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
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