This is the form in which the Oedipus situation appears in real life:
A male child may become overattached to his mother and develop a morbid, more or less concealed, hostility to his father. The female child may become overattached to her father and manifest a more or less overt hostility to her mother.
There is no case of neurosis in which analysts do not discover a more or less marked maladjustment of that type. In fact Freud has gone as far as stating that the Oedipus Complex is the central complex of every neurotic disturbance.
The Freudian View. Freudian analysts have somewhat dramatised the Oedipus complex which they consider as due to incestuous longings. Those incestuous longings, according to Freud, are in their last analysis, a yearning of the child to return to the mother's body where the child enjoyed, in its prenatal life, absolute peace and comfort.
The average child manages to free himself gradually from the mother's body, first seeking pleasurable sensations in his own body, sucking his thumb, playing with his genitals, later becoming interested in other children like himself, finally, at puberty, seeking human beings of the opposite sex, etc.
Some children, on the other hand, never seem to free themselves from the parent of the opposite sex. They are technically designated as the victims of a mother fixation in the case of boys, of a father fixation in the case of girls.
Jung's Interpretation. Jung, head of the Swiss school of psychoanalysis, considers the Oedipus complication from a broader point of view. To him the father and mother are not real persons, but more or less symbolic and distorted figures created by the imagination of the child. The yearning of the child for its mother, its jealousy toward the father are simply due to its desire to monopolise a perfect provider and protector.
Pseudo-Incest. To Adler of Vienna, the Oedipus complex is a fiction created unconsciously by the neurotic who is trying to fall back on the father or mother for support. The boy, afraid of life and of the responsibilities imposed upon a man by a normal sexual life, is naturally inclined to cling fondly to his mother, from whom he receives a love and adoration which need not be won or paid for or reciprocated and which in their demonstrativeness only stop short of sexual gratification.
The neurotic girl dreams of monopolising the father's affection and financial support which are not to be repaid by sexual intercourse with its consequences, etc.
Freud's interpretation explains certain details of behavior in boys with a mother fixation but the yearning to return to the mother's body does not explain a father fixation in a woman.