454. The oedipus complex

0:04 Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Spake and welcome back to The Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast, you guys know the drill, it is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our 20s. Today I have a mini bite-sized episode for you all. This is part of our broader debunking psychology series we've been doing recently where we take popular psychology terms, popular psychology phrases that have become widely used in society, sometimes misused, and we break down exactly what they mean and the real evidence-based science

0:59 and history that most people just don't know. We've covered personality tests, we've done Stockholm Syndrome, trauma bonds, narcissism, and today we turn our attention to one of the biggest of them all, which is the Oedipus Complex. You have probably heard about the comedy routines, newspaper headlines, gossip magazines, everyday conversations, and you may know it means something raunchy.

1:28 You may have an idea that it means something to do with maybe sex, maybe some other R-rated themes, but today I really just want to break it down entirely for you. A quick disclaimer, this episode talks about sex and it talks about sexual attraction in a kind of in a strange and not always pleasant to discuss context.

1:58 I'm going to say it that way. This is purely for educational purposes, but if you are sensitive to topics around sex and around attraction and children, it may be best to skip this episode. As I said, all educational, but sometimes a little bit sensitive. So let's get into it. So to begin with, let's just cover the basics. What is the Oedipus Complex? What does it mean? How did it originate? So the Oedipus Complex describes a conflict that Sigmund Freud and believed emerged during early childhood. In its most familiar form, the Oedipus complex is basically this idea that a young boy develops an unconscious sexual or romantic desire for his mother, and as a result of that begins to view his father, who in this kind of

2:58 form already occupies the position beside her, as a rival. It's important to stress the word unconscious here. So Freud, the person who first began speaking about this idea and gave it its name, he wasn't claiming that four-year-olds consciously sit there and think about entering a sexual relationship with their mothers. Instead, he kind of believed these wishes existed beneath our conscious awareness and appeared indirectly. So appeared through things like intense affection for one's mother, possessiveness, jealousy, fantasy, and competition with the father. you know, when a child becomes irritated or annoyed because the dad is kissing the mom, like Freud interpreted that as symbolic. Or when a child,

3:48 so specifically a boy child in this scenario, when he's saying, you know, I want to marry mommy when I grow up. Again, Freud saw that as indicative of the Oedipus complex, unconscious desire for the mother and an unconscious competition with the father. Because of these unconscious desires. The child experiences a weird kind of strange situation where they both rely on their mother but also love her in a strange way and then they also rely on their father but feel competition and fear for him in the same way. They believe, well according to Freud, he believed that when a young boy begins to see their mother this way, they believe that if their father were to find out about it, they would hurt them or harm them. And so they

4:42 also feel all these very complex relationships towards what are actually their caregivers and the people who need to take care of them. So this combination of love and hostility and fear creates the psychological conflict that is at the center of the complex. In Freud's mind, there was this kind of four-way pathway going on where a child or a boy loves their mother, also loves their father, desires their mother, is jealous of the father and is fearful of the father. So this is the basic premise. Let's talk about where Freud got this idea from, because if we're being honest, it's a pretty weird idea. Like, Everything I say about this, part of me is like, oh, I need to just double clarify that this is not

5:27 my belief. This is a belief of long, long ago that I think in the modern day, we kind of just look at and say is very creepy and unnecessary. However, it has a historical role and it is a theory that exists. So where did it come from? So the Oedipus Complex came about through a combination of Freud's clinical work with adult patients, his interpretations of their dreams and their symptoms. He read a lot into literature and mythology.

5:59 And he also based this theory on his own self-analysis. So based on how he felt about his mother and how he felt about his father. Very important to clarify, this theory did not come from any kind of official study, experiment, or any kind of structured scientific research. It is what we would call a singular anecdotal theory coming from the mind of one person. So I said that he did a lot of self-analysis about this. Well, it was actually the death of his father in 1896 that really triggered Freud to start thinking about this. And he really began reflecting upon his own childhood and his attachment to his mother and his feelings towards his father. Essentially, this man had a lot of really deep wounds to do with

6:50 his parents. And he obviously had a lot of really weird feelings about his parents, as is indicated by his creation of this Oedipus complex idea. And Unlike the normal person who would have these experiences and say, that's a bit weird. That's probably something for me to deal with. He said, well, I think everybody else must feel this way as well. And I think this must be a thing that every single young boy goes through. This is a theory of human development that we haven't figured out yet.

