ection of feelings he named the "Oedipus Complex' after the Greek legend of Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. Originally Freud hypothesized that females experienced a parallel "Electra complex." However, in time Freud changed his mind, saying, (1931, p.229): "It is only in the male child that we find the fateful combination of love for the one parent and simultaneous hatred for the other as a rival."Children eventually cope with these threatening feelings by repressing them then identifying with and trying to become like the rival parent. Through this identification process children's superegos gain strength as they incorporate many of their parents' values. Freud believed that identification with the same-sex parent provides our gender identity - the sense of being male or female.With their sexual feelings repressed and redirected, children enter a latency stage. Freud maintained that during this latency period, extending from around age 6 to puberty, sexuality is dormant and children play mostly with peers of the same sex.At puberty, latency gives way to the final stage -- the genital stage -- as youths begin to experience sexual feelings towards others.In Freud's view, maladaptive behavior in the adult results from conflicts unresolved during earlier psychosexual stages. At any point in the oral, anal, or phallic stages, strong conflict can lock, or fixate, the person's pleasure-seeking energies in that stage. Thus people who were either orally overindulged or deprived, perhaps by abrupt, early weaning, might fixate at the oral stage. Orally fixated adults are said to exhibit either passive dependence (like that of a nursing infant) or an exaggerated denial of this dependence, perhaps by acting tough and macho. They might continue to smoke or eat excessively to satisfy their needs for oral gratification. Those who never quite resolve their anal conflict, a desire to eliminate at will that combats the ...
