June 25, 2025 • 12 mins
The Oedipus complex is probably Sigmund Freud’s most famous theory – that every little boy or girl goes through a phase where they want to kill one parent and, well, do things with the other. Good thing Freud just made it up.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff, Chosh, Chuck, Jerry,
not Dave but Dave. And this is short.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Stuff, yeah, the one in which we continue to lay
wood onto Sigmund Freud as a lot of people do.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Yeah, I mean his spirit at least.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, here's the deal with Sigmund Freud.
He and I think this this thing that you put
together from Britannica and very well mind and psych central
and simple simply psychology and other places, I think it
kind of nails it. Where like maybe we should just
think of Freud as kind of an innovative, perhaps even
great mind and thinker, and not like a rigorous scientist,
(00:46):
because a lot of the stuff in his psychoanalysis and
in his theories was not It was just stuff based
on anecdotal things he saw in the cases he worked on.
Sometimes just like a single case would make him say like, oh,
well here's what this is. I think.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Yeah, yeah, I mean he would just theorize based on conjecture.
He never applied the scientific method to any of his theories.
He just thought and talked out loud and smoked cigars,
and he came up with interesting explanations right for things
he observed for like actual real things, and one of
the actual real things that he observed is that a
(01:25):
lot of times little kids are mean and hostile to
one parent and can't be separated from the other parent.
And he came to kind of recognize that usually they
were attached to the opposite sex parent and were mean
to the same sex parent, and that formed the basis
of what came to be known as the Otopus complex,
which is far and away his most famous theory among
(01:49):
a lot of very famous theories that he came up with.
But just like all the other ones, it's essentially conjecture.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Yeah, I mean, when you think, if you know nothing
about Freud, you probably have made a about like somebody
wanting to sleep with their mother.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yeah, I mean there's a.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yeah, what is it?
Speaker 1 (02:07):
I'm not going to tell you.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
So we should just quickly go over the Greek myth
of Oedipus, in which it was so named for Oedipus
was abandoned at birth and then fulfilled a prophecy, killing
his father, the king and marrying his mother, the queen,
whom he did not know because he was abandoned at birth.
That was his father and his mother. He ended up
(02:31):
having four kids with his mother, and after learning this,
Queen Jocasta hanged herself and Oedipus gouged out his eyes.
Perhaps appropriate action, yeah in his case at.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Least, yeah, so grossed out, he gouged out his own eyes.
And to be clear to the Greeks, the point of
this myth was not like, how gross is this? It
was like it was about how like the inevitability of
faith and the inability of humans to like change their
fate or their destiny, because he was this was a
prophecy that he ended up fulfilling despite trying really hard
(03:06):
not to write. Freud was like, I like that really
gross part. I'm going to use that to describe these
feelings that little kids have towards their parents.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
I like the idea, though, that someone's writing this myth
and they're like, oh boys, I got one for you.
This one's so gnarly. What's it about?
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Oh you just wait, Yeah, I'm not going to it's about.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
It's about destiny whatever? Sure?
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Sure? So yeah, I mean that's where that's where Freud
picked it up. Was I mean, it is perfectly suited
in that in that sense.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Yeah, And we'll describe from kind of directly from the
Simply Psychology website what the edible complex is and it
occurs during the phallic stage of development ages three to six,
in which the source of libido or the life force
is concentrated in the erogenous zones of the child's body.
And during the stage, children experience an unconscious feeling of
(03:59):
desire for their opposite sex parent and jealousy and envy
toward their same sex parent.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Okay, it makes sense, it's a little it's a little jargony.
I also found one from Encyclopedia Britannica. It's a little
more lay person geared. They say the Oedipus complex in
psychoanalytic theory is a desire for sexual involvement with the
parent of the opposite sex in a cocomminant sense of
rivalry with the parent of the same sex. But it's
(04:26):
a crucial stage in the normal development process according to
psychoanalytic theory at least.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Yeah, that part is pretty key. And what's also key
is that Freud based this on a case one case
study of a four year old patient that he anonymized
as Little Hans. Apparently, Little Hans was brought in by
his father and had recently seen the collapse of a
horse pulling a heavy cart that really traumatized.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Him, to traumatized anybody, Sure, and.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
He developed a fear of horses.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
So Hans's father said, you know what, He's developed all
these really specific anxieties. He feels really uneasy without mom around,
and he's really fixated on male genitalia, especially horse genitalia.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
And Freud was like, yes, yes, I see very interesting. Yeah,
I'm sorry everybody. So he basically said, this all just
makes total sense. Check this out, Hans' father. All of
this comes from a foundational animosity that he has towards you,
his dad, And the reason that he's afraid of horses
(05:36):
because the horses represent you, his dad, and he's afraid
that you, his dad, are going to castrate him because
he secretly wants to sleep with his mother even though
he's four years old. And Freud's sycophantic secretary jumped to
his feet and started applauding, uncomfortably loudly.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yeah, which this. You know, if he went into a
you know, a shrink today and you heard something like this,
you'd say, thank you for your time, I'll be going
to see someone else.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
You can actually probably file suit for something like that.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Yeah, you probably could. But at the time this turned
out to be like the foundational legacy of Freud's psychoanalysis,
which is just you know, bananas to think about.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Should we talk about girls first and take a break
or break and then girls? Let's talk about girls, okay,
because there are such things as girls, And Freud was like, well,
I guess I should probably talk about the girls too.
