UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT SANTA CRUZ
PSYCH 41; ©2004 V. Tonay
But first...a little review of the Id-Ego-Superego:
One way of looking at the psyche is to divide it, as Plato did, into three parts which interact with one another in a dynamic way. Dynamic means that the parts of the psyche are always in conflict. Freud used the id (translated from German as "the it") to describe that part of the psyche containing the pure aggressive and sexual drives with which we humans are born, constantly seeking expression through fantasy and behavior. It is mostly unconscious--i.e., we are mostly unaware of it.
The superego (translation: "above I") contains introjected values from one's culture, most often communicated through one's parents, extended family, school, and religion. It contains the "shoulds" we all carry around about the way in which we'd best behave.
The ego (translated as "the I") is the "I" we refer to when speaking of ourselves; it is mostly conscious. The ego is the rational part of the psyche which we use to learn, evaluate, analyze, and perform other higher order cognitive processes. The ego mediates between the desires of the id and the demands of the superego in order to get as many id desires expressed as possible without suffering the pain (and potential threat of loss of love) inflicted by the superego. Ex: Your id wants to wring your mother's neck after she calls you 8 times in a day. You consciously experience this as feeling ferociously angry. The superego explains that you really mustn't do such a naughty thing; if you do, your mother will no longer love you, and neither may anyone else, you horrible daughter, you. You consciously experience this as feeling guilty. The ego says, okay, maybe the thing to do is imagine you're screaming at her while calmly telling her that when she calls you several times a day you get annoyed. That way you can express great rage in fantasy without harming your relationship with your mother, and you can also change the situation by informing her how you feel.
The Oedipal conflict is not about wanting to have sex with one's parent..
I'll write my simplified version of the current psychoanalytic female version here, since most of us have heard about the very out-of- date male version of the theory. There are lots of variations depending on whether this is a single parent family, the child is being raised by the father, etc. You can use 'primary caretaker' for mother and 'secondary caretaker' for father if you prefer. The resolution of the Oedipal conflict results in the formation of the initial, immature superego:
The girl at age 5 has passed the symbiotic stage where she feels joined with her mother. She now realizes she is separate from her mother and, modeling herself after her mother, begins to look to her father for affection. She realizes, though, that he is not always there for her when she wants him to be. She looks around, sees he's often there for mom, that dad actually chooses mom over her increasingly more often.
This hurts (fears abandonment), threatens her natural egocentrism
at this age ("I am the center of the universe, and Very Important
to Everyone"), and her self-esteem ("He wants to be
with mom more because there's something wrong with me;" she
feels damaged).
The daughter realizes she is in competition
with mother for father's affection, which means pleasure and self-worth
to her. Because she is a child, she is unable to either win her
father's affection by competing with and beating out her mother,
or to express her hurt feelings. Because she is powerless to express
it directly, the daughter's hurt transforms to anger (as it does
when unexpressed), and the child develops an unconscious wish
to remove her mother forever and thus secure dad's attention permanently
("If only mom wasn't here, I'd have him all to myself!").
However, the daughter also wants to protect her mother, whom she
loves and on whom her survival depends, from her wish (ambivalence).
Essentially, the daughter wants both to have and not have her
mother and her father. She is not cognitively developed enough
to realize that she can have both. If she has dad, she has to
get rid of mom; if she has mom, she can't have dad.
Mother, meanwhile, might be resentful of father's attention for
daughter (especially if mother has unresolved Oedipal issues of
her own). The child has realized for some time she is physically
different from her father and more like her mother. Unlike the
boy child, the girl child has no fear of the mother "castrating"
her (destroying power), because she has never had power (penis).
The daughter is afraid mother can sense daughter's wish (magical
thinking) and will destroy the child because of it (origin
of "mother/woman = wicked witch"). Daughter represses
the desire for father, anger towards mother and the resultant
anxiety; she has no choice (since they can't be expressed) and
also LOVES both parents and wants to protect them from her powerful
(child's normal feelings of grandiosity) wishes.
To resolve this seemingly unresolvable conflict, the daughter
identifies with (adopts values of) mother, for that is the only
way she can obtain the attention of her father--if she's like
mom, dad should like her, too! Also, her mother will never kill
someone so like herself! She, therefore introjects her
mother's values exactly. The superego (moral voice) thus develops
to prevent future annihilations by the mother. At this point,
the superego is identical with the mother's values. However, because
castration anxiety (= fear of loss of power) is not present
in the girl (because she has already "lost" her power/penis),
Freud believed the superego does not develop in girls as strongly
as in boys, which has not been supported by subsequent research;
in fact, females tend to express a slightly higher level of moral
(superego) development than do males.
All depends on the response of the mother to the daughter's emerging
individuality at this point. If mother is threatening, daughter
will remain "stuck" (fixated) here. She will
retain this original superego--her mother's values exactly--getting
involved with men who represent her father, and competing with
female authority figures and romantic rivals who represent her
mother. She will remain in the original psychological situation,
often becoming involved in/seeking out romantic triangles as an
adult, where the partner is confused with her father, and "the
other" man (or woman, depending on sexual orientation), confused
with her mother (through displacement). A young girl can
get fixated at earlier places in the conflict as well, which might
result in deeper, or more intractable, difficulty in relationships,
particularly with authority figures. She may be more comfortable
befriending men than women, with whom her relationships will be
mostly competitive and characterized by resentment. A woman in
this situation is said to have an Oedipal complex.
If the mother is not threatening, but
encourages the daughter's individuality and own developing sense
of conscience and identity, the girl is able to re-evaluate her
superego. She incorporates some of her mother's values and rejects
others, to develop her own moral code (a mature superego). That
is the "healthy" or "normal" path of female
development according to modern psychoanalysis. We all go through
the Oedipal conflict, but only some of us end up with the
Oedipal complex.
NOTE: Psychoanalysis is one theoretical system of psychology, most utilized by clinical (therapy) and personality psychologists and researchers and some developmental psychologists. (Social, quantitative, cognitive, educational psychology are other branches of psychology which don't deal much with psychoanalytic or clinical theory.) Within clinical (therapy-oriented) psychology, there are several theoretical systems which give rise to various therapy methods: cognitive, behavioral, humanistic, and psychodynamic are the main systems. Psychoanalysis is a psychodynamic system which includes such sub-disciplines as self psychology, ego psychology, and Jungian/depth psychology. Much of psychodynamic theory used today was developed by women psychologists who altered and added to Freud's original theory. Modern day psychoanalysis is quite different than that which was developed in the early 1900s, and although few modern clinical psychologists are psychoanalysts or practice psychoanalysis, most do hold to some aspects of Freud's original thinking.