Understanding the Electra Complex

The term electra complex is used to describe “a girl’s sense of competition with her mother for the affections of her father”. You can compare it with the Oedipus complex, the male version of the complex. The goal for resolving the complex is to lead to identification with the same-sex parent.

Many connect the term with Sigmund Freud, but the term actually was proposed by Carl Gustav Jung. In Neo-Freudian psychology, the term is used to describe a period of the psychosexual development of a girl. During that period, the girl is in the phallic stage, and she forms discrete sexual identity. The complex occurs in the third phallic stage which is between ages of 3 and 6 years old. An informal term for the complex is “Daddy’s Girl”.

The origin of the Electra Complex

The origin of the complex dates back to Ancient times and myth of Electra. According to the legend, Electra plotted matricidal revenge with her brother Orestes against their mother Clytemnestra and their stepfather Aegisthus. They wanted to get a revenge for the murder of their father Agamemnon.

Sigmund Freud used this story and legend to develop the theory of a girl’s sexual competition with her mother for sexual possession of her father. Those are actually the female aspects of the Oedipus complex.

However, it was his collaborator Carl Gustav Jung that proposed the term Electra in 1913.

How does it work?

Freud claimed that during the female’s psychosexual development, a young girl is actually attached to her mother at first. Initially, she feels more connected with her mother.

However, as she develops, and discovers that she does not have a penis, she starts to connect with her father, who actually has male genitalia. The young girl begins to resent her mother, as well as blaming her for “her castration”. What happens next is that the girl starts to identify with and emulate her mother. She does this out of fear of losing her love.

Freudian theory suggests that an important part of the development process is learning to identify the same-sex parent. During this period of psychosexual development, the libidinal energy of a person is focused on different erogenous zones of the body. If something goes wrong during this stage, a child develops a fixation. These fixations lead to anxiety and play a key role in maladaptive behaviors in adulthood.

One of those fixations is the Electra complex, the female version of the Oedipus complex. Just for info, Freud described the Oedipus complex as a “boy’s longing for his mother and competition with his father”. The boy actually has a desire to replace his father as the sexual partner for his mother. This leads to rivalry between the father and the son. At the same time, the young boy also develops a fear that his father will discover these fears. To resolve the anxiety, the boy begins to identify with his father and develop a desire to be more like his father. According to Freud and his followers, at this stage children accept their gender roles and develop an understanding of their sexuality.

How to counter

There are several defense mechanisms that play a role in resolving the complex. The most basic way to resolve the conflict is to repress the urges and desires from conscious memory. The primal ID requires that the child possess her mother and then competes with her father.

During the process of resolving and repressing desires and urges, an identification process occurs. During the identification process, a girl begins to identify with her mother. At this point, she incorporates same personality characteristics.

This process allows the girl to internalize her mother’s morality. She implements those characteristics in her super-ego, which in the end, allows her to follow the rules her parents and society set.

Electra complex in popular culture

One of the most controversial examples of the Electra complex is Ivanka and Donald Trump. If you look at all the photos between these two, you will clearly notice a sexual energy between them.

But let’s get into more fiction. For example, many argue that Cinderella to be the perfect example of the Electra complex. In the story, Cinderella has two maternal figures. The first one is her stepmother which represents society, and her fairy godmother.

In poetry, Sylvia Plath uses the Electra complex for her poem “Daddy”, published in 1962. In the poem, a woman, afflicted with an unresolved complex, conflates her dead father and derelict husband in dealing with being emotionally abandoned.