Glossary: Complex

Everyone knows nowadays that people "have complexes." What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.

- "A Review of the Complex Theory," par. 200


A collection of feelings and attitudes about a thing or person (e.g. the mother complex, a power complex, etc.). The complex forms around an archetype as one’s personal experiences accrue around it, like a pearl around a seed of sand. The Oedipus complex is probably the most famous complex but nearly anything can become a complex if there’s enough emotional experience. Some common complexes are: the mother complex, the father complex, a Jesus complex, the Don Juan complex, inferiority complex, superiority complex, God complex. Not all complexes are problematic but the same complex that is useful and well adapted in one person can be poorly adapted and neurotic in another.

Complexes are autonomous partial personalities that act like independent, though simplified, personalities in one’s psyche. Possession happens when one of these autonomous complexes invades the ego and takes over consciousness. One common example of this is possession by the animus or anima. The ego is also a complex; it’s one complex out of many but a very special complex and, unlike other complexes, is (hopefully) a fairly complete personality.

The difference between archetypes and complexes is that archetypes are the unconscious, universal symbol of a thing while complexes are the emotionally tinged expression of the archetype in a specific individual’s life. The archetype of a mother encompasses all aspects of the universal mother image, from nurturing to devouring. A person’s unique mother complex is shaped by personal experience but builds on the nucleus of the archetype; the mother archetype may be all things but one’s own mother complex will only express those things that you yourself experienced in your encounter with your personal mother.

Complexes interfere with the intentions of the will and disturb the conscious performance; they produce disturbances of memory and blockages in the flow of associations; they appear and disappear according to their own laws; they can temporarily obsess consciousness, or influence speech and action in an unconscious way. In a word, complexes behave like independent beings.

- “Psychological Factors in Human Behaviour," par. 253

Complexes obviously represent a kind of inferiority in the broadest sense… [but] to have complexes does not necessarily indicate inferiority. It only means that something discordant, unassimilated, and antagonistic exists, perhaps as an obstacle, but also as an incentive to greater effort, and so, perhaps, to new possibilities of achievement.

- “A Psychological Theory of Types," par. 925

The possession of complexes does not in itself signify neurosis… and the fact that they are painful is no proof of pathological disturbance. Suffering is not an illness; it is the normal counterpole to happiness. A complex becomes pathological only when we think we have not got it.

- “Psychotherapy and a Philosophy of Life," CW 16, par. 179

A complex can be really overcome only if it is lived out to the full. In other words, if we are to develop further we have to draw to us and drink down to the very dregs what, because of our complexes, we have held at a distance.

- "Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype," CW 9i, par. 184

Complexes are focal or nodal points of psychic life which we would not wish to do without; indeed, they should not be missing, for otherwise psychic activity would come to a fatal standstill.

- "A Psychological Theory of Types," CW 6, par. 925

Our entire psyche seems to consist of separate complexes which gather together into what one could call the psychic individuality, just as the Mendelian units of our hereditary factors together to form a unity.

We can clearly see in a small child, who still possesses a very labile ego-consciousness, how loosely the separate complexes live with each other in the moods which change like lightning and by means of which the youngster can switch from “loving child” to “devil” and vice versa, one moment completely affectionate, the next minute utterly engrossed in his play, one moment in deep despair, two minutes later joyful again, sucking a candy. These fluctuations decrease slowly as the conscious ego gradually builds itself up, but then the ego often experiences collisions of the individual complex-impulses within and must then learn to endure and control them. Once, when I was nine, I wanted to draw a picture of my dog whom I loved passionately, but he wouldn’t sit still. I was furious so I smacked him and shouted at him. I will never forget that dog’s innocent, offended look! I did not hit him again, but when I sat down to finish my drawing I felt clearly within me how the fury of my impatience and my love for the dog clashed painfully together. Jung conjectured once that ego consciousness first develops from collisions of the small child with the outer world and later from collisions of the growing ego with the impulses from its own inner world (as in the example of my fury with the dog). The “parliament of instincts,” as Konrad Lorenz would have called it, is not a peaceful organization within us; it is rather violent in there, and the President – the ego – often has difficulty asserting himself. From a practical point of view we can observe that whenever a complex becomes autonomous, then there always arise projections which disturb adaptation and blur the “mirror of inner truth.”

- Marie-Louise von Franz, Dreams


Link

"The Hidden Source of Self"