Pound Pup Legacy

The Oedipus complex is a concept within psychoanalytic theory referring to a stage of psychosexual development where a child of either gender regards the parent of the same gender as an adversary, and competitor, for the exclusive love of the parent of the opposite gender.

Freud considered the successful resolution of the Oedipus complex to be key to the development of gender roles and identity. He posited that boys and girls resolved the conflicts differently as a result of castration anxiety (for males) and penis envy (for females).

Freud also held that the unsuccessful resolution of the Oedipus complex could result in neurosis, and homosexuality. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_complex]

In the Oedipus complex, a boy is fixated on his mother and competes with his father for maternal attention.

The opposite, the attraction of a girl to her father and rivalry with her mother, is sometimes called the Electra complex. 

http://changingminds.org/disciplines/psychoanalysis/concepts/oedipus_complex.htm

 Oedipus
n. Greek Mythology  http://www.answers.com/topic/oedipus

Literal meaning: ‘swollen-foot’. Son of Laius, King of Thebes, and Queen Jocasta. His father, having learnt from an oracle that he was doomed to perish by the hands of his own son, exposed Oedipus on a mountainside, immediately after his birth, with his feet pierced and tied together. The child was found by a shepherd who took him to the childless King and Queen of Corinth; they brought Oedipus up as their own son.

In his youth Oedipus was told by the Oracle at Delphi that he would kill his father and marry his mother and, horrified, he resolved never to return to Corinth. Ignorant of his true ancestry, he set out for Thebes and on the road encountered King Laius, whom he slew in a quarrel over the right-of-way. Near the city he answered the riddle of the Sphinx, then a plague to all travellers, and for defeating this monstrous female wingedlion, the Thebans made him their king. He married the widowed Jocasta and so, unwittingly, fulfilled the prophecy. In time he became aware of the patricide and incest: this self-discovery caused him to blind himself before going into exile, where in the grove of Colonus near Athens the Eumenides finally released Oedipus from an earthly existence. Jocasta hanged hereself shortly afterwards.