Oedipus complex envy. "Oedipus" refers to a 5th-century BC Greek mythological character Oedipus, who unwittingly kills his father, Laius, and marries his mother, Jocasta. A play based on the myth, "Oedipus Rex", was written by Sophocles, ca. 429 BC. Modern productions of Sophocles' play were staged in Paris and Vienna in the 19th century and were phenomenally successful in the 1880s and 1890s. The Austrian psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), attended. In his book "The Interpretation of Dreams" first published in 1899, he proposed that an Oedipal desire is a universal, psychological phenomenon innate (phylogenetic) to human beings, and the cause of much
Castration anxiety of the concepts related to penis envy were among his greatest accomplishments. However, these are also his most criticized theories as well—most famously by Karen Horney. Freud derived this term from the Greek tragedy "Oedipus Rex". In this tragedy, the main character, Oedipus, kills his father and marries a woman whom he does not know is his mother. Given this irony, Freud used the term Oedipus complex to indicate this unconscious desire. According to Freud, the Oedipus complex relates to a universal wish that a boy has, unknowingly, to have his mother all to himself by the removal of his