Electra complex examples
Definition, Freud, Examples, Symptoms, and More
The Electra complex is a term used to describe the female version of the Oedipus complex.
It involves a girl, aged between 3 and 6, becoming subconsciously sexually attached to her father and increasingly hostile toward her mother. Carl Jung developed the theory in 1913.
Sigmund Freud, who developed the Oedipus complex theory, first developed the idea that a young girl child competes with her mother for the sexual attention of her father.
However, it was Carl Jung — Freud’s contemporary — who first called this situation the “Electra complex” in 1913.
Just as the Oedipus complex was named after a Greek myth, so is the Electra complex.
According to Greek mythology, Electra was the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. When Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus, killed Agamemnon, Electra persuaded her brother Orestes to help her kill both her mother and her mother’s lover.
According to Freud, all people go through numerous stages of psychosexual development as children. The most important stage is the “phallic stage” between the ages of 3 and 6.
According to Freud, this is when both boys and girls become fixated on the penis. Freud argued that girls fixate on their lack of a penis and, in its absence, their clitoris.
In a girl’s psychosexual development, Freud proposed, she’s first attached to her mother until she realizes she doesn’t have a penis. This causes her to resent her mother for “castrating” her — a situation Freud referred to as “penis envy.” Because of this, she develops an attachment to her father.
Later, the girl identifies more strongly with her mother and emulates her behavior out of fear of losing her mother’s love. Freud called this a “feminine Oedipus attitude.”
Freud believed this was a crucial stage in a young girl’s development, as it leads her to accept gender roles and understand her own sexuality.
Freud proposed that the feminine Oedipus attitude was more emotionally intense than the Oedipus complex, so it was repressed more harshly by the young girl.
This, he believed, led to women being less self-confident and more subservient.
Carl Jung expanded on this theory by labeling it the “Electra complex.” However, this label was rejected by Freud, who said it was an attempt to analogize the Oedipus complex between the sexes.
Since Freud believed there were crucial differences between the Oedipus complex and the feminine Oedipus attitude, he didn’t believe they should be conflated.
Initially, the girl is attached to her mother.
Then, she realizes she doesn’t have a penis. She experiences “penis envy” and blames her mother for her “castration.”
Because she wants to sexually possess a parent and she can’t possess her mother without a penis, she tries to possess her father instead. At this stage, she develops subconscious sexual feelings toward her father.
She becomes hostile toward her mother and fixated on her father. She might push her mother away or focus all her attention on her father.
Eventually, she realizes she doesn’t want to lose her mother’s love, so she becomes attached to her mother again, emulating her mother’s actions.
By emulating her mother, she learns to follow traditional gender roles.
In puberty, she’ll then start becoming attracted to men who aren’t related to her, according to Freud.
Some adults, Jung noted, could regress to the phallic stage or never grow out of the phallic stage, leaving them sexually attached to their parent.
The Electra complex isn’t widely accepted in psychology nowadays. As with many of Freud’s theories, the feminine Oedipus attitude complex and the notion of “penis envy” is also widely criticized.
Very little data actually supports the idea that the Electra complex is real. It’s not an official diagnosis in the the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).
As a 2015 paper points out, Freud’s ideas about psychosexual development have been criticized as outdated because they rely on century-old gender roles.
The concept of “penis envy” has, in particular, been criticized as sexist. The Oedipus and Electra complexes also imply that a child needs two parents — a mother and a father — to develop properly, which has been criticized as heteronormative.
That said, it’s possible for young girls to experience sexual attraction toward their fathers. It’s just not as universal as Freud and Jung believed it to be, according to many in the field.
The Electra complex is no longer a widely accepted theory. Most psychologists don’t believe it’s real. It’s more a theory that’s become the subject of jokes.
If you’re concerned about your child’s mental or sexual development, reach out to a healthcare professional, such as a doctor or child psychologist. They can help guide you in a way that may settle your concerns.
What Is the Electra Complex?
This debunked theory aimed to explain a possessive form of attachment between a female child and her opposite-sex parent.
