Electra complex classical psychoanalytic theory, the child's identification with the same-sex parent is the successful resolution of the Electra complex and of the Oedipus complex; his and her key psychological experience to developing a mature sexual role and identity. Sigmund Freud instead proposed that girls and boys resolved their complexes differently—she via penis envy, he via castration anxiety; and that unsuccessful resolutions might lead to neurosis. Hence, women and men who are fixated in the Electra and Oedipal stages of their psychosexual development might be considered "father-fixated" and "mother-fixated". As a psychoanalytic term for daughter–mother psychosexual conflict, the Electra complex derives from
Freud's seduction theory repetition compulsion, transference and resistance, and the unfolding psychosexual stages of childhood would never have been added to human knowledge. An alternative view involves the recognition that the notion of unconscious mental processes was commonplace before Freud started writing on the subject. Moreover, the skepticism of almost all non-Freudian psychiatrists and psychologists towards Freud's psychosexual stages of childhood is that it is not consistent with much of current informed opinion. Freud's seduction theory Freud's seduction theory () was a hypothesis posited in the mid-1890s by Sigmund Freud that he believed provided the solution to the problem of the origins of