Notes on Oedipus1 ( Book: Electra vs Oedipus)

Hendrika C. Freud 2010. Electra vs Oedipus : The Drama of the Mother-Daughter Relationship. Taylor and Francis.

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The author complements the Oedipus complex by using the Ancient Greek mythological character Electra to refer to the extreme separation and total symbiosis of the mother-daughter relationship, and calling for a model of the mother-dominated family.

Historically, C.G. Jung coined the term Electra complex and first mentioned it in his Freud and Psychoanalysis. However, the author critics Jung for not elaborating further on the specific topic of female development, and Sigmund Freud for rejecting the term ‘Electra complex’.

The reason why the H.C. Freud (2010) believes that Elektra is a more accurate and appropriate revelation of female upbringing than Oedipus is because women tend to be more susceptible to love-hate relationships with their mothers than to the Oedipal complexes mentioned by Freud. Specifically, even fathers who are often absent are more likely to be noticed and celebrated. In contrast, even daughters who hate their mothers subconsciously follow or imitate them(PP79).

In her critique, Hendrika C. Freud (2010) observes that S. Freud recognised the limitations of the Oedipus complex for explaining female development and expanded his framework by introducing the pre-oedipal stage to acknowledge the extended mother-daughter bond (PP63).

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 Hendrika C. Freud (2010) argue that it is a woman's destiny to reinvent aspects of herself in her daughters, resulting in a maternal attachment that is both stronger and more ambivalent than the mother-child relationship. This bond between mother and daughter is a conduit for women's emotional health and psychopathology through the generations.

However, the author argues that the symbiotic and detached relationship between most mothers and daughters is in a state of imbalance. She describes an extremely interdependent mutual psychological involvement relationship as a ‘symbiotic illusion’, in which the mother and daughter are overly dependent on each other and are unable to establish a relationship of independence or otherwise. The other extreme of the symbiotic illusion is total separation, where even ideally, the daughter achieves partial separation and will still be dependent on her motheras a continual source of guidance and exampl. As a result, this mother-daughter pattern is perpetuated across generations, resulting in the well-documented phenomenon of intergenerational transmission of trauma, and this intergenerational transmission is particularly pronounced, tenacious, and unavoidable in women.(P3-10)