Love and affection between children and parents is natural. How you’re raised — and in particular, the amount of love and support you’re given — can impact how you develop into an adult.
But when a child’s feelings of love and attachment shift into a form of desire, it may signal a deeper mental health complex.
One unproven theory of psychosexual development created by Sigmund Freud describes this experience as becoming stuck in “phallic phase” of development, triggering an Oedipus complex.
The Electra complex is a complementary — though similarly unproven — theory developed by Carl Jung, a student of Freud, and centers on similar feelings female children might experience.
The Electra complex is a largely debunked theory that describes a female child experiencing specific feelings toward the parent of the opposite sex — her father — including:
- desire
- possessiveness
- fixation
According to its creator Carl Jung, a child experiencing the Electra complex may also have a competitive drive against the parent of the same sex.
The Electra complex theory is sometimes considered the female counterpart to the Oedipus complex theory, a component of Sigmund Freud’s psychosexual theory of development.
Electra complex isn’t a Freudian term, however.
It’s an expansion of his theory created by Carl Jung, specifically used to define feelings in female children who are fixated on their fathers.
Though many children experience feelings that may match the Electra complex theory description, it’s not an accepted theory or condition in modern psychotherapy.
Who was Electra?
A legendary character of ancient Greek tragedy, Electra was the daughter of King Agamemnon and Clytemnestra.
When King Agamemnon was murdered, she helped save her younger brother Orestes by sending him away into hiding.
When he returned from exile, Electra persuaded her brother to help her murder their mother Clytemnestra and her new lover, who were responsible for the death of their father, King Agamemnon.
Unlike Oedipus, Electra didn’t marry her opposite-sex parent. Instead, she married Pylades, one of her brother’s friends.
When does Electra complex occur?
Freud’s original theory of psychosexual development consists of 6 phases.
Each phase involves aspects of maturing pleasure sensations and a growing sense of self-identity.
These phases include:
- oral: infancy to 18 months
- anal: 18 months to 3 years
- phallic: 3 years to 5 years
- latency: 5 years to 12 years
- genital: 12 years, or the onset of puberty, to adulthood
Though empirically unproven, Freud believed that children experienced the majority of their development in sexual identity between ages 3 and 5 years old, or the phallic phase.
His theory suggests that this is also the phase where children may experience the Oedipus — or Electra — complex, which he saw as a natural part of development.
The Electra and Oedipus complexes are no longer widely accepted among modern psychotherapists and analysts.
Both of these early theories remain a fascinating perspective on childhood development and the history of psychoanalysis.
However, newer theories have emerged to explain attachment between children and parents without components of sexuality or an overbearing focus on gender.
Heteronormative gender roles
Additionally, the Electra and Oedipus complexes have been heavily criticized for their reliance on heteronormative gender roles.
Having one female and one male parent doesn’t necessarily equal better childhood development. Current research suggests children raised in LGBTQ families may experience primarily positive outcomes. They may also face similar family challenges as those of families with heterosexual parents.
In Freud’s original Oedipus complex theory, both male and female children with a parental fixation fell under the same classification.
Freud fundamentally believed that both girls and boys experienced psychosexual development in the same phases. Therefore, he felt the Oedipus complex aptly described this type of experience in both sexes.
Carl Jung is credited with expanding the Oedipus complex theory in 1913, splitting the complex between boys and girls.
Jung suggested that his Electra complex was a way to clearly define a female child’s feelings of desire toward her father.
Originally, Jung intended for the Electra complex to be the female counterpart to the Oedipus complex. However, Freud never supported this additional classification.
Likewise, it may be an oversimplification to call the Electra complex a female version on Freud’s original Oedipus complex.
Freud’s theory of psychosexual development
Freud felt Jung’s Electra complex theory created an unnecessary separation. According to his original theory, the Oedipus complex wasn’t about the adult definition of sexual desire toward a parent.
In Freud’s Oedipal theory, children may develop a desire to possess a parent because that parent might represent a need gratification.