7:22 And so I'm talking about it for the first time. Now the name Oedipus and the story goes, of Oedipus that gave this complex its name is a lot older than Freud's theory. As I said, Freud, you know, we see him as this like researcher scientist. He kind of also just really liked history and he really liked Greek mythology.

7:44 And so when he was looking for a name for this complex that he'd identified, he went to that same source. He went back to Greek mythology and And of course, he found the perfect story, the story of Oedipus. If you are not familiar with it, in the story, Oedipus, the main character, is told by an oracle that he is destined to kill his father and to marry his mother. Now, this prophecy wasn't just given to Oedipus himself, but was delivered years earlier to his biological parents. And his biological parents were this very famous king and queen. And so when they were told that story when he was born, they...

8:20 wanted to prevent it. So they ordered that the infant be killed. They ordered that their son, Oedipus, you know, be murdered. Instead, he wasn't murdered. He was abandoned on a mountainside and he was found and he was raised by another family completely unaware of his true origins. He later receives the prophecy, but he believes the people who he knows as his mother and father are his real mother and father. And so he tries to escape his fate by fleeing them, by avoiding them, But in his efforts to do that, as he is fleeing, he encounters an old man on a road. They have a heated argument.

8:59 He kills him. That man is his father. He doesn't know that. He thinks his father is back in his hometown. And he then travels to Thebes where he solves this riddle. And the result of him solving this riddle is that he gets to assume the throne and take the hand of the widowed queen. he marries her, not realizing that the widow queen is in fact his mother. And so the prophecy comes true. When it's finally revealed, it's very sad.

9:28 Oedipus blinds himself. His mother slash wife dies by suicide. So it's just very dramatic. It's this big Greek story. And Freud heard that story and he was like, I'm going to steal that. That sounds great. But also he thought, well, there's a reason this story must be so popular. It must be so popular because a lot of people relate to it. So he kind of saw our interest in a story like that as a projection of an unconscious internal desire. So that's where the name Oedipus Complex came from.

10:01 So to understand why Freud thought this particular conflict emerged in early childhood, we also need to look at his broader theory of psychosexual development. So Freud divided childhood development into a sequence of stages. During each stage, he believed the libido, which for him, libido was not all about sex.

10:19 It was also about the psychic energy of life and the pleasure-seeking energy of the human spirit. Sex was involved. It wasn't everything. When we think of libido today, we just think sexual desire. No, for him, it meant life. It meant energy. He believed that in each stage, our libido... became focused upon a particular bodily area or developmental conflict.

10:45 So as we move through childhood, we move through these stages. There was the oral stage, which is associated with the mouth and feeding. There is the anal stage, which is associated with bowel control, the phallic stage, the latency period, and finally the genital stage, which Freud associated with more mature sexuality. Now the Oedipus complex was supposed to reach its peak during the phallic stage, which is around three to six years old. During this period, Freud believed children became especially interested in their bodies. They became very interested in like their anatomical features and how the sexes differed in that way. And he kind of saw that as that they were, I don't know, he really read a

11:25 lot into that in a way that we probably wouldn't today. For us, we kind of understand that children are curious because they are learning. Freud took that a whole step further and was like, this curiosity must be reflect a sexual desire within the family and this idea that children are, you know, it just got very, very strange. So in his mind, he thought that as children, specifically boys, went through this period, that is when they experienced this conflict between, you know, wanting their mother, hating their father. And the only way for them to get through that conflict was to realize that they couldn't have their mother And therefore, they should become like their father to find somebody like

12:10 their mother later on in life. They begin to emulate their father. They begin to copy him. This is called identification. And it's how boys learn to be men. It's how they learn what's right in society. In practice, he was like, well, this is why. And this really explains why boys go through this period of really loving their mothers, being very much like mother orientated. to wanting to be like their fathers and suddenly taking an interest in the same activities as them, imitating them, wanting to dress like them, wanting to be around them all the time. That, to most of us, would just be like, that's how children learn.

