The story of Oedipus, who unwittingly killed his father and equally unwittingly married his mother, is widely known. This led Sigmund Freud to use Oedipus’ name for a discovery he made in his consulting room concerning the human subconscious. Freud sees the Oedipal phase as commencing when the child is between three and five. He also calls this the phallic phase, a time in which the external sex organs are central to the child’s mental map. At the same time this phase sees the emergence of the superego, the conscience, beginning with the internalizing of parental authority — for boys mainly the father’s — and is hence also the point at which guilt feelings may arise.
Two central concepts in Freud’s theory are castration anxiety in boys and girls and penis envy in girls. Castration anxiety leads the boy to defer to his father, while penis envy causes the girl to focus on her father. After a period in which children’s principal attachment is to the mother, the father figure comes more into the picture. In boys this results in an ambivalent feeling towards the father: rivalry and anxiety on the one hand, admiration and protectiveness on the other. The boy would love to give his mother a baby, and resolves this ambivalence by identifying with his father and emulating him, which is how he becomes a man. For a girl it means an intense focus on the father; she would like a penis too and would love to have his baby or give her mother a baby. The young girl experiences these as the same thing. She becomes ambivalent towards the mother: she distances herself somewhat, but is also frightened of losing her mother. The girl resolves this ambiguity by identifying with the mother and emulating her. In Freud’s view this is how the girl becomes a woman.