A Question about Freud, and the Wrong Answer

Somebody in Yahoo!Answers recently asked the following very broad question: "How does Freud, Jung or other psychoanalyst explain the development/ manifestation of the Oedipus/ Electra complex within a gay?"

It isn't only very broad, it is ungrammatical. The verb should be either "do" or "did." If we think of the proper names as shorthand for their ideas/texts, then present-tense "do" is better.

Anyway, it is a fascinating question, though perhaps of diminishing significance as the authority of those names/texts recedes. I'm not scholar enough to take it all on, but I did answer a bit of it as best I could, thus:

My understanding is that in Freudian theory, sexual identity is determined in adolescence, as the 'latency phase' comes to an end. A growing boy 'should' resolve his oedipal conflict by identification with his father, so his father is no longer a rival, and by the development of a sentimental affection for Mom, which displaces sexual ambition. But in some cases Mom is too dominant an influence to allow for that displacement, or Dad is absent, and for either reason the resolution can fail, so that the Oedipal conflict is repressed, still unresolved, and homosexuality is one of the possible results. In more recent decades, the 1950s and '60s, authorities such as Benjamin Spock were taking these notions as gospel.

I have since realized that I was actually referencing the Freudian attitude toward schizophrenia. I don't know whether it is or was also proposed as an etiology for homosexuality. I linked to the following as a source, although all you will find sourced there is the general closeness of Dr. Spock to Freudian orthodoxies.

OBVIOUS OVERUSED PUN WARNING: One would expect a Vulcan to be more logical.

Anyway, I submit the following as inducement to my readers. If any of you would like to school me in the psychoanalytic theory vis-a-vis these matters, I'm curious and open minded.

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