In his works “Essays on the theory of sexuality” (1905) [1], “On children’s sexual theories” (1908) [2], “On a special type of object choice in a man” (1910) [3], “On the most common humiliation love life" (1912) [4], "On narcissism" (1914) [5], "The Taboo of Virginity" (1918) [6]. Freud uses the concept of the Oedipus complex; notes that the “threat of castration” that accompanies the resolution of the Oedipus complex is characteristic of the male child, and the main concept around which castration ideas in girls are constituted is “penis envy.”
In his works “The Decline of the Oedipus Complex” (1924) [7] and “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Difference of the Sexes” (1925) [8] Freud postulates:
“When we first examined the first mental formations of sexual life in a child, we usually took as our object a male child, a little boy. For a little girl, we thought, things should be similar, but somehow different. Where on the path of development this difference should be sought remains unclear” [8].
The differences in the passage of Oedipus in a boy and a girl affect several important points:
1. The castration complex for a boy represents, first of all, the threat of castration in the future and the premonition of its completion, reinforced by various prohibitions and hints from adults; while for a girl, the castration complex represents knowledge about castration as a fact that has already happened for her, which she needs to learn to deal with one way or another (for example, to come to terms with or not to come to terms with);
2. A girl’s awareness of her inferiority is associated with physiology: her childhood sexuality is focused on the clitoral area, which is perceived as a defective penis (which is associated with the concept of a “narcissistic wound”), subsequently the girl will have to repress active clitoral sexuality in order to discover vagina and go into a passive position (while the boy in adulthood simply returns to the habitual and familiar to him from the phallic phase of active sexuality);
3. A boy who views his mother as his property, unlike a girl, in the process of going through the Oedipal phase does not necessarily have to reorient his attraction to the opposite sex, since it is already focused on him; the girl needs to go through the path of changing the object of attachment - from her mother to her father; thus, “a girl must change both the erogenous zone and the object over time, while in a boy both are preserved” [9];
4. Both the logic of object choice and the logic of unconscious identification in Oedipus are completely different for boys and girls: the reasons why a boy chooses his mother or father as an object of identification are different from the reasons why a girl identifies with one of her parents, and in general there are many such reasons, and in order to trace them, it is necessary to analyze a specific clinical case.
In modern psychoanalysis, the question of differences in the passage of Oedipus has centered around the idea that, unlike the boy, the psychosexual development of the girl represents three successive changes: object (from maternal to paternal), erogenous zone (from clitoris to vagina) and identification ( from active to passive / from male to female).