The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Concocting the Oedipal Complex -- (Chapter VIII, Part 28)

What was novel about Freud's take on the Unconscious was his contention that people were ruled from infancy by their libidos.

Around the time that he was exculpating himself for having helped one friend to kill himself with cocaine and another to disfigure a patient, he claimed to remember that his own libido had been awakened towards his mother when he was roughly two years old.

Freud reckoned he'd made a journey with his mother to Vienna 'during which we must have spent the night together and there must have been an opportunity of seeing her nudam,' he told Fliess.

As if that weren't speculative enough, Freud then admitted that the inspiration for this was Fliess himself and his remark about his own young son supposedly having an erection after seeing his mother naked.

So Freud cobbled together a pseudo-memory of his own and a disparate anecdote from a colleague to concoct a grand unified theory of child sexuality.

Incredibly, Freud then congratulated himself for his candor.

'Being totally honest with oneself is a good exercise,' he wrote, claiming that he realized he'd been in love with his mother and jealous of his father. 'I now consider it a universal event in early childhood.'

Eh?

To this day, there's no proof to support Freud's very specific claim that all boys aged two to three literally want to have sex with their mothers (or vice-versa little girls and their fathers).

Ironically, though, one reason that the Oedipus Complex has been accepted into popular mythology is because it ties in neatly with the old Christian view of sex and Original Sin: it's probably no coincidence that Freudianism took off in traditionally—or perhaps formerly—puritanical countries like England and America.