The key experience is toilet training. The third stage, called the phallic stage, is more complex and occurs between the age of four and five. Pleasure comes from self-stimulation of the genitals. The key experience involves sexual desires directed towards one's parents and the eventual repression of these desires. By this stage, the infant can sense that another person of the opposite sex is best suited to satisfy their sexual urges, and the parent is the ideal choice.
Boys have sexual feelings for their mothers, while girls have feelings for their fathers.
Furthermore, the other parent is seen as a threat, and consequently boys feel hostility towards their fathers and girls towards their mothers. Freud termed these feelings Oedipal desires, based on the figure of Greek myth, Oedipus, who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother. The rivalry that produces hostility also produces fear, since the child recognizes the rival parent to be physically stronger. Eventually, the child successfully resolves the conflict by transforming his feelings of hostility into identification with the same-sex parent and his role in life. The feelings of attraction toward the opposite-sex parent are repressed.