He Electra complex It is one of the most famous concepts proposed by Carl Gustav Jung.
This author, as a member of the psychodynamic movement and a disciple of Sigmund Freud, focused on the development of personality during the first stages of childhood to, from there, propose ideas about how these experiences leave a mark on the way of life. behave and think of human beings once they have become adults.
The Electra complex, linked to the theory of psychosexual development, is the way in which Jung adapts Freud’s Oedipus complex to the case of women. However, it is presented as something more than a simple adaptation of Oedipus to the female case. Let’s see what this is about.
As we saw in the article on Freud’s theory of psychosexual development, the father of psychoanalysis came to attach great importance to the way in which sexuality is managed during the first months and years of our lives.
The idea that Freud started from was that, depending on the way in which we give vent to our sexual impulses during childhood and early adolescence (and the success we have in the task of correctly regulating libido) we will develop more or fewer psychological problems. reaching adulthood.
So, if we do not properly satisfy that part of our unconscious mind that, according to Freud, governs the way we behave, we will develop fixations that can give way to mental disorders and to 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 cannot be released, it leads to the accumulation of this energy, to the pressure of the rest of the psychic instances, and to aberrant ways. to behave.
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 old.
In it, male children go through the following phases:
Carl Jung’s Electra Complex
Although a large part of the people he dealt with in the clinical setting were female patients, Sigmund Freud developed a theory of psychosexual development basically focused on what happens in men, leaving aside the development of females. women.
Carl Jung attempted 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 his theory on archetypes). That is why, among other things, to define the Oedipus complex he looked at the part of Homeric Greek mythology in which the life of Electra the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra king and queen of Mycenae.
Legend has it that it was Electra’s own mother, or her lover, who killed Agamemnon after he returned from school. Trojan War Electra then decided that her mother and her lover must die, and she encouraged her brother Orestes so that he would avenge their father by carrying out the murders.
The characteristics of the Electra complex
The Electra complex can be understood as the female version of the Oedipus complex, but it is not exactly the same as this one. Although it is true that the initial situation is similar, the attraction towards the father on the part of the daughter, and that this infatuation with the father causes a rivalry to arise towards the mother, there are differences between the theory of the Oedipus complex and that of the of Electra.
Carl Jung believed that the emotional bond between the daughter and her mother is closer than that between the son and the father, so the Electra complex is usually more hidden, since the degree of attachment is greater and compensates for the rivalry between mother and daughter.
An incipient Oedipus
According to Jung, at first girls are attracted to both their fathers and mothers, although soon after they begin to focus only on the father as a result of a species conservation mechanism.
The fear of punishment
While in the Oedipus complex the male child is afraid that his father will castrate him, in the Electra complex the daughter comes to the conclusion that she has already been castrated.
The resolution of the Electra complex
According to both Freud and Jung, the passage through the Oedipus and Electra complexes, respectively, They are phases that are part of the normal development of most boys and girls In some way, they point out how the psychic development of human beings occurs from their first years of life.
That is why they believed that both phenomena were resolved within a period of 2 or 3 years, while in a few cases the rivalry between sons and fathers and daughters and mothers remains entrenched and causes their relationship to deteriorate.
a reminder
It is worth remembering that both the Electra complex and the Oedipus complex are part of ideas that are totally outdated and widely rejected in contemporary scientific psychology ; This means that no father or mother should be afraid of developing bad bonds with their children due to poor management of these processes that, in reality, only exist in the theories of Freud and Jung.
The theories proposed by these two authors use soft thinking and metaphors as ways of understanding the human mind, but this fact served to cause philosophers of science, among whom Karl Popper stood out, to reject the approaches of these authors for being too interpretable. and ambiguous, of little use for analyzing specific cases.
However, this does not mean that it is not useful to know these theories, since They are very incorporated into the cultural legacy 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 kinds.
