Electra complex Electra complex In Neo-Freudian psychology, the Electra complex, as proposed by Carl Jung in his ""Theory of Psychoanalysis"", is a girl's psychosexual competition with her mother for possession of her father. In the course of her psychosexual development, the complex is the girl's phallic stage; a boy's analogous experience is the Oedipus complex. The Electra complex occurs in the third—phallic stage (ages 3–6)—of five psychosexual development stages: (i) the Oral, (ii) the Anal, (iii) the Phallic, (iv) the Latent, and (v) the Genital—in which the source of libido pleasure is in a different erogenous zone of the infant’s body. In
Penis envy by removing the man from the penis or the penis from the man). Freud's theories regarding psychosexual development, and in particular the "phallic stage", were early challenged by other psychoanalysts, such as Karen Horney, Otto Fenichel and Ernest Jones, though Freud did not accept their view of penis envy as a secondary, rather than a primary, female reaction. Later psychologists, such as Erik Erikson and Jean Piaget, challenged the Freudian model of child psychological development as a whole. Jacques Lacan, however, took up and developed Freud's theory of the importance of what he called ""penisneid" in the unconscious of women"