The idea of infantile sexuality has always been central to Freud and very early he has started to work on a basic theory for the Oedipus complex: the desire for the parent of the other sex and hostility towards the other.The first name chosen is 'nuclear complex', then 'paternal complex'.It is only in 1910 that the term 'Oedipus complex' is first used. In a first approach that doesn't give a clear answer of the difference between the boy and the girl, by linking the Oedipus complex to the castration complex, breaks the symmetry between male Oedipus and female Oedipus and gives a real dimension to the psychoanalytic theory. But this difference in the psychic development of the boy and the girl shouldn't withdrawn the fact that for the boy as much for the girl, the first love object is the mother.

Pre-genital sexuality is a major fact in childhood and adult sexuality is mainly based on it. According to Freud, the child has different stages of development before puberty; each one is part biological, cultural and shaping one's identity. He has widely written about the omnipresence during childhood of a sexual urge, essentially

This part of identification to the father leads him to find like him a woman likely to 'treat' his penis as phallic equivalent. This identification to the father also develops his 'super-ego'.

For the girl, the mother is also the first object of love and libidinous investment. The discovery of her castration as well as her mother's lead to different types of 'solutions' : the rejection of sexuality, the rejection of castration or the choice of the father as a sexual object. The process is therefore the following: the rejection of the mother as castrated, the desire to have a penis like the father and also to have a child from him. This position which puts the father as an object of desire places the mother as a rival and object of identification. According to Freud, for the girl, the Oedipus complex never disappears and it has effects in the women's mental life. It would be because the girl can't find in the father any feminine identification in which her Oedipus would resolve. It would leave her a in permanent form of disappointment and need for love. She risks to be a eternal 'hurt lover' or it would send her back to her first love for her mother.

For the boy to escape this situation, he is obliged to give up the idea of sexual satisfaction with any of his parents, given that any of the possibilities would lead to a threat of castration. He has to renounce to the sexual possession of his mother (because of the threat of being castrated by his mother) as well as the seduction of his fa

Some common words found in the essay are:
According Freud, , oedipus complex, complex castration, seduction father, desire mother, imaginary castration, boy girl, castrated mother, hostility towards, identification father, object mother,
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