page_title: Electra complex
section_title: Case studies
hierarchical_section_title: Electra complex / Case studies
caption_attribution_description: English: Prince Charming meets Cinderella in a 1912 book of fairy tales. Cleaned up by en:User:Ihcoyc. Español: El Príncipe Azul y Cenicienta en un libro de cuentos de 1912
context_page_description: In Neo-Freudian psychology, the Electra complex, as proposed by Carl Jung in his Theory of Psychoanalysis, is a girl's psychosexual competition with her mother for possession of her father. In the course of her psychosexual development, the complex is the girl's phallic stage; a boy's analogous experience is the Oedipus complex. The Electra complex occurs in the third—phallic stage —of five psychosexual development stages: the Oral, the Anal, the Phallic, the Latent, and the Genital—in which the source of libido pleasure is in a different erogenous zone of the infant's body.
  In classical psychoanalytic theory, the child's identification with the same-sex parent is the successful resolution of the Electra complex and of the Oedipus complex; his and her key psychological experience to developing a mature sexual role and identity. Sigmund Freud instead proposed that girls and boys resolved their complexes differently—she via penis envy, he via castration anxiety; and that unsuccessful resolutions might lead to neurosis.
  Hence, women and men who are fixated in the Electra and Oedipal stages of their psychosexual development might be considered "father-fixated" and "mother-fixated".
context_section_description: A 1921 study of patients at a New York state mental hospital, On the Prognostic Significance of the Mental Content in Manic-Depressive Psychosis, reported that of 31 manic-depressive patients studied, 22 (70%) had been diagnosed as afflicted with an Electra complex; and that 12 of the 22 patients had regressed to early stages of psychosexual development.
caption: Prince Charming hero meets Cinderella heroine (1912)
exif: {}