Psychosexual development character Oedipus, who unwittingly killed his father, Laius, and sexually possessed his mother, Jocasta. Analogously, in the phallic stage, a girl's decisive psychosexual experience is the Electra complex, her daughter–mother competition for psychosexual possession of father. This psychological complex derives from the 5th-century BC Greek mythologic character Electra, who plotted matricidal revenge with Orestes, her brother, against Clytemnestra, their mother, and Aegisthus, their stepfather, for their murder of Agamemnon, their father, (cf. "Electra", by Sophocles). Initially, Freud equally applied the Oedipus complex to the psychosexual development of boys and girls, but later developed the female aspects of the theory as
Oedipus in the Trobriands Oedipus in the Trobriands Oedipus in the Trobriands is a 1982 book about the Oedipus complex by the anthropologist Melford Spiro, in which the author criticizes the research of Bronislaw Malinowski on the Trobriand Islanders. The work received positive reviews, and Spiro's criticism of Malinowski was compared to Derek Freeman's criticism of Margaret Mead in "Margaret Mead and Samoa" (1983). Spiro discusses the Oedipus complex and controversies over it that have involved psychoanalysts and anthropologists. He notes that there is already a vast literature on the topic, which in his view shows that it has a "persistent claim on the