He didn't come up with the name electra complex. That
was Carl Jung, but he did take the oedipal complex
and apply it to girls and basically said, same thing,
(06:40):
but do the old switcheroo with the parents. The girls
want to sleep with their father and they hate their mother.
But the whole thing is not to do with castration anxiety.
It's penis envying girls.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
That's right. And another what I mentioned is the first key.
And by the way, I realized how creepy that sounded
when I say let's talk about girls, okay, by the
way I make it that way, okay. Good. His proposal was,
and this is very key, was that a kid that
does not undergo this experience of the edipal complex will
not fully mature sexually, and they will be stuck for life.
(07:17):
They're going to be stuck identifying with the opposite sex parent,
and they will never be able to have a normal,
socially acceptable love life and desires for people who aren't
in their family.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Yeah. He basically said that an incomplete development through the
edipal complex is the basis of homosexuality. That's how he
would have put it at the time. And then the
other problem of it is you're stuck in that portion
of your development, doomed to forever, like, go through it,
even though you're never going to get past it. And
(07:51):
he said that guys like that turn out to be
real Norman Baits types, and all of his colleagues were like,
who is Norman Bates? And Freud was like, just wait,
just wait, because he's gonna knock your socks off when
he comes along in the early sixties.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
I guess we take our break now, all right, we'll
be back right after this. Thanks, weet, shop shop stop.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Okay, chuck, So we're back. So the big question is
is all of this weird gross stuff correct?
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Answer me, Well, most psychologists today and the world of
psychology as a whole, are pretty like bashful about even
talking about this. They're like, can we just kind of
forget all that stuff? We've moved on. It's completely discredited.
Most of Freud's theories are pretty discredited at this point,
(09:12):
but that's not to say that there isn't some support
for this still.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
No, there have been papers that have come out that
seem to very strongly support the presence of Freud's Oedipus complex,
and one came out in two thousand and nine. It
was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B
and it made international news when it was published because
they studied these similarities, the physical characteristic similarities between men's
(09:39):
mothers and their wives, and they measured everything as like
jaw link. They did everything, and they were coming up
with correlations in like the ninety second percentile, so essentially
like photo copies between mom and wife. And they were like, see,
guys really want their moms. What you're gonna do? Dog's
(10:01):
gonna hunt kind of thing. And like I said, it
made international news, and luckily some other scientists were like,
let me see your data and went through and they're like,
this does not support your conclusions at all.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Yeah, here's the thing I'm gonna go out on a limb.
Hold on to your hats. I'm gonna go on a
limb and say, I've seen plenty of examples where kids
end up married to someone that is maybe in some way,
like like a really good parent that they had of
the opposite sex or maybe of the same sex. Even
(10:38):
I don't necessarily think like it's the looks thing, but
like if you're like a really awesome dad, and you're
like super fun and funny, and you know, maybe you
have a certain job, like, and your daughter goes on
to marry somebody who has got like a great sense
of humor and has maybe have a similar interest as
something your father did. Like, I think that can be
(10:59):
a thing. I don't think it's always a thing, but
it's just sort of when you're raised with a parent
that you look up to and love and admire, you
may seek out people like that in your life. And
I think that's kind of all that is.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
I think similarly, and maybe even more frequently or commonly,
people inadvertently or unconsciously seek out people who are like
their parents in the worst ways.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yeah, or sometimes completely seek out the opposite.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Yes, but that's conscious.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Yeah maybe so, But yeah, I see what you mean
for sure.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Yeah, so again there have been There was another paper
in the eighties that studied rats that basically said, like, yes,
these rats at least have Oedipus complexes that carry on.
So luckily psychology came up with some other stuff that said, like, okay,
kids do stuff like this when they're young. We don't
(11:52):
think it's the Oedipus complex. And luckily, things like attachment theory,
which we did an entire episode on that was pretty good. Yeah,
have less way less creepy. They've come along and offered
pretty good structures for understanding child development that is just
much less ichy than Freud's.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
So you're just gonna summarize that rat study. You're not
gonna talk about rat ejaculation.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Do you want me to? No?
Speaker 2 (12:16):
I think we should just leave that right now.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Okay, cool, So I think more than ever short Stuff
is out.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff, Chosh, Chuck, Jerry,
not Dave but Dave. And this is short.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Stuff, yeah, the one in which we continue to lay
wood onto Sigmund Freud as a lot of people do.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Yeah, I mean his spirit at least.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, here's the deal with Sigmund Freud.
He and I think this this thing that you put
together from Britannica and very well mind and psych central
and simple simply psychology and other places, I think it
kind of nails it. Where like maybe we should just
think of Freud as kind of an innovative, perhaps even
great mind and thinker, and not like a rigorous scientist,
(00:46):
because a lot of the stuff in his psychoanalysis and
in his theories was not It was just stuff based
on anecdotal things he saw in the cases he worked on.
Sometimes just like a single case would make him say like, oh,
well here's what this is. I think.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Yeah, yeah, I mean he would just theorize based on conjecture.
He never applied the scientific method to any of his theories.
He just thought and talked out loud and smoked cigars,
and he came up with interesting explanations right for things
he observed for like actual real things, and one of
the actual real things that he observed is that a
(01:25):
lot of times little kids are mean and hostile to
one parent and can't be separated from the other parent.
And he came to kind of recognize that usually they
were attached to the opposite sex parent and were mean
to the same sex parent, and that formed the basis
of what came to be known as the Otopus complex,
which is far and away his most famous theory among
(01:49):
a lot of very famous theories that he came up with.
But just like all the other ones, it's essentially conjecture.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Yeah, I mean, when you think, if you know nothing
about Freud, you probably have made a about like somebody
wanting to sleep with their mother.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yeah, I mean there's a.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yeah, what is it?
Speaker 1 (02:07):
I'm not going to tell you.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
So we should just quickly go over the Greek myth
of Oedipus, in which it was so named for Oedipus
was abandoned at birth and then fulfilled a prophecy, killing
his father, the king and marrying his mother, the queen,
whom he did not know because he was abandoned at birth.
That was his father and his mother. He ended up
(02:31):
having four kids with his mother, and after learning this,
Queen Jocasta hanged herself and Oedipus gouged out his eyes.
Perhaps appropriate action, yeah in his case at.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Least, yeah, so grossed out, he gouged out his own eyes.
And to be clear to the Greeks, the point of
this myth was not like, how gross is this? It
was like it was about how like the inevitability of
faith and the inability of humans to like change their
fate or their destiny, because he was this was a
prophecy that he ended up fulfilling despite trying really hard
(03:06):
not to write. Freud was like, I like that really
gross part. I'm going to use that to describe these
feelings that little kids have towards their parents.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
I like the idea, though, that someone's writing this myth
and they're like, oh boys, I got one for you.
This one's so gnarly. What's it about?
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Oh you just wait, Yeah, I'm not going to it's about.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
It's about destiny whatever? Sure?
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Sure? So yeah, I mean that's where that's where Freud
picked it up. Was I mean, it is perfectly suited
in that in that sense.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Yeah, And we'll describe from kind of directly from the
Simply Psychology website what the edible complex is and it
occurs during the phallic stage of development ages three to six,
in which the source of libido or the life force
is concentrated in the erogenous zones of the child's body.
And during the stage, children experience an unconscious feeling of
(03:59):
desire for their opposite sex parent and jealousy and envy
toward their same sex parent.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Okay, it makes sense, it's a little it's a little jargony.
I also found one from Encyclopedia Britannica. It's a little
more lay person geared. They say the Oedipus complex in
psychoanalytic theory is a desire for sexual involvement with the
parent of the opposite sex in a cocomminant sense of
rivalry with the parent of the same sex. But it's
(04:26):
a crucial stage in the normal development process according to
psychoanalytic theory at least.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Yeah, that part is pretty key. And what's also key
is that Freud based this on a case one case
study of a four year old patient that he anonymized
as Little Hans. Apparently, Little Hans was brought in by
his father and had recently seen the collapse of a
horse pulling a heavy cart that really traumatized.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Him, to traumatized anybody, Sure, and.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
He developed a fear of horses.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
So Hans's father said, you know what, He's developed all
these really specific anxieties. He feels really uneasy without mom around,
and he's really fixated on male genitalia, especially horse genitalia.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
And Freud was like, yes, yes, I see very interesting. Yeah,
I'm sorry everybody. So he basically said, this all just
makes total sense. Check this out, Hans' father. All of
this comes from a foundational animosity that he has towards you,
his dad, And the reason that he's afraid of horses
(05:36):
because the horses represent you, his dad, and he's afraid
that you, his dad, are going to castrate him because
he secretly wants to sleep with his mother even though
he's four years old. And Freud's sycophantic secretary jumped to
his feet and started applauding, uncomfortably loudly.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yeah, which this. You know, if he went into a
you know, a shrink today and you heard something like this,
you'd say, thank you for your time, I'll be going
to see someone else.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
You can actually probably file suit for something like that.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Yeah, you probably could. But at the time this turned
out to be like the foundational legacy of Freud's psychoanalysis,
which is just you know, bananas to think about.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Should we talk about girls first and take a break
or break and then girls? Let's talk about girls, okay,
because there are such things as girls, And Freud was like, well,
I guess I should probably talk about the girls too.
