Oedipus, Electra and Freud

From our basic knowledge of Oedipus The King we know that Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother. Freud took this story and developed the theory of the Oedipus complex. It states that boys will compete with their fathers for their mother's attention because they want to have sex with them. Honestly, there is a lot more to it than just that. You can read up on it and it's gross, but no one uses Freud anyway because his theories are outdated, sexist superstitions most of which do not have any clinical evidence. Sophocles wrote another play, however, which is related to one written by Aeschylus. The Oresteia is told in 3 parts and follows Agamemnon's life and death after the trojan war and then his son Orestes revenge on his mother for killing Agamemnon. In the second part of the story during The Libation Bearers we meet Electra, Orestes' sister, and daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. She only serves as Clytemsetra's foil in that she accepts she can't challenge societal norms of misogyny and loves her brother more than her mother. In Sophocles Electra she becomes a complex character, questioning herself if exacting revenge on her mother is the correct thing to do. She survives as basically a slave in her own home which fuels her motivation. It's an interesting read and brings into question human morality and justice. Freud did not coin the term "the Electra complex", it was actually his contemporary Carl Jung. Freud rejected the term Electra complex but developed many of the underlying theories for this "negative Oedipus complex". It basically states that girls will compete with their mothers for their father affection until they have replaced them as the sexual partner. Again, really gross and really incesty. Jung and Freud were actually close friends and colleagues, but it was Freud's obsession with psychosexual behaviors that lead Jung to leave him. Both of these theories are pretty much the same in that children will fight to compete with one parent for the others attention, sometimes even the kids even kill them in the process. These complexes, according to Freud, are normal and happen during a developmental stage between the ages of 3 and 6. However, children don't realize they are doing this because it is an unconscious desire occurring from the Id which is the instinctual and impulsive part of the mind in Freudian Psychology. I thought this would be interesting to blog about because after reading Electra I stumbled across the complex while doing some reading in a psychology book.