Unlike Freud, Erikson believed that sexual impulses were not the only conflicts within the child's developing psyche: a desire for autonomy, for example, was equally important at most stages of development.

Freud's most famous contribution to the study of development is his theory of the Oedipus Complex, which suggests that after a period of polymorphous perversity, or the ability to be sexually stimulated by a number of undifferentiated means, the child begins to desire the mother as its first love object. In the case of a boy, he begins to despise and feel murderously towards his father as a rival for the mother's affection, while the young girl begins to resent the mother for making her 'incomplete' (without a penis) and tries to 'have' her father as a way of 'having' what she lacks. Eventually, the girl tries to resemble her mother to win her father -- and other males'...
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