The Electra complex – a more hazy version of the Oedipal complex – is found in many young girls. It derives its name from Electra, the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, who wanted her brother to avenge their father’s death by killing their mother.
The complex itself is very different. A young girl starts wanting to possess the penis of her father and views the mother as the enemy. It’s a simple kind of eroticism that plays more on possession than anything sexual. Sometimes, though, she dreams of bearing his children. This is what Freud calls the Phallic stage.
We view our mothers as the enemy and blame them for taking our fathers away, Freud also adds that the male influence is stronger in the psyche than the female influence during the Phallic stage.
Either I conve-niently forgot about this roller coaster of emotions just when I was assembling my first vocabulary, or (I’m hoping that) it never happened at all.
Daughters hating moms is quite natural, penis envy or no penis envy. Women, after all, to a certain measure naturally rally against each other. In my case it was how my parents played good cop and bad cop with us. My mother would make me eat every last morsel of rice even if it took four hours for me to swallow, ban me from seeing movies where the bird and the flower made friends, and make me wear matching outfits with my BROTHER! My dad, on the other hand, did the exact opposite – he was livin’ la vida Lopez! It was all about chocolates, the Terminator and late nights watching TV. Even in my older years, he would allow me to club-crawl on weekdays, sneak in some beer (which I hated) for me to taste, not give me the evil eye when I flunked PE and math – again – and was generally the symbol of hope for my teenage social juice.
A piece of advice for all mothers: don’t listen to anything mean that your daughter says when she is in high school. My parents, in one of their dramatic rows, decided to punctuate their brawl with a divorce (which by the way, doesn’t exist in the Philippines). My mom made me choose whom I wanted to live with. I immediately thought of life with my mom: Curfew, rice and PG-rated movies. I immediately chose dad. When you’re 15 with your own Euphoria card, you can get a bit selfish. My mom never forgave me and proceeded to coddle my brother, who thankfully by that time started having a different wardrobe from me.
My Dad and I have a funny relationship. My earliest memory of him was him walking me down the stairs of my grandfather’s house and begging me never to grow up. Perhaps if it was my phallic stage then, it was his dwarf stage. But later on I understood his odd request.
I can imagine every father cringing as they see their little girl grow up. She starts popping boobs that other boys look at – suddenly dad is not the number-one man anymore – she wears clothes fit for her toddler years to socialize in and yes, she brings different versions of him home.
After several boyfriends I can say that I have been dating my father. The converse reaction is to date his opposite, but you still end up with qualities that are perhaps the better ones your father possesses but that you deny he has. This is when you want to remove yourself from any paternal attachment.
But one of the simple truths in life is you can never divorce your family spiritually. They always come back to haunt you.
Anyway, I never really thought about this until I was writing this article. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why I never dated male models. Not that my dad is ugly, he actually is quite cute and I got my good skin from his genes, which I will be eternally thankful for. But what makes my dad so lovable is that he is a fantastic character. He is boorish but funny, sarcastic but warm and the typical passive-aggressive dad who has learned to Teflon himself after raising six teenagers.
I date characters. You know, the Philip Seymour Hoffmans of the world, not the Brad Pitts. Because early on, my attachment to my father came from him making me laugh and loving the unconventional qualities in people. Of course, every time I take a version of him home, he eyes the fellow with intense scrutiny. My dad knows that truth in my dating psyche already, as all dads secretly do. He thinks to himself, "What does this loser have in common with me?!" My dad hates freeloaders the most. For obvious reasons, of course, although in my younger years I had a penchant for them. In some sick way it made me feel powerful (but left me broke). What makes him tolerate them is when they act like his personal butlers. Not because of his own selfish reasons – he just knows what a hellcat he raised. However, what makes him love the guy even more is when he knows he’ll be gone soon.
Dads are never really nice to the One. If he is, it’s because Mom told him to be nice; it’s usually the moms who adore the "ones." Because after all, they are younger and eager versions of their husbands. They try not to remind themselves of how they change after three years of marriage and a mortgage.
So yes, my ideal man would be my dad. As flawed as he is in many ways, I can’t stop looking for a version of him. But maybe that’s why this is futile. Because there is only one Albertito, and it’s likely I’ll never love another one as much I love him.