Rolf Degen summarizing... It may well be that Sigmund Freud stumbled upon universal, evolutionarily driven patterns of infant development, into which he mistakenly read the drama of the Oedipus complex

Türkarslan, Kutlu K. 2020. “It Is About Siblings, Not Sex: Oedipus Complex as an Expression of Parent-offspring Conflict.” PsyArXiv. October 7. doi:10.31234/osf.io/h8bpj

Abstract: Being Freud’s most famous contribution to psychoanalysis, the Oedipus complex is still a topic of heated interest. It has been disputed in many different disciplines ranging from anthropology to biology. This review was aimed to explain the phenomenon of the Oedipus complex in terms of parent-offspring conflict, sibling competition, and infanticide. All of these evolutionary biological concepts or their combination could conceive specific relational settings that may be mistakenly regarded as comprising the Freudian Oedipus complex by external observers. Furthermore, the propositions regarding the adaptive function of the Oedipus complex in terms of sexual imprinting and mate modeling are not robust and convincing. In this article, the author asserts while the Freudian Oedipus complex covers only the sex-contingent representations of parent-offspring conflict, the parent-offspring conflict may account for both sex-contingent and non-sex-contingent conflicts between the parents and the offspring. In light of this hypotheses, related literature and suggestions for further studies were discussed.