As the child develops sexually, that need gratification can involve into sexual stimuli. However, the concept of sex and sexuality isn’t something a child commonly understands at that age.
Freud believed both male and female children first fixated on their mother — the primary need-fulfiller — during their psychosexual development.
Around age 3 to 5 years old, children go through the phallic development phase, where both girls and boys might be fixated on the penis. However, Freud suggested a differentiation between boys and girls during this phase.
Girls and ‘penis envy’
During the phallic phase, Freud theorized that girls might realize they’re physically different than boys, understanding that they lack a penis. Freud referred to this as “penis envy.”
Again, penis envy is purely theoretical and has little to no empirical support by the wider scientific community. The theory isn’t used or accepted in modern psychology.
Girls might also learn that their mother doesn’t have a penis during this phase. Freud’s theory suggests this may cause girls to subconsciously blame their mother for somehow “castrating” them.
During this time of resentment, Freud hypothesized that girls may turn more towards their fathers and away from their mothers, until they entered the next phase of psychosexual development.
Jung’s reasoning
While Freud did address the female experience in his Oedipus complex theory, Jung felt Freud’s original theory was too heavily oriented towards explaining behavior in males.
So, Jung separated the female theory under its own label — the Electra complex. This was his attempt to fill in Freud’s knowledge gaps related to the psychosexual development of girls.
The Electra complex is considered a typical part of the phallic stage of psychosexual development, according to Jung’s theory.
However, this theory also states that it is possible to become “stuck” in this phase.
A typical part of development
Characteristics of the Electra complex are commonly seen as a transient phase of development for girls.
This is when a female child’s primal id — the subconscious part of the self present from birth — may cause her to move away from her mother due to Freud’s concept of penis envy.
During this time, girls may become possessive of their fathers and hateful toward their mothers.
The ego and superego
As psychosexual development progresses, female children may soon start to develop their ego and then superego. These are the components of personality that eventually drive conscious decisions and morality.
As the ego develops, Electra complex behaviors typically fade and girls begin to identify with their mothers again.
Unresolved phallic phase conflicts
But sometimes, those feelings of possession and desire toward the father figure don’t fade with development. Freud believed this was due to unresolved internal conflict during the phallic phase.
Because the Electra complex remains an unproven theory, the possible causes of unresolved internal conflict during the phallic phase remain scientifically unsettled.
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)
It’s possible that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), like trauma, could be a contributing factor to developing an Electra complex.
ACEs have been linked to many other conditions, including:
- chronic health problems
- mental health disorders
- substance use disorders
According to Jung’s theory, an Electra complex left unresolved in childhood may persist into adulthood.
Since Electra complex isn’t a formal mental health diagnosis, it may be difficult to tell if you’re experiencing symptoms.
Potential signs of Electra complex for women and women-identifying people could include:
- avoiding or being hostile toward your mother
- disliking your mother for no obvious reason
- fixating on only what your father does
- seeking out romantic partners that resemble or have characteristics of your father
- wanting to be overly involved in everything your father is doing
Just because you prefer your father over your mother doesn’t necessarily mean you’re experiencing Electra complex.
There are many reasons why children might form strong attachments to one parent over the other, such as emotional unavailability or parental absence.
Since the Electra complex remains an unproven and often controversial theory, it can’t be diagnosed. Therefore, there are currently no formal treatments for Electra complex.
However, if you’re concerned about the level of attachment you or your child might feel toward a parent, talking with a therapist can help. A therapist trained in child development can help you or your child work through the root of these complex emotions.
While Jung’s Electra complex intended to fill gaps in Freud’s Oedipus complex and build upon his overall theories of psychosexual development, it remains unproven and controversial.
As a result, the Electra complex is not a condition that can be diagnosed or formally treated.
Feeling strong emotions for one parent over another isn’t necessarily an indication that something is wrong with you, or that you didn’t develop correctly as a child.
Other aspects of childhood experience can sometimes impact your parental relationships and interactions, such as:
- trauma
- culture
- home environment
- spiritual beliefs
Sometimes, a parent may have their own challenges that prevent a strong bond with children, such as emotional unavailability or absence.