He didn't come up with the name electra complex. That
was Carl Jung, but he did take the oedipal complex
and apply it to girls and basically said, same thing,
(06:40):
but do the old switcheroo with the parents. The girls
want to sleep with their father and they hate their mother.
But the whole thing is not to do with castration anxiety.
It's penis envying girls.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
That's right. And another what I mentioned is the first key.
And by the way, I realized how creepy that sounded
when I say let's talk about girls, okay, by the
way I make it that way, okay. Good. His proposal was,
and this is very key, was that a kid that
does not undergo this experience of the edipal complex will
not fully mature sexually, and they will be stuck for life.
(07:17):
They're going to be stuck identifying with the opposite sex parent,
and they will never be able to have a normal,
socially acceptable love life and desires for people who aren't
in their family.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Yeah. He basically said that an incomplete development through the
edipal complex is the basis of homosexuality. That's how he
would have put it at the time. And then the
other problem of it is you're stuck in that portion
of your development, doomed to forever, like, go through it,
even though you're never going to get past it. And
(07:51):
he said that guys like that turn out to be
real Norman Baits types, and all of his colleagues were like,
who is Norman Bates? And Freud was like, just wait,
just wait, because he's gonna knock your socks off when
he comes along in the early sixties.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
I guess we take our break now, all right, we'll
be back right after this. Thanks, weet, shop shop stop.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Okay, chuck, So we're back. So the big question is
is all of this weird gross stuff correct?
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Answer me, Well, most psychologists today and the world of
psychology as a whole, are pretty like bashful about even
talking about this. They're like, can we just kind of
forget all that stuff? We've moved on. It's completely discredited.
Most of Freud's theories are pretty discredited at this point,
(09:12):
but that's not to say that there isn't some support
for this still.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
No, there have been papers that have come out that
seem to very strongly support the presence of Freud's Oedipus complex,
and one came out in two thousand and nine. It
was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B
and it made international news when it was published because
they studied these similarities, the physical characteristic similarities between men's
(09:39):
mothers and their wives, and they measured everything as like
jaw link. They did everything, and they were coming up
with correlations in like the ninety second percentile, so essentially
like photo copies between mom and wife. And they were like, see,
guys really want their moms. What you're gonna do? Dog's
(10:01):
gonna hunt kind of thing. And like I said, it
made international news, and luckily some other scientists were like,
let me see your data and went through and they're like,
this does not support your conclusions at all.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Yeah, here's the thing I'm gonna go out on a limb.
Hold on to your hats. I'm gonna go on a
limb and say, I've seen plenty of examples where kids
end up married to someone that is maybe in some way,
like like a really good parent that they had of
the opposite sex or maybe of the same sex. Even
(10:38):
I don't necessarily think like it's the looks thing, but
like if you're like a really awesome dad, and you're
like super fun and funny, and you know, maybe you
have a certain job, like, and your daughter goes on
to marry somebody who has got like a great sense
of humor and has maybe have a similar interest as
something your father did. Like, I think that can be
(10:59):
a thing. I don't think it's always a thing, but
it's just sort of when you're raised with a parent
that you look up to and love and admire, you
may seek out people like that in your life. And
I think that's kind of all that is.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
I think similarly, and maybe even more frequently or commonly,
people inadvertently or unconsciously seek out people who are like
their parents in the worst ways.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yeah, or sometimes completely seek out the opposite.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Yes, but that's conscious.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Yeah maybe so, But yeah, I see what you mean
for sure.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Yeah, so again there have been There was another paper
in the eighties that studied rats that basically said, like, yes,
these rats at least have Oedipus complexes that carry on.
So luckily psychology came up with some other stuff that said, like, okay,
kids do stuff like this when they're young. We don't
(11:52):
think it's the Oedipus complex. And luckily, things like attachment theory,
which we did an entire episode on that was pretty good. Yeah,
have less way less creepy. They've come along and offered
pretty good structures for understanding child development that is just
much less ichy than Freud's.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
So you're just gonna summarize that rat study. You're not
gonna talk about rat ejaculation.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Do you want me to? No?
Speaker 2 (12:16):
I think we should just leave that right now.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Okay, cool, So I think more than ever short Stuff
is out.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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