Electra complex

n. In psychoanalysis, the process that girls go through in middle childhood in which they first become focused on pleasant feelings in the clitoris. They want to have sex with their mother and are jealous of their father because he is their mother's lover. The little girl then becomes envious of the father's possession of a penis and feels she has been castrated by her father and blames her mother for not protecting her from this. Eventually the tension of the little girl's hatred and envy of the father and anger toward the mother becomes too great, and she enters latency by repressing all her sexual feeling and all direct expression of sexuality in favor of directing that energy into becoming a woman like her idealized idea of her mother. This is done so that she will be able to grow up and be like her mother and attract and marry a man like her father, because doing so will give her possession of the power of his penis, which will lead to emotional connection with the mother by becoming a mother herself.