Electra complex the 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). Sigmund Freud developed the female aspects of the sexual development theory—describing the psychodynamics of a girl’s sexual competition with her mother for sexual possession of the father—as the feminine Oedipus attitude and the negative Oedipus complex; yet it was his collaborator Carl Jung who coined the term Electra complex in 1913. Freud rejected Jung's term as psychoanalytically inaccurate: "that what we have said about the Oedipus complex applies
Psychosexual development the Oedipal complex as universal and essential to human psychologic development. The anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski's studies of the Trobriand islanders challenged the Freudian proposal that psychosexual development (e.g. the Oedipus complex) was universal. He reported that in the insular matriarchal society of the Trobriand, boys are disciplined by their maternal uncles, not their fathers; impartial, avuncular discipline. In "Sex and Repression in Savage Society" (1927), Malinowski reported that boys dreamed of feared uncles, not of beloved fathers, thus, power — not sexual jealousy — is the source of Oedipal conflict in such non–Western societies. In "Human Behavior in Global Perspective: