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These two papers in the same issue of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis are welcome additions to the debate about the place of the Oedipus complex in female development. Both papers assert the inadequacy of the complex stated in this form to describe the vicissitudes of female development and argue persuasively for the adoption of other myths in thinking about this important issue.
Halberstadt-Freud suggests that the Electra myth is much more pertinent in thinking about the development of girls than that of Oedipus, because, she argues, it gives a central place to the mother-daughter relationship, a relationship undervalued in classical Freudian theory. The central place of her mother in the life of a woman means that she continues to live with the legacy of a homo-erotic bond, and with an identification which she retains throughout life. The mother-daughter bond is and remains a strong one but may be powerfully ambivalent, a situation which makes an adequate separation extremely difficult, if not impossible. This situation is exemplified in the Electra myth. Halberstadt-Freud discusses Freud's writings on the female Oedipus complex and his view that the girl changes her object. Freud thought that it was only in the male child that there is the fateful combination of love for one parent and simultaneous hatred of the other as a rival. He is less aware of the parallel development in girls and of the complication for girls of loving and hating the same parent. He suggests that girls become truly feminine only when the attachment to the mother has been surmounted.
By contrast, Halberstadt-Freud suggests that girls do not and should not surmount this attachment, that a hostile turning away from the mother betrays an unconscious attachment to the maternal image and is indicative of unresolved conflicts with the internal mother. Negative feelings intensify the attachment rather than loosen it, and prolonged hatred and disappointment with the mother create patholo