However, if you suspect that you or your child might be feeling emotions that creep into the realm of desire or possessiveness for a parent, talking to a therapist may be a good idea.
If you’re ready to seek help, visit Psych Central’s guide to mental health support.
Elektra Complex: Abandoned Girl Syndrome?
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A girl who lost her father at an early age and unwittingly idealizes him for many years. A daughter who continues to rebel against her mother even after adolescence is over. A teenage girl who is more attracted to dreams of boys than real relationships. A woman who cannot realize herself in any way in the profession ...
Many of those girls and women who are close to such styles of behavior live the myth of Elektra in their lives - says Jungian psychologist Nancy Kater, author of the book "The Elektra Complex in the Psychology of Women."
What archetypal situations recognizable in modern families does this myth describe?
Psychological incest with father
The legends about Electra have different interpretations - first of all, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Euripides and Seneca. The essence of the conflict can be represented as follows: first, Clytemnestra, the mother of Electra and Orestes, in alliance with her lover Aegisthus, kills Agamemnon, her husband.
Years pass, Orestes and Electra grow up and decide to avenge their father: Orestes, led by his sister, kills his mother and Aegisthus.
Looking more closely at this story, let's pay attention to the story of a girl who is acutely experiencing the loss of her beloved father.
Until about the age of six, Elektra lived as a princess in a palace at Mycenae with her father, Agamemnon, a powerful king. She grew up "daddy's daughter", a favorite. It can be assumed that little Elektra already idolized her father.
Later, during the ten-year absence of her father, who went to the Trojan War, her desire for idealization intensifies.
And the death of Agamemnon at the hands of Clytemnestra makes Elektra forever fix the ideal image of a courageous, loving, protective father - an image that can no longer be corrected in reality.
“If at first a positive fantasy about a father helps a woman by giving her a sense of hope,” explains Nancy Cater, “then over time it becomes destructive, because it does not allow her to continue to live her life.
A woman lives only in her imagination, without real relationships. She has no energy left to follow her own destiny.”
The disturbed image of the mother
The “Electra complex” is precisely a complex of feelings, internal conflicts and experiences that cannot be reduced only to the idealization of the father.
Another facet of it is a disturbed relationship with one's body and one's own sexuality, the reason for which is Elektra's difficult relationship with her domineering mother, Clytemnestra. The mother does not share the grief of her daughter who lost her father, moreover, she devalues her loss in every way.
“Clytemnestra embodies the negative aspects of Elektra's maternal archetype,” says Nancy Cater. The absorbing mother does not allow her daughter to grow, develop personally or experience joy, creativity, freedom.
More generally, she denies the uniqueness and individuality of her daughter.” It is especially important that the negative maternal image breaks the connection of Electra with her female "I", with her sexuality.
Electra complex
The term "Electra complex" was coined by Carl Gustav Jung. In The Theory of Psychoanalysis, he suggested using it to describe the oedipal stage of development in girls, the stage in which a 3-6 year old daughter "develops a special affection for her father with a corresponding zeal for her mother."
Portrait of a modern Elektra
Portrait of Elektra from Nancy Kater's point of view is as follows. This woman is psychologically stuck in adolescence because of her unresolved relationship with her father. She continues to mourn for him many years later and cannot find her place in the outside world.
She identifies with the role of the victim, blaming her mother for all her problems. She projects her power onto men (primarily her father and brother, Orestes) and is unable to act: she simply waits for her brother to come and save her.
At the same time, she unconsciously has an inflated opinion of herself as a princess.
The myth of Electra is lived today by many women and girls. The loss of a father is not only about death, but about the departure of a father, divorce, is a common occurrence in our world. It becomes a trauma - for both the mother and the daughter.
A mother who cannot cope with the loss (becomes angry with her ex-husband, blames him or suppresses love for him) will find it difficult to bear the behavior of a daughter who continues to demonstrate her love for her father.
