You mean other than the view that it is nonsense? My view is that Freud was on the right track with his trauma theory but he couldn't face the reality that so many women had been traumatized nor could he face the implications in his own life. Rather than acknowledge the wide spread sexual abuse he decided it was the fantasy of his women patients.

I think you may be confusing two quite different Freudian psychoanalytic concepts in this post. The "family romance" has nothing to do with the Oedipus/Electra complex but rather is the common early childhood fantasy that one's parents are not one's "real" parents and that one's real parents are better, nobler, more perfect, etc. and may arrive at any time to rescue one from the misery of having to put up with parents who have recently been revealed as imperfect, unreliable and all too human. The term "romance" here has absolutely nothing to do with sex, but rather is used in its original sense of "fiction" or fantasy.

Freud was hardly the first to observe this phenomenon, although he may have been the first to explicitly conceptualize it. As a literary trope, the family romance has deep roots in the West, with variations on it appearing even in classical fiction (as well as fairytales and folklore: the "ugly duckling" theme has its roots in this fantasy, and the transfigured prince/princess probably displaces elements of this fantasy onto a potential romantic partner, allowing the fantasy to be carried into adulthood). It reached its peak in the 18th century, particularly in France, where just about every popular novel of the period featured some form of this fantasy. Eminent modern-day feminist Freudian, Ethel Spector Person, devotes considerable space in her book 'By Force of Fantasy' to a discussion of the family romance and the social conditions that fostered its widespread popularity in pre-revolutionary France. Very interesting reading.

Some Freudians believe the transference process between analyst and patient embodies in a useful, therapeutic way aspects of the family romance fantasy (with the therapist essentially playing the role of the imaginary "real" parent).

As for the Electra complex, probably the less said the better. While most contemporary Freudians wholeheartedly adopt the Oedipus complex, few seem to find the Electra complex as it stands in early psychoanalytic writings, convincing or useful. Because of both human biology and most societies' child-rearing practices, the Oedipus and Electra complexes are not truly analogous. The very choice of Electra as the embodiment for this complex makes this quite clear: unlike Oedipus, Electra doesn't marry her father, nor does she ever express any sexual desire for him; in fact, if any incest can be imagined in this particular myth it would have to be sibling incest, as Electra seems extravagantly affectionate towards and passionately obsessed with her brother, Orestes. While there may well be daughters who desire their fathers, the fact that a more suitable female embodiment for this complex could not be found says a lot about its validity and universality -or lack thereof (father-daughter incest does occur in classical literature and myth, but virtually always due to the father's desire; the daughter is generally portrayed as the unwilling victim of an evil, unnatural man's lust). It's important to note too, that Freud himself did NOT come up with the Electra complex (Carl Jung actually proposed the name) and seemed to have serious reservations regarding the reasoning required to make it "work".