What is the Electra complex?

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

This author, as a member of the psychodynamic current and a disciple of Sigmund Freud, looked at the development of personality during the early stages of childhood to, from there, propose ideas about how these experiences leave an imprint on how 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 the Oedipus complex from Freud to the case of women. However, it is presented as something more than a simple adaptation of the Oedipus to the female case. Let's see what this is about.

Starting with the precedent: Freud's theories

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

The idea from which Freud started was that, depending on the way in which we vent our sexual impulses during childhood and the first adolescence (and the success we have in the task of correctly regulating the libido) we will develop more or less psychological problems when we reach the Adult stage.

Thus, if we do not properly satisfy that part of our unconscious mind that, according to Freud, governs our way of behaving, we will develop fixations that can lead to mental disorders and 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 manages to give it an outlet, it leads to the accumulation of this energy, to the pressure of the rest of psychic instances, and to aberrant ways of behave.

The Oedipus complex

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

In it, male children go through the following phases:

• They begin to develop a strong desire for their mothers (or towards women who exercise the role of mothers).
• They observe that the mother has a strong emotional and intimate bond with her husband, that is, her father, and that they spend time alone.
• They develop jealousy towards their parents and they begin to think of him in hostile terms. But, at the same time, they fear them, since 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 towards his mother.. The way in which the greatest possible punishment is symbolized is castration.

Carl Jung's Electra Complex

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

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

Who was Electra?

Jung was an academic very focused on the study of symbology, since it 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 your theory about archetypes). That is why, among other things, that to define the Oedipus complex he looked at the part of Homeric Greek mythology in which the life of Electra, the daughter of Agamemnon Y Clytemnestra, king and queen of Mycenae.

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

The Electra Complex Features

The Electra complexcan be understood as the female version of the Oedipus complex, but it is not exactly like this. Although it is true that the initial situation is similar, the attraction towards the father by the daughter, and that this infatuation of the father causes a rivalry towards the mother to arise, there are differences between the theory of the Oedipus complex and that of the complex of Electra.

The bond with the mother

Carl Jung believed that the emotional bond between daughter and her mother is closer than that between son and 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 mothers, although shortly after they turn to focus only on the father as a result of a mechanism of conservation of the species.

Fear of punishment

While in the Oedipus complex the male child is afraid that his father will cast him down, in the Electra complex the daughter concludes that she has already been castrated.

The Electra Complex Resolution

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 boys and girls. In some way, they indicate how the psychic development of human beings occurs from their first years of life.

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

A reminder

It should be remembered that both the Electra complex and the Oedipus complex are part of totally outdated and widely rejected in contemporary scientific psychology; This means that no father or mother should be afraid of developing bad bonds with her children through cause of a mismanagement of these processes that, in reality, only exist in the theories of Freud and of Jung.

The theories proposed by these two authors use soft thinking and metaphors as forms understanding the human mind, this fact served so that philosophers of science, among whom highlighted Karl Popper, rejected the proposals of these authors as being too interpretable and ambiguous, of little use to analyze specific cases.

However, this does not mean that it is not useful to know these theories, since are deeply embedded in the cultural heritage 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 hermeneutical tool with which to analyze and interpret historical, social and political events of all class.

Bibliographic references:

• Arlow, B. (1964), Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Structural Theory. New York: International Universities Press.
• Clay, C. (2018). Mazes: Emma, ​​her marriage to Carl Jung, and the early years of psychoanalysis. Madrid: Three Points Editions.
• Frey-Rohn, L. (1991, 2006). From Freud to Jung. Mexico: Economic Culture Fund.
• Grünbaum, A. (1984). The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique. University of California Press.