As a result, the mother becomes closed to her feelings. Their mutual misunderstanding strengthens the mother's new marriage, which the daughter may perceive as a betrayal of her father and her.
In the future, such a psychologically incestuous relationship with an ideal father can complicate her sexual relations with men.
Feeling isolated, the girl can go into a fantasy world populated by heroic male figures.
She will dream that one day one of these father-like heroes will come and save her from life with her mother.
In the future, such a psychologically incestuous relationship with an ideal father can complicate her sexual relations with men.
Having matured, the modern Elektra may also experience difficulties in finding her own professional path. And not only because of depression and unwillingness to act. If her domineering mother is successful in her career, the daughter may refuse to realize herself in the profession in order to avoid comparison with her mother.
Find your way out
The young women who recognize themselves in this story should not be trapped in the myth, insists Nancy Cater. It formulates tasks, the solution of which will help to go beyond the myth and become freer. Here are some of them:
1. Say goodbye to your father. In order to complete the grieving process, the modern Elektra must come into contact with her anger at her father for leaving her.
Anger plays an important role in the process of mourning, and the refusal to acknowledge it only prolongs this process. Once she can openly express the feelings of anger and abandonment that are repressed by her idealized father image, she will be able to accept her loss and move on.
2. Separate the real father from the ideal image. Elektra may learn about her father's shadowy, negative traits after he leaves relatives, family friends or other people.
However, there is a possibility that she will still be attached to the idealized image of her father. Therefore, the modern Elektra can work out this issue indirectly through her subsequent relationships with men.
Modern Elektra will have to reconsider her relationship with her mother, admit that she and she are in many ways similar to each other
3. Reconnect with your animus. Electra women project their animus (the male part of the female psyche) onto men.
It is important to determine what these traits are - for example, the ability to set goals, make decisions, take actions - and develop them in yourself.
As soon as these projections are returned, the psychic energy will be released, and the woman will be able to become stronger, more responsible, ready to find her own way in life.
4. Discover your femininity. The modern Elektra will have to reconsider her relationship with her mother, recognize that she and she are alike in many ways, try to see positive traits in her and reconnect.
What to do if the relationship is destroyed irretrievably? Fortunately, the positive mother archetype exists within our psyches. The Elektra woman can reconnect with him in a variety of ways.
Positive mother figures may appear in her dreams, she may also interact with him through her relationships with other female teachers and friends.
Nancy Kater is convinced that recognizing a myth allows us not only to understand our own experiences more deeply, but also to take the first steps towards liberation from its unconscious power.
Text: Alla Anufrieva Photo credit: Getty Images
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More Efficient Pretraining of NLP Models with ELECTRA / Sudo Null IT News0001
Recent developments in pre-training of language models have led to significant advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), giving rise to high performance models such as BERT, RoBERTa, XLNet, ALBERT, T5 and many more.
These methods, which have different architectures, nevertheless, are united by the idea of using large amounts of unlabeled textual data to create a general natural language understanding model, which is then further trained and fine-tuned to solve specific applied problems, such as sentiment analysis or building question-answer systems.
Existing pre-learning methods fall mainly into two categories:
- Language Models (LM) such as GPT, which process input text from left to right, predicting the next word in a previously given context;
- Masked Language Models (MLM) such as BERT, RoBERTa, and ALBERT, which attempt to predict masked words in source text.
The advantage of MLMs is that they work bi-directionally, i.e. "see" the text on both sides of the predicted token, unlike LM, facing only one direction. However, MLMs (and models like XLNet) also have disadvantages stemming from their pre-training task: instead of predicting every word of the input sequence, they predict only a small masked portion, only about 15%, which reduces the amount of information received from a single sentence.
Existing pre-training methods and their shortcomings. The arrows indicate the tokens used to obtain the output (rectangles). Left: traditional language models (eg GPT) using only the left context of the current word. Right: masked language models (like BERT) that use the context on either side of the current word, but predict only a small fraction of the words in the input sequence.