12:48 They learn through socialization. They learn through experiences and modeling. Freud was like, well, no, it's because they're sexually attracted to their mother. And that's just where it gets very, very strange. But he did say, by resolving the Oedipus complex, this is important for people, specifically boys, to learn social order, to learn what is right, what is wrong, and to learn more about who they are and who they want to be. That is the outcome if it's resolved. Again, this is unconscious. So he says that even as boys get older, they don't really realize that they ever had these desires. It just kind of is something that pushes them and shapes them and moves them forward. However, the desire never really goes away. So this is this interesting thing.

13:39 Freud was like, well, in order to resolve and to become like, in order to become more mature and to develop, one should resolve this desire for the mother. But additionally, he also said, well, one actually never does though. One never does. He basically believed that, you know, it just becomes more suppressed. And then it comes up later when a boy goes to choose his own life partner. And it's why he believed and why a lot of people will kind of have this, there's this like weird myth in society that, you know, boys choose somebody who's just like their mom. And all of that comes back to the Oedipus complex. Now that's what happens if it's resolved, i.e.

14:22 boys still unconsciously want someone like their mom, doesn't sound resolved to me. But if it was unresolved and if the boy never learned to give up this unconscious desire and never learned to identify with the father, what Freud believed happened was that they developed a fixation or they became emotionally and developmentally frozen at this point in their life.

14:49 And what that meant was that even as they get older, a man or a boy who has not resolved this conflict will become very frustrated, will really have difficulties with authority and have difficulties with jealousy and possessiveness in romantic relationships. So it's an important developmental stage for boys to go through.

15:11 That is the basic summary and basic theory that came from Freud's brain. Does it have any evidence? This theory is quite an old one and our scientific standards and abilities and testing functions have improved. With that, have we ever been able to find support for this theory that Freud couldn't when he was alive. Let's talk about it after this short break. So if you are hearing this episode and everything I'm serving to you now and thinking actually what the fuck are you talking about and this is not what I expected when I clicked on this episode, you are absolutely not alone. I think we sometimes hear a name like Freud. And he's so celebrated in psychology and he's this huge figure and that lends his theories

16:08 a lot of legitimacy. And then when you look at these theories, you realize that they are quite odd and actually that there might not be that much evidence. They were just so outlandish and of the time that they've just seemingly carried on. I really want to remind us, Freud is existed in a time before rigorous psychological experimentation.

16:32 And now that we do use processes that involve random sampling, experimental conditions, control groups, ethics committees, that big one, now that we do use those theories, well, sorry, we do use those methods, we have put the Oedipus complex as a theory through those standards and we've attempted to test it.

16:56 in this rigorous manner and there has been absolutely no established evidence and no clinical test that can demonstrate that the Oedipus complex as a universal or even mildly supported theory exists. Nobody has been able to find wide scale evidence. However, here is what is actually quite tricky and what people don't always talk about. Freud presented a lot of his ideas as unconscious processes. And he presented a lot of his ideas in a way that meant we cannot falsify them.

17:38 We cannot prove that they do not occur. This was a very smart thing he did, whether he did it deliberately or not. But the way a lot of Freud's theories are set up is that they are very hard to prove wrong, even if we know they are not right. I mentioned this in the Freud episode, but When you have a scientific theory, your scientific theory should ideally make predictions that allow researchers to actually test whether this thing exists or doesn't exist. But when you create a theory that says this is entirely unconscious, therefore, if you don't find evidence for it, that proves it. And if you do find evidence for it, that proves it as well.

18:21 It becomes nearly impossible to decisively conclude whether something is real or not. For example, Freud often treated and worked in the space of dreams and interpretations and projection and all these other things. And the thing was, is that if a patient agreed with his interpretation, that would support his theory. But if a patient strongly rejected his interpretation, that could also be interpreted as evidence. Let me put this in the kind of way of the Oedipus complex.

