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 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",