and mr man has gone to work already... hmm... i'm not really sure what 'identify' means... maybe it means 'appreciates their mental states' or 'appreciates where they are coming from' or something like that. i guess the Freudian notion is... well... that the infant identifies with their same sex parent's ideals (that incest is not okay, i guess) and internalises those ideals out of the fear of castration / death. hence... the super-ego (which has to do with norms like incest not being okay and stealing not being okay and stuff like that).

i guess i think... that might be attributing a little too much cognitive ability to an infant.

and i guess i think... that the structural model of mind (id, ego, super-ego) is no more than an obfuscatory metaphor...

i guess i also think... that co-operation is the norm rather than conflict (which is a very "self-psychology" rather than "ego-psychology" / "freudian" thing to say). i don't figure that an infant really has sexual desires for the opposite sex parent. erotic desires (broadly conceived) sure. but i don't see why parents of either or both sexes can't be the object of erotic desires (which is to say that the infant longs to be emotionally close to them).

i did try searching google for "electra complex" at some point and didn't really come up with much. didn't even come up with much about "oedipus complex" which surprised me rather. not sure how much of an essential place they have in current theorising... i can't access "PEP web", though, which seems to be the main database for access to psychoanalytic articles :-( i restrict my searches to "-PEP" now because i get sick to death of getting all these really interesting hits where i can only read the frigging abstract and can't access the fulltext. i guess i could interloan, but i lack the patience really...