The first time I learned about Oedipus Complex was in a lit…

The first time I learned about Oedipus Complex was in a literature class. I had no previous understanding of what it meant. But upon learning about what it means, I was opened up to a whole new experience of the world.
I’d previously watched a “Yoruba movie” where the son had some unusual closeness with his mom, and he hated his dad for how close he was to his Mom. I’ve also seen another movie where it was The Daughter and The Dad. But as a psychological phenomenon, it is more of the son and the mother.
During my first year of being a university student, I had to take Psychology 101, and here was where I learned in detail, all about Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis of the unconscious desire of the mother to keep her child “as a child”, and never truly allowing the child to grow. The pervasive form of this Oedipus Complex is what has greatly to do with the sexual relationship between the mother and her child.
That is quite the introduction to this psychological piece. If I must add, I will only bring to life the idea of the mother who devours her child (metaphorically) and never allowed them their freedom to learn about the outside world and grow in relationship to it.
I hope you have a swell time on this page.
The Oedipal Mother Archetype
The pathology of masculinity is the absent, tyrannical, or aggressive dad. While the feminine pathology is deeply rooted in the overprotection and infantilization of the child.
To Sigmund Freud, the Oedipal Mother is the mother that gets too close to her children and intermingles herself with them to too great a degree. Where, in her attempts to protect them, she undermines them, and alters their development into proper adults.
When children are over-sheltered and overprotected, they turn into grown children, and not proper adults. This is the curse of the over-protective mother.
The devouring mother is a very old archetypal idea that we sing about in our songs, tell in our tales, and act in our plays and dramas. It is an inescapable pathology that affects human relationships. We’ve seen it all in Disney tales like Tangled, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Hansel and Gretel, etc. They all have similar reoccurring patterns of the mother that is interfering with their child’s wish to grow into something beyond what they already are.
In The Little Mermaid, for example, Ursula, the sea witch, could be associated with the devouring mother concept. She manipulates and preys upon Ariel’s longing for a different life, using her desire to control and ultimately devour her voice and identity. Ursula represents the destructive and overpowering aspects of the mother figure, attempting to consume Ariel’s individuality.
The overprotective mother interferes with the proper development of her child, infantilizing the child and clinging to her relationship with the child. Rather than having the child go out into the world and have the adventure of their life that will enable them to grow into a proper adult.
Even in our personal lives, we may share the experience of the overprotective mother that fails to allow their child to grow into an adult that is capable of navigating their own way around the world. If not our lives, it would be the lives of some people we know. The Oedipal Complex is a universal phenomenon.
It is easy for this phenomenon to manifest itself in families. Sometimes, it is even in the most unhealthy fashion. Where a child is never allowed any sort of freedom away from the mom, even when said child is finally married or leaves for college.
The Devouring Mother
It is a motherhood thing because it is clear how long a child’s dependency period is. The mother is also primarily the one that had to be emotionally and physically attached to a baby during and after the pregnancy stage. Some children are dependent on their parents even in their 20s, or 30s. In some cases, it is the fault of the parents for deliberately keeping the child dependent on them. They’ve infantilized the child. He/she is not comfortable being beyond the range of their parents.
This is borne out of the fear of the child becoming someone they can’t control, or someone that fails to recognize the pivotal role they (the parents) play in the child’s life. In this scenario, the child merely grows up to be an overgrown child. Never allowed to grow properly.
There are some scenarios where this situation of the Oedipal Mother returns to be the undoing of the mother. You can after all keep a princess or prince locked up in their garden of Eden only for so long before their natural instinct for exploration kicks in, and they develop an unending hunger for an apple from the tree of knowledge. This will open their eyes to the real truth that lies beyond the lies they’d been brought up with. Once this happens, they will grow the desire for more freedom — more experiences beyond what they already know. When this sets in, they might forever abandon their parents, never to return home.
This is one of the r…