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
Freud's seduction theory repetition compulsion, transference and resistance, and the unfolding psychosexual stages of childhood would never have been added to human knowledge. An alternative view involves the recognition that the notion of unconscious mental processes was commonplace before Freud started writing on the subject. Moreover, the skepticism of almost all non-Freudian psychiatrists and psychologists towards Freud's psychosexual stages of childhood is that it is not consistent with much of current informed opinion. Freud's seduction theory Freud's seduction theory () was a hypothesis posited in the mid-1890s by Sigmund Freud that he believed provided the solution to the problem of the origins of