Electra complex of "Mother" develops the super-ego as the girl establishes a discrete sexual identity (ego). Without a penis, the girl cannot sexually possess her mother, as the infantile id demands. Consequently, the girl redirects her desire for sexual union upon her father, and thus progresses to heterosexual femininity, which culminates in bearing a child who replaces the absent penis. Moreover, after the phallic stage, the girl’s psychosexual development includes transferring her primary erogenous zone from the infantile clitoris to the adult vagina. Freud thus considered the feminine Oedipus attitude ("Electra complex") to be more emotionally intense than the Oedipal conflict of
The Freudian Coverup consistently reported childhood instances of sexual molestation. Many of Freud's patients suffered from a common Victorian diagnosis, hysteria. Since his hysterical patients repeatedly reported sexual abuse, most often naming their fathers as the abusers, Freud drew a causal connection between sexual abuse and neurosis. This became the frame for the seduction theory, in which he pointed to a direct connection between sexual abuse in childhood and adult hysteria. According to Florence Rush, author of "The Freudian Cover-up", this repeated and persistent incrimination of fathers by his patients made him uneasy, and led him to abandon the seduction theory. More at