Electra complex

The Electra complex is a stage in Freudian psychosexual development in which a female child unconsciously desires her father and experiences a desire to eliminate her mother. It is the female version of the more famous Oedipus complex. Jung, the first to use the term, chose to follow Freud’s model in taking the name of the complex from Greek mythology. Electra is a bereaved daughter who pushes her brother Orestes to kill their mother and her lover and thus avenge the murder of their father. Feminist psychologists viewed the Electra complex as sexist, although some modified the Freudian view. As Freud’s influence waned, the Electra complex became less important in psychology, although it continued to be employed by literary critics. Twentieth-century playwrights and poets, perhaps most notably Eugene O’Neill and Sylvia Plath, found the idea useful in writing about family relationships.

Brief History

The mythical Electra is a character in the plays of the three great Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The three use the same basic story. Agamemnon—king of Argos (Mycenae in Homer) and the leader of the Greek forces during the Trojan War—offended Artemis, goddess of the hunt, and the Greeks were denied the favorable winds they needed to sail for Troy. To appease Artemis, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia. Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, fiercely angry over the death of her daughter, took Agamemnon’s enemy as her lover. The two murdered Agamemnon upon his homecoming. They, in turn, were murdered by Agamemnon’s son Orestes. Each of the tragedians presents a different view of Electra’s character, but in all three plays, Electra mourns the loss of her father and demands his murder be avenged by the deaths of Clytemnestra and her lover.

Carl Jung introduced the term "Electra complex" in 1913, but he never fully defined the term. Some psychologists have faulted Jung’s choice of the term, pointing out that Electra commits neither incest nor murder and is instead a relatively passive figure who makes a murderer of her brother.

Freud himself referred to the Electra complex only three times, always in parentheses or footnotes. He explicitly rejected the term, preferring his own designation of the female Oedipus complex. Freud believed the phallus was central to the identity of both male and female. He viewed it as so important to the male child that, motivated by castration anxiety, the male surrenders his love for his mother and identifies with his father. In this manner, the male acquires his gender identity. The female child, recognizing that the penis is desirable, turns from the mother to the father in an attempt to restore the penis she blames her mother for taking from her. Because the female complex is never fully resolved, female moral development is inferior to that of the male. Freud’s ideas about the female Oedipus complex appear to have shifted. In 1931, he wrote that only the male child experiences the conflict of simultaneously loving one parent and hating the other. Later, he stated that remaining in the “feminine Oedipus attitude” was harmless because it prepared a woman to choose a paternalistic husband and submit to his authority.

Impact

In the twenty-first century, the Electra complex, as Freud described it, has been largely rejected by modern psychology due to its controversial and outdated ideas. Feminists have been particularly critical of Freud’s phallocentrism. Some have accepted the essential idea of the Electra complex but have argued that it is not the penis of a physical father that the female desires but rather the power that the organ represents in a patriarchal culture. A number of feminists have offered competing views of the Electra complex. Sheila Powell sees Electra’s story as revealing the darker aspect of the mother-daughter relationship, the antithesis of the Demeter-Persephone myth. Doris Bernstein argues that Electra is an unsatisfactory mirror for the Oedipus myth because she is sexless, passive, and in denial about paternal abandonment. The last state leads her to an unnatural rage turned on her mother.

Literary scholar Jill Scott contends that Electra has exercised an appeal stronger than that of Oedipus for contemporary artists precisely because her story lends itself to consideration of the limits of gender roles and the privileges of male power. Unlike Oedipus—whose story has become inseparable from Freud’s use of it—Electra, freed from such linkage by Freud’s inability to develop a satisfactory female version of the Oedipus complex, can be shaped to serve the purposes of creative artists. Literary and cultural critics have interpreted The Little Mermaid, both Hans Christian Andersen’s original tale and Disney’s movie version, as the story of an Electra complex that is successfully resolved when the mermaid replaces her father as love object with a young man and renounces her sea identity and assumes human legs, signifying her sexual availability.

Many American writers of the late 1920s and 1930s incorporated Freud’s theories into their work. Freud’s influence is obvious in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and in Eugene O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (1928), and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1941–1943). But it is O’Neill’s trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra, produced and published in 1931 and based on the Oresteia trilogy of Aeschylus, in which the Electra complex is most substantive. Set in New England during the era of the American Civil War, the characters and their relationships echo both the story of Aeschylus’s drama and the tensions of Freudian psychology. The Electra complex in its father-lover, mother-hatred, and brother-displacement are all present. O’Neill even has Christine (Clytemnestra) directly accuse Lavinia (Electra) of usurping her role as wife and mother.

The Electra complex has also been used by women poets, from modernist poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) to Sharon Olds, winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 2013. However, confessional poet Sylvia Plath may be the poet most associated with the term. Plath used the Electra complex in several poems, but she identified the speaker of “Daddy,” her most famous poem, as “a girl with an Electra complex.” The poem combines a simplistic, near-primitive rhythm with a caustic tone that variously labels the speaker’s dead father as a Nazi, vampire, and devil, eventually conflating him with her husband, whom she also was forced to kill. Despite the predictable autobiographical elements of the father who died and abandoned her and the unfaithful husband, critics have generally agreed that the fathers from whom the speaker must violently free herself are the patriarchs who would silence her creative voice.

Bibliography

Dundes, Lauren, and Alan Dundes. "The Trident and the Fork: Disney's 'The Little Mermaid' as a Male Construction of an Electral Fantasy." Psychoanalytic Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 2000, pp. 117-1301.

Freud, Hendrika C. Electra vs Oedipus: The Drama of the Mother-Daughter Relationship. Translated by Marjolijn de Jager, Routledge, 2011.

Huss, Roy. The Mindscapes of Art: Dimensions of the Psyche in Fiction, Drama, and Film. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1986.

Hyde, Janet Shibley, and Nicole Else-Quest. Half the Human Experience. 8th ed., Cengage Learning, 2013.

Kulish, Nancy, and Deanna Holtzman. A Story of Her Own: The Female Oedipus Complex Reexamined and Renamed. Jason Aronson, 2008.

Laks, Batya. Electra: A Gender Sensitive Study of the Plays (Aeschylus' Oresteia through Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class). McFarland, 1995.

Nickerson, Charlotte. “Overview of the Electra Complex in Psychology.” Simply Psychology, 25 Jan. 2024, www.simplypsychology.org/what-is-the-electra-complex.html. Accessed 27 Dec. 2024.

Scott, Jill. Electra after Freud: Myth and Culture. Cornell University Press, 2005.

Swiontkowski, Gale. Imagining Incest: Sexton, Plath, Rich, and Olds on Life with Daddy. Susquehanna UP, 2003