Phallic stage the female aspect of phallic-stage psychosexual development as the feminine Oedipus attitude and the negative Oedipus complex; but his student–collaborator Carl Jung proposed the "Electra complex", derived from Greek mythologic character Electra, who plotted matricidal revenge against her mother for the murder of her father, to describe a girl's psychosexual competition with her mother for possession of her father. Despite mother being the parent who primarily gratifies the child's desires, the child begins forming a discrete sexual identity — "boy", "girl" — that alters the dynamics of the parent and child relationship; the parents become the focus of infantile libidinal
Oedipus complex love and hate can be tolerated in the child's mind ... this provides us with a capacity for seeing us in interaction with others, and ... for reflecting on ourselves, whilst being ourselves". As such, in "The Dove that Returns, the Dove that Vanishes" (2000), Michael Parsons proposed that such a perspective permits viewing "the Oedipus complex as a life-long developmental challenge ... [with] new kinds of Oedipal configurations that belong to later life". In 1920, Sigmund Freud wrote that "with the progress of psychoanalytic studies the importance of the Oedipus complex has become, more and more, clearly evident; its