Madonna–whore complex

A psychological pattern in which women are divided into idealized, sexually pure partners and sexually desirable but unworthy partners. The split links sexual desire with contempt or difficulty sustaining intimacy.

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Idealization and devaluation: A relational pattern of elevating someone as perfect and later treating them as worthless. The complex applies this split to women’s perceived purity and sexual desirability.
Sigmund Freud: An Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis and developed influential theories of the unconscious. Freud’s 1912 essay gave an influential account of the split between love and desire.
Sexual repression: The inhibition or exclusion of sexual thoughts and impulses from conscious expression. Repression concerns restricting desire; the complex concerns dividing women into contrasting relational roles.
Misogyny: Prejudice, contempt, or hostility directed toward women. Devaluing women for sexual desire expresses a gendered form of contempt.
Splitting (psychology): A defense mechanism that organizes people or experiences into all-good or all-bad categories. It captures the stark either-or judgments that define the complex.
On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love: A 1912 essay by Sigmund Freud on the separation of affectionate and sensual currents in some men’s love lives. Freud’s essay is a canonical source for the idea behind the complex.
Asexuality: A sexual orientation characterized by experiencing little or no sexual attraction. Asexuality concerns attraction, not a gendered split between purity and sexual worth.
Intimate relationship: A close personal relationship involving emotional or physical intimacy. The split can obstruct equal, affectionate relationships with mutual sexual desire.
Sexual objectification: Treating a person primarily as an instrument of sexual pleasure rather than as a whole person. Reducing women to sexual roles helps sustain the complex’s opposing categories.
Psychoanalysis: A theory and therapeutic practice that explores unconscious mental processes and their influence on behavior. The complex originated within psychoanalytic explanations of desire and emotional conflict.