18:56 If you go up to a bunch of people, you do a randomized controlled study with a thousand people and you say, have you ever experienced any of these feelings towards your own mother that you can remember or acknowledge? If somebody says, yes, I do. Great. You get to count that as evidence. If somebody says absolutely not, that is so weird. Great. You also get to count that as evidence. The reason being, because the Oedipus complex is treated as this unconscious, suppressed, unresolved desire. And so denying it is just as much evidence of its existence as agreeing with it and saying that I've experienced that. So when almost every possible outcome can be interpreted as support for a theory, that theory, just by its basis, is

19:50 a great one in terms of like if you're somebody who never wants to be proven wrong like Freud, but a terrible one when it comes to actually trying to identify a truth about humanity and a truth about society. Another huge issue with this theory beyond that and it's probably something you've been screaming at me to mention this whole time, I promise you I was getting to it, is the fact that it doesn't acknowledge that homosexuality exists.

20:17 It doesn't have an explanation for people who have single parents. It doesn't have an explanation for people who have divorced parents. It doesn't have an explanation for people who are raised in communal societies, people who are transgender, people who are non-binary, people who have same-sex parents. And the biggest blaring omission is, It really doesn't mention girls. The Oedipus Complex seems to be entirely about boys. The homosexuality thing, I will say, is, like, I think the biggest problem. Like, it just doesn't make any sense. You know, all of those things. I'm like, oh, well, the homosexuality thing. But then also the single parent thing.

20:57 But then also, like, the divorce parent thing. Like, he just didn't have explanations for those things. But... When it came to women and all young girls and how they fit into the theory, it gets a whole lot weirder. I know you're probably like, that's impossible. I've just heard you go on and on about this crazy thing. No, it gets a lot weirder. So he proposed that girls initially have a close attachment to their mother, which is most children. But during the phallic stage, they supposedly become aware that they do not have a penis. I know.

21:32 I told you it was going to get weird. Freud claimed that when women realize that, they go, I don't have a penis. My dad does. My mother doesn't. They get all confused. And they interpret this as a deficiency. And they blame their mother for the fact that they don't have a penis. And they redirect their attention towards their father because they possess something that she lacks. I.e., all young girls secretly want sex. penis and this creates a concept known as penis envy that means they hate their mother and they admire their father yeah yeah it's crazy eventually like Freud says that you know the girl comes back she begins to realize she can never get a penis she identifies with her mother and she seeks

22:27 in his words symbolic substitutes for the penis and including in Freud's account, the desire to have a baby and the desire to have a boy. Yeah. All women secretly, all women secretly have penis envy and they secretly want to have children to fill that void, specifically boy children. If you've ever, the idea of a boy mom, like this idea of like, oh, I'm a boy mom. And like this whole thing online about boy moms, Freud would have a field day with that. That, actually provides a lot of evidence for his theory which is crazy like that's crazy that yeah women on TikTok and like on Instagram being like I love my I'm like I love being a boy mom and like oh my god I love my son more than I've ever loved any man

23:17 and I don't know what I'm gonna do when he like he loves another woman I might just kill her like all those crazy things he's literally like not proving, but providing evidence for this crazy whack job theory that Freud had about women. There is another term though, that we use sometimes that describes this. It's called the Electra Complex.

23:39 This is actually labeled by Carl Jung, who was Freud's predecessor, but Freud didn't want a separate term for what happened to women in this period. He liked Oedipus Complex. He just kind of thought that women, like he, it was kind of an afterthought for him. So these ideas are naturally crazy. Let's just call it as we see it.

23:59 And they were naturally challenged at the time within the psychoanalytic, like psychoanalytical community, specifically by a woman called Karen Horny. She was a German psychoanalyst operating at the same time as Freud. And she basically heard this theory and was like, that is insane. You have, do you know women? Do you speak to women? who aren't your patients or like your daughter, like that's, this is, you've interpreted this whole thing through a male centered lens, one that is probably inaccurate as well. She suggested that rather than perceiving women, rather than women perceiving their own bodies as defective as a result of some apparent envy for men, it's not envy that they are experiencing towards the penis. Women are

24:39 experiencing envy around the access to social freedom and independence and authority and power. that was available to men at the time. To her, it was just insane to say that all women secretly wanted a penis because they were sexually jealous and attracted to their father. She basically said, no, this is again all part of socialization and it's all part of girls and boys learning at a critical age, around six or seven, they start to really realize what is my role in society because of my gender? What is expected of me? What is and isn't correct in the eyes of society? And how do I adjust that with my own sense of self? That possessiveness as well that of parents that Freud saw as indication of sexual desire,

25:22 unconscious sexual attraction. It's also just really normal when you're a kid. Do you know what I mean? Like it's really normal when you're a child to maybe favor one parent or to maybe identify more with one parent based on your gender. And it's really normal for children to try and make sense of relationships and through the relationship that their parents have and say, oh, I want to marry somebody like mummy because, well, they've only probably been this close to one example of a relationship their whole lives.

