Oedipal and Electra Complexes Essay example -- Sexuality Heroine Freud

Oedipal and Electra ComplexesIn Rebecca egg-producing(prenominal) knowledgeableity is explored through the heroines symbolic festering of a banish Oedipal interlacing followed by an Electra complex. Although avoidance of incest was believed by Freud to be the urge for blueprint sexual development, the conduct explores the abnormal outcome of a negative Oedipal/Electra complex, i.e. replacement of the find by the daughter as the gravels straightaway love interest. The heroine is torn between her desire to merge with Rebecca and to associate from her due to this combination of negative Oedipal and Electra complexes. The key difference between these twain complexes underlies the heroines development.The difference between a negative Oedipal and Electra complex is not subtle. A negative Oedipal complex involves love for the mother in the fashion of Freuds bisexual attraction. The young woman will desire and expose with her, wishing to emulate her. An Electra com plex is defined by the little girls imagined rivalry between mother and daughter for the fathers love. For Freud the heterosexual development of little girls is more difficult to explain comp atomic number 18d to that of little boys because the girl must change the object of her love from woman to man. Initially the girl has a negative Oedipal complex until some catalytic occurrence shifts her into an Electra complex marked by dis corresponding of the mother and rivalry. In a normal Freudian non-incestuous descent the girl will transfer love of the father to other men and will not stop loving the mother entirely. In an incestuous relationship the girl will eliminate the holy terror of the mother, reward her place, and engage in a sexual relationship with the father. Avoiding this, Freud believes, drives the female sexual development. Embracing this, Hitchcock displays, drives the unheimlich development of Rebecca.Symbolically in the film, the main characters take on the ro les of key players in Freuds development strategies. The lovely heroine is intelligibly the girl, very young relative to apothegm and for the first half of the film innocent, weak, and small. She is made smaller by the overpowering presence of Rebecca, who for her typifies the perfect female. Maxim is clearly the father figure due to his age relative to the heroine and his relationship with her. His comments about her being a child, his desire for her never to grow up or wear ... ...e destruction of Mandalay and the death of Danvers, her pass true worshiper. The last scene shows Maxim and the heroine embracing, insinuating that they go on to a heterosexual, symbolically incestuous relationship that is not overshadowed by Rebecca.In short the heroines development in the film from a naive, weak little girl into a powerful, knowledgeable wife is mirrored by this symbolic transition from a negative Oedipal stage to an Electra stage to a father-daughter incestuous relationship. The heroines actions are not given explicit justification in the film, but the representative behavior of Freuds proverbial girl matches her behavior perfectly. The heroine tries to become like the woman who she believes Maxim loves, fails, and tries then to compete with her. The twist on the Oedipal/Electra complex comes about when the girls feminine rivalry turns to aligned ambition with the father against the mother leading to an incestuous relationship, precisely the outcome Freuds theory sought to avoid. Because the films development of the heroine diverges from normal sexual development in this way, Rebeccas development attains Hitchcocks sought after unheimlich effect.