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
The Cambridge Companion to Freud discussion of the seduction theory, Simon and Blass's discussion of the Oedipus complex, Neu's discussion of sexuality, and Chodorow's discussion of female psychology. She credited Hopkins with providing the most lucid explanation of "ordinary explanations of actions in terms of motives or beliefs and desires" that she had ever seen. She found Paul's discussion of Freud's "myth of the primal horde" interesting, but criticized him for "leaving in place ... Freud's arguably grandiose view of the oedipal complex as an inscription in the very brain of the human infant" and for failing to "question such Freudian assumptions as that explaining