25:54 It's really quite normal for children to feel like they want more attention from their mother or from their father, whoever is the primary caregiver, and to see the other parent as competition because children are greedy and children are 100% reliant on their caregivers or anything that feels like that's going to take them away from that, obviously they're going to react accordingly. So these days, the theory is seen as a bit of a joke and seen as a little bit funny, right? It's like taking, it's like somebody being like, well, how are apples made? And coming up with this like elaborate idea of like somebody sowing an apple to a tree. Like we know that children go through these things. Is it because of this weird whack

26:41 job idea that they are somehow unconsciously desiring their parents? Probably not. And it was a real big reason why at the time Freud got into a lot of fights and a lot of professional arguments with his colleagues, including his predecessor, Carl Jung, who basically stopped talking to him because he was like, you need to chill out. Your theories are a little bit perverted. And also what? Like, also, why?

27:09 You know, like they just were a bit like, you need to just maybe go for a walk and actually maybe speak to women a bit more that aren't just your patients and also maybe not make everything about sex. So with that being said, does this theory have any lasting value? As a literal universal theory of childhood development, no, it does not have any value because it excludes a whole lot of the diversity that exists in real families in our society today. And it just actually can't explain it.

27:38 It can only explain a very, very narrow, very narrow section of society in a way that is also probably not true. Besides that, the theory has an enormous historical and cultural impact. I think because of how shocking it is. You know, this whole idea is really memorable. It challenges deeply held assumptions about innocence, about family bonds, about morality, about sex. And I think the shock factor behind this theory is is what makes it and continues to keep it present in popular culture and in academic debates to this day. If we were going to give Freud any of his flowers, and if there was anything good to take from this, I will say he did acknowledge that humans and children are complex. And he did acknowledge that

28:25 children can have conflicting ideas or complex ideas, which at the time wasn't that widely held, right? He really did He saw people as acting irrationally, he saw people as acting imperfectly, and he kind of saw the fact that children do start to have their own personalities and desires in a way that clinicians probably weren't really talking about that widely at the time. So these days, we've cherry-picked, we've refined, we've developed the idea, and we've just created a bit more of a robust theory of We've come a long way since like 100 years ago where this was like the best thing we could come up with. Nowadays, we understand that children go through these different developmental periods.

29:10 They naturally become more curious about themselves, including their body, including their anatomy. And whilst that is happening, they also become more aware of the social dynamics surrounding them. And so whilst these things may look like they're happening at the same time or look like they're causing one another, that is not the case. It is just the pathway forward.

29:30 that people take. Multiple things are happening in the developmental life of a child at the same time. That is all I have for you today. If you had no idea... what this was about I'm I feel like I need to apologize I feel like you've come into this being like oh my god yeah I'm just gonna listen to this at the gym just gonna listen to this in the car with my parents or my friends and suddenly you're like oh my god why does she keep saying sex an unconscious desire And penis and envy, penis envy.

30:00 So I'm sorry. I still hope you learned something from this episode. I think it's a really good thing to know. And once you start understanding this, you can kind of catch certain jokes that you see in like pop culture. You start being able to apply it to like funny things that you see. So yes, I hope you learned.

30:18 I hope you were shocked, but not unhappy with the contents of this episode. I want to thank our researcher Libby for helping us with this episode today. If you did not know already, you can watch all of our episodes on Netflix. Not this episode. I don't think it would have gotten past their standards. I don't think they would have let me do an episode on this. But all of our non-bonus episodes, of which there are a lot, are now on Netflix. Go give it a look. Go give it a watch. You can also follow us on Instagram, Substack.

30:48 Everything you need to know will be in the description, including an entire playlist of every single one of our bonus episodes online. Have a look down there. You'll find it. And you can listen to some of our other ones. I promise they're a lot less raunchy than this. But thank you for listening all the way to the end.

31:04 Until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very, very soon.