The article "ELECTRA: Pre-training Text Encoders as Discriminators Rather Than Generators" proposed a different approach to pre-training language models that retains the benefits of BERT but trains much more efficiently. ELECTRA - Efficiently Learning an Encoder that Classifies Token Replacements Accurately is a new pre-learning method that outperforms existing designs without increasing the cost of computing power. For example, ELECTRA shows the same result as RoBERTa and XLNet in the tasks of the GLUE natural language understanding benchmark, however, spending ¼ of their computing resources, and also achieves outstanding results in the SQuAD question-and-answer benchmark.
The extraordinary efficiency of ELECTRA means that it can work well even on a small scale: trained on 1 GPU in just a few days, it can show better accuracy than the GPT model, which requires 30 times more computing power. ELECTRA is published in the public domain as a model on top of TensorFlow and includes a set of ready-made pre-trained language models.
ELECTRA solves a new pre-learning problem - replaced token detection (RTD), for which a bidirectional model is trained (as in MLM) at all input positions (as in LM). Inspired by generative adversarial networks (GANs), ELECTRA learns to identify “real” and “fake” inputs. Instead of making the input sequence noisy by replacing the words with a "[MASK]" token (as in BERT), the RTD approach involves replacing the input words with incorrect, but to some extent possible fake words. For example, in the image below, the word "cooked" could be replaced with the word "ate". While not exactly a meaningless substitution, the new word does not fit well in the context of the entire input sequence.
Solving the pre-learning problem requires creating a model (so-called discriminator) to determine which words from the original sequence have been replaced and which have not. It is important that this binary classification problem is solved for each input token, and not for a small number of masked tokens (15% in the case of BERT-type models). This makes RTD more efficient than MLM - the ELECTRA model needs to "see" fewer examples to achieve the same result, because it receives a training signal from each example. At the same time, RTD allows you to create highly representative language models, since to solve its problem, the model needs to learn an accurate representation of the data distribution in the training dataset.
Replaced token detection trains a bidirectional model on each of the input positions.
Replacement tokens are produced by another neural network called a generator. And while the generator can be any model that produces an output distribution over tokens, ELECTRA uses a small masked language model (such as a BERT model with few hidden layers) that is trained in conjunction with a discriminator.
Although the structure in which the generator passes tokens to the discriminator is similar to GAN, the developers trained the generator to predict masked words based on maximum likelihood rather than adversarially due to the difficulty of applying GAN to text data. The generator and discriminator share common input embeddings. After preliminary training, the generator is discarded and the discriminator (ELECTRA model) is retrained on a specific NLP task. All presented models have Transformer type architecture.
More details about the task of detecting a replaced token. Fake tokens are generated using a small MLM model that is trained in conjunction with ELECTRA.
Comparing ELECTRA with other leading NLP models, the developers found that the former is significantly more efficient in terms of computing resources, reaching the heights of RoBERTa and XLNet using less than 25% of the power required to train them.
The x-axis shows the amount of computing resources used to train the model (calculated in FLOPs), and the y-axis shows the GLUE result.
ELECTRA trains much more efficiently than existing pre-trained NLP models. Note that the current GLUE leaders, such as T5, are not shown on the graph, as require significantly more computing resources (almost 10 times more than RoBERTa).
In an effort to achieve even greater efficiency, the developers experimented with the ELECTRA-Small model, which can show good accuracy when trained on a single GPU in just 4 days. And although it does not achieve the accuracy shown by large models that require many TPUs for their training, ELECTRA-Small still shows quite good results and even surpasses GPT, spending only 1/30 of the latter's computing resources.
Finally, to see how successful ELECTRA results can be scaled, the ELECTRA-Large model was trained at high powers (almost equal to RoBERTa and 10% of T5). This model achieves the best results on the SQuAD 2.0 question-answer dataset (see table below) and beats RoBERTa, XLNet, and ALBERT on the GLUE leaderboard. And although T5-11b holds the top spot in GLUE, ELECTRA is 30 times smaller and requires only 10% of the resources spent on training T5.
