Do you know the Electra Complex?

The Electra complex was proposed by Carl Gustav Jung to adapt the well-known Oedipus complex to the case of women. While the Oedipus complex refers to that love, perhaps obsession, that children feel for their mothers, the Electra complex indicates that same love, but from daughters to fathers.

Freud thought that depending on how we control our sexual impulses in childhood, how repressed they are, we may or may not have psychological problems in adulthood. Thus, for the initial psychoanalysis, this complex would not only exist but would be the first cause of many apparently inexplicable evils of the adult stage.

The story of Electra

When Jung focused on the Oedipus complex to discover its variant towards daughter-father, he had to go to Greek mythology to look for answers and give it a name that was faithful to its definition. In doing so he discovered the story of Electra.

According to Greek mythology, Electra was the daughter of Agamemnon and Climtemnestra. Her mother, and it is believed that she was also her lover, killed her father when he returned from the war that had taken place in Troy. When Electra found out she contacted her brother to kill both her mother and her lover.

This fact made Jung choose the appropriate term for the complex he had described. A complex that develops and manifests around 3 and 6 years of age. But, although it may be thought that it lasts a lifetime, the most common thing is that it lasts for about 2 or 3 years, and then disappears.

It is true that Although it may seem pathological, most children tend to show attachment to their parents.. This does not mean that it is negative, although you do have to know how to manage it, so that as children grow they gain independence from their parents.

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The Electra complex

The Electra complex could be more dissimilated than the Oedipus complex, since it is believed that the degree of attachment is much greater in girls than in boys. The most notable features of this complex would be:

They develop a strong desire for their parents: a desire that they transfer to other men who also maintain a father’s role. As they grow up, they will look for similarities between their father and their potential partners.They live in constant competition with their mothers: The girls observe that their father spends time with their mother, that they have a special connection and that causes them to have to compete with her for the father’s attention.They develop jealousy towards their mother: the mother is the competition, the one who monopolizes the object of desire of the daughter who knows that she has certain limitations in the field. For this reason, the daughter will live with continuous jealousy towards her mother.

These are some of the features that may be a wake-up call about this complex. But why would it be developed? Because, as Freud said, the daughter has not satisfactorily passed the stage of her sexual development, the so-called phallic stage.

The curious thing about the Electra complex is that at first the girls feel closer to their mothers than to their fathers.. The problem arises when they are aware of the differences between the male and female sex. They recognize that her father is different from her and her mother. That is when her rivalry with her mother begins to receive the affection of her father, that person who is so different from her, who makes her feel protected from her and who, for her, is her authority.

What is the biggest difference between the Electra complex and the Oedipus complex? That Children who suffer from the Oedipus complex fear their father, because they see him as someone superior to them. Therefore, they would try to hide the desire they feel towards their mother, since they do not want to be discovered. The same does not happen with girls, who would clearly compete with their mothers and would not be afraid to confront them.

All of these situations could be normal, as long as they did not exceed time. The problem would appear when they keep generating obsessions and a constant search for that perfect partner who resembles the desired parent. In this way, in the Electra complex, the woman seeks to feel protected, as with her father.

This complex belongs to the origin of psychoanalysis and currently has insufficient clinical relevance to understand it with the importance it has had in initial psychoanalytic theory. Nevertheless, It is part of that revolution that psychoanalysis proposedhighlighting the importance of childhood sexuality and, more importantly, the significance of the attachment bonds that are formed at an early age.

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