cinema and all kinds of forms of artistic expression, and even as a hermeneutic tool with which to analyze and interpret historical, social and political events of all kinds.

Bibliographical references:

• Arlow, B. (1964), Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Structural Theory. New York: International Universities Press.
• Clay, C. (2018). Labyrinths: Emma, her marriage to Carl Jung and the early years of psychoanalysis. Madrid: Tres Puntos Ediciones.
• Frey-Rohn, L. (1991, 2006). From Freud to Jung. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
• Grünbaum, A. (1984). The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique. University of California Press.