Oedipus complex the Electra complex to describe a girl's daughter–mother competition for psychosexual possession of the father. In the phallic stage, a girl's Electra complex is her decisive psychodynamic experience in forming a discrete sexual identity (ego). Whereas a boy develops castration anxiety, a girl develops penis envy, for she perceives that she has been castrated previously (and missing the penis), and so forms resentment towards her own kind as inferior, while simultaneously striving to claim her father's penis through bearing a male child of her own. Furthermore, after the phallic stage, the girl's psychosexual development includes transferring her primary erogenous zone
Oedipus in the Trobriands the reader to re-examine Malinowski's position on the Oedipus complex, and a "brilliant exercise in both methodology and theory construction." He praised Spiro's "re-working of Malinowski's own data on the Trobrianders to reach contrary conclusions", and wrote that Spiro presents "a theory of cultural integration which goes far beyond Malinowski's functionalism", but predicted that "Oedipus in the Trobriands" would be controversial. "Oedipus in the Trobriands" was also reviewed by Mary Hawkins in "Mankind", Richard L. Brubaker in "History of Religions", K. O. L. Burridge in "Pacific Affairs", the anthropologist Gilbert Herdt in "American Anthropologist", Annette B. Weiner in "American Ethnologist",