Phallic stage the female aspect of phallic-stage psychosexual development as the feminine Oedipus attitude and the negative Oedipus complex; but his student–collaborator Carl Jung proposed the "Electra complex", derived from Greek mythologic character Electra, who plotted matricidal revenge against her mother for the murder of her father, to describe a girl's psychosexual competition with her mother for possession of her father. Despite mother being the parent who primarily gratifies the child's desires, the child begins forming a discrete sexual identity — "boy", "girl" — that alters the dynamics of the parent and child relationship; the parents become the focus of infantile libidinal
Oedipus and the Sphinx and evil, but also between the sexes, and that the opening poem of "Buch der Leider" by Heinrich Heine was the source for the idea of the painting. In that poem the Sphinx triumphs over Oedipus. In a Freudian interpretation, it has been argued that the Sphinx represents the castrating effect of Moreau's mother that he has seeking to escape. At the time the painting was created, Moreau's father had recently died. By contrast, Henri Dorra has suggested that the poses of the sphinx and Oedipus are derived from the Greek etymological meaning of the word sphinx, which is to