First formulated by Freud in 1899, and  taking its name from the mythical Greek  

tragic hero Oedipus (who in the eponymous play  by Sophocles unknowingly sleeps with his mother  

and then kills his father), it suggests  that every child goes through a phase,  

normally between the ages of three and  five, of physically desiring its opposite  

sex parent while wishing to do away with,  or kill, its rivalrous same-sex parent.

Expressed bluntly like this, the Complex  tends to arouse immediately puzzlement,  

ridicule - or disgust: children aren’t  generally to be witnessed expressing  

any kind of sexual desire and we are  unlikely to remember anything in our  

own lives remotely resembling what Freud  insistently describes as a universal truth.

However, the explanatory power of the Oedipus  Complex is likely to increase - as is often  

the case with Freud’s ideas - the less  literally we take it, in other words,  

the more we view it as providing  us with an overall picture of the  

genesis of human sexuality rather than as  a concrete event in a given child’s mind.

We might think of the Oedipus Complex as offering  us a guiding narrative about how we come, through  

the varied experiences of childhood, to have our  own distinctive approach to sexuality. The Complex  

shines a light on a range of questions: - How confident do we now feel in  

our powers of attractiveness? - Are we disgusted or broadly  

at peace with our sexuality? - Do we think that other people  

are likely to reject or accept our advances? - How much are we intimidated by our desires?

What is telling is that a huge range  of responses are to be found here:  

some of us labour under critical degrees of  shame and terror. Others have no particular  

difficulty making our appetites known and  acting on them in reciprocal situations. Sex  

may be a source of exceptional joy - or the  locus of boundless masochism and paranoia.

With Freud’s ideas in mind, rather than imagining  that we actually wanted to sleep with anyone as  

children, we might say that we went through a  phase of exploring what it might mean to prove  

attractive to a man or a woman. Importantly, we  did so in the form of a game, one in which we no  

more wanted things to become real than we would  - when we played pirates or jungle explorers  

in the kitchen - have wished to join an actual  Caribbean drug cartel or a trip down the Amazon.

Little boys and girls will, in a limited  way, try out what happens if they attempt  

to charm mum or dad; at a given point, they  might pull a highly endearing smile and say  

they want to spend the rest of their life with  only one parent, or send the other one away or  

muse that it might be nice if they could have  a little wedding ceremony with one parent only.

And here - for better and for worse - the games  can unfold very differently according to the  

emotional maturity of the parent. In an optimal  scenario, when a small child initiates a game,  

the adult will be exceptionally careful neither  to shame nor to excite them. They won’t say ‘Don’t  

be so silly’ or ‘How repulsive’. They won’t get  furious or punishing. They will be resolved enough  

about their own sexuality not to take fright at  its first echoes in their child. They will notice  

what’s going on, smile indulgently and go along  with the game just long enough for the child to  

feel acknowledged and heard. And yet they will  naturally not do anything remotely seductive  

back. They will, with great kindness, ensure  that the game always stays very much a game.

So much is, however, liable to go wrong. There  are mothers and fathers too fragile internally  

to allow a child to flex their faculties  of attraction; they get bitter or snide,  

dismissive or angry; there can only be one chief  or one queen bee. There are parents too deeply  

swallowed up in cares and depression to allow  themselves to be charmed. And then there are  

parents whose loneliness and confusion means  they mistake a child’s game for some form of  

genuine desire for sexual contact - with all the  obvious tragic life-long repercusions that ensue.

If we as adults have difficulties around sex, we  might - with Freud’s Oedipal concept in mind - ask  

ourselves some of the following: - How much did I, as a child,  

feel able to charm my mother or father? - Did they seem to take pleasure in my existence? 

- Were they angry, sad or simply elsewhere? - Was my same sex parent able to tolerate my games  

or did they respond with bitterness or bullying? - Concurrently, how much did my parents give me  

a sense that they knew boundaries and would  stop any game when it needed to be stopped?

Freud understood that adult mental health depends  on the early expressions of our desire having been  

handled with particular skill by those around us:  without excessive punishment or licence, without  

neglect or enticement, without anger or shame.  The healthy adult is someone who can feel potent  

without being terrified or guilty. Their games  went well; now their reality can follow suit.

Freud’s Oedipal Complex becomes a  source of valuable insight once we  

separate it from its more literal  formulations. It might show us why  

sex has ended up a lot more complicated  for us than it should ever have been.