Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Oedipus Complex

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Just like great shoes, great books take you places. Through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget. I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies. I'm Danielle Robay and this is Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club. The new podcast from Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts, where we dive into the stories that shape us on the page and off. Each week, I'm joined by authors, celebs,

book talk stars, and more for conversations that will make you laugh, cry, and add way too many books to your TBR pile. Listen to Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. Josh, Chuck, Jerry, not Dave, but Dave. And this is Short Stuff.

Yeah, the one in which we continue to lay wood onto Sigmund Freud. What? As a lot of people do. Yeah, I mean his spirit at least. Yeah, yeah. Sigmund Freud. Matthew Fetcher What? Matthew Feeney As a lot of people do. Matthew Feeney Yeah. I mean, his spirit at least. Matthew Feeney Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, here's the deal with Sigmund Freud. And I think this thing that you put together from Britannica and Very Well Mind and Psych Central and 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 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. 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 for things he observed, for like actual real things. And one of the actual real things that he observed is that a 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 Oedipus Complex, which is far and away his most famous theory, among a lot of very famous theories that he came up with, but just like all the other ones, it's essentially conjecture. Yeah, I mean, when you think, if you know nothing

about Freud, you probably have made a joke about like somebody wanting to sleep with their mother. Yeah, I mean, there's a word for that. Yeah, what is it? I'm not going to tell you. So we should just quickly go over the Greek myth of Oedipus in which that 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 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 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 fate 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 not to, right?

Freud was like, I like that really gross part. I'm gonna use that to describe these feelings that little kids have toward their parents. 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. Gnarly. for their parents. 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. Gnarly.

What's it about? Oh, you just wait. Yeah, I'm not gonna tell. Is it about destiny? Ah, whatever, sure. Sure. So yeah, I mean that's where Freud picked it up was, I mean it is perfectly suited in that sense.

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 this stage, children experience an unconscious feeling of desire for their opposite sex parent and jealousy and envy toward their same sex parent. 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 layperson geared. They say the Oedipus complex in psychoanalytic theory is a desire for sexual involvement with the parent of the opposite sex and a concomitant sense of rivalry with the parent of the same sex. But it's a crucial stage in the normal development process, according to psychoanalytic theory at least. 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 him.

It traumatized anybody. Sure. And he developed a fear of horses. 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. 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's 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 is 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. Yeah, which this, you know, if you 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. You could actually probably file suit

for something like that. 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 just bananas to think about. 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 electrocomplex. That was Carl Jung, but he did take the Oedipal complex and apply it to girls and basically said, same thing, 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 envy in girls. That's right. And what I mentioned is the first key, and by the way, I realized how creepy that sounded when I said, let's talk about girls by the way, I realized how creepy that sounded when I said let's talk about girls.

Okay. I didn't take 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 Oedipal complex will not fully mature sexually. And they will be stuck for life. They're gonna 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. Yeah he basically said that an incomplete development through the Oedipal 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 go through it, even though you're never going to get past it.

And he said that guys like that turn out to be real Norman Bates 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 60s. I guess we take our break now?

Yes. All right, we'll be back right after this. I'm not daring. I'm not a boss. I'm a scum. I'm a scum. I'm just a scum. I'm a scum. Just like great shoes, great books take you places. Through unforgettable love stories

and into conversations with characters you'll never forget. I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies. I'm Danielle Robay and this is Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, the new podcast from Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcast. Every week I sit down with your favorite book lovers,

authors, celebrities, book talkers, and more to explore the stories that shape us on the page and off. I've been reading every Reese's Book Club pick, deep diving book talk theories, and obsessing over book to screen casts for years. And now I get to talk to the people making the magic. So if you've ever fallen in love with a fictional character or cried at the last chapter or passed a book to a friend

saying you have to read this, this podcast is for you. Listen to Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are there any pictures of you online? I'm not just talking about Google, I'm talking anywhere. Clearview scrapes together images from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Venmo accounts.

That database is now being used by police departments all across the country to match criminal suspect photos and sometimes it makes mistakes. So in this one case, two of their search results that are I think were in the top 10 of the search results were Michael Jordan, a picture of Michael Jordan, but cops are still using it to make arrests. This is not a minority report. This is happening right now.

People are getting arrested and doing actual time in jail after being picked out by a computer. I'm Dexter Thomas, host of Kill Switch, where every Wednesday we explain the right now of living in the future. You can turn off the computer, but do not let the computer turn you off. Listen to Kill Switch in the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And I'm in charge of the stuff you should know Okay Chuck, so we're back. So the big question is, is all of this weird gross stuff correct?

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. But that's not to say that there isn't some support for this still. No, there have been papers that have come out that seem to very strongly support the presence of Freud's Oedipus complex.

One came out in 2009. It was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. And it made international news when it was published because they studied the similarities, the physical characteristic similarities between men's mothers and their wives. They measured everything as jaw length. They did everything. They were coming up with correlations in the 90 second percentile. So essentially, photocopies between mom and wife. They were like, see, guys really want their moms.

What you gonna do? Dog's 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. Yeah, here's the thing.

I'm gonna go out on a limb, hold onto your hats. I'm gonna go out 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 a really good parent that they had of the opposite sex or maybe of the same sex even. I don't necessarily think it's the looks thing, but if you're a really awesome dad

and you're super fun and funny and maybe you have a certain job and your daughter goes on to marry somebody who's got a great sense of humor and has maybe have a similar interest as something your father did, I think that can be 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. 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. Yeah. Or sometimes completely seek out the opposite.

Yes, but that's more conscious. Yeah, maybe so. But yeah, I see what you mean for sure. Yeah. So again, there was another paper in the 80s 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 says, like, okay, kids do stuff like this when they're young, but we don't think it's the Oedipus complex. And luckily, things like attachment theory, which we did an entire episode on that was pretty good, have come along. entire episode on that was pretty good.

Yeah. Way less creepy. Way less creepy. They've come along and offered pretty good structures for understanding child development that is just much less icky than Freud's. So you're just going to summarize that rat study? You're not going to talk about rat ejaculation? Do you want me to?

No. I think we should just leave that right there. Okay, cool. So I think more than ever, short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, myHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.