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 Dialectic of Sex for Firestone, the only kind of reality is social actuality (the generic experience or accidental experience of the individual), and that in this respect Firestone's work closely resembles that of Wilhelm Reich. In Mitchell's view, Firestone's interpretation of Freud reduces his psychological constructs to the social realities from which they were reduced, thereby equating the Oedipus complex with the nuclear family. Firestone thus interprets Freudian "metaphors" such as the Oedipus complex in terms of power relations within the family, an approach Mitchell considered mistaken. In her introduction to the 1998 edition of the book, Rosalind Delmar argued that Firestone's "counter-explanation