Complexes

The structure of a complex and how it forms

A complex is a psychic structure in which emotionally charged memories, ideas, and images arising from personal experience have clustered around an archetypal core. Jung called it a feeling-toned complex (gefühlsbetonter Komplex). In the word association experiments he ran at the psychiatric clinic of the University of Zurich, the Burghölzli, disturbances in reaction time to a stimulus word gave him a way to trace the complex at work. Where an ordinary association comes back in one or two seconds, a word that touches a complex brings a markedly delayed response, or a response of an entirely different kind.

At the core of a complex lies an archetypal image, and around it the wounding experiences and repeated emotional episodes of a personal history settle in layers. In a mother complex, for instance, the core holds the great mother archetype, and crystallized around it are the feeling-memories that grew out of the relationship with the actual mother. That double structure is why a complex is personal and universal at the same time.

Autonomy, and the way a complex breaks into consciousness

The most important feature of a complex is its autonomy. A complex behaves like an independent "splinter psyche" (Splitterpsyche), activating with no regard for what the ego intends. In daily life it shows up as a slip of the tongue, what Freud called a parapraxis, or as a sudden burst of feeling, or a swing of mood you can't account for. Jung put it this way: we do not have complexes, complexes have us.

Once a complex is active, the ego is placed under it for a time. Someone taken over by a complex of anger says afterward that the person back there wasn't really them. That texture is described as a complex functioning as though it had a will and feelings of its own. In rare cases, people report experiencing a complex as though it were a separate personality. When the sense of having become someone else keeps recurring and starts to interfere with daily life, set dream interpretation aside and talk it over with a psychiatrist or a mental health clinic.

How a complex shows itself in dreams

A dream is the most direct place to watch a complex in motion. What waking life holds down takes shape in the dream as a person, an animal, a situation. Someone carrying a complex around authority may dream again and again of being chased by a boss or a police officer. That figure is the complex wearing a human form, and its pattern of behavior is read as the character of the complex showing through.

When the same complex keeps returning under a different symbol, it is read as one that has not yet been brought up into consciousness. As therapy proceeds, the figure of the complex in dreams is said to change from something threatening into something cooperative. A dream in which the shadow that had been chasing you becomes someone you talk with is interpreted as a sign that integration is moving along.

To catch that movement in a dream diary, three lines are enough.

• The figure or the scene in the dream you reacted to most strongly.
• How your body felt the moment you woke: tightness in the chest, a dry throat, damp hands.
• A recent moment in waking life when that same feeling came up.

Lay two weeks of those side by side and you'll notice that the face of whoever chases you keeps changing while the skeleton, being chased, stays put. Once you can name that skeleton in your own words, the complex has begun crossing over to the conscious side.

Integrating a complex, and individuation

A complex is not a pathology; it is a normal component of the psyche. It becomes a problem only when it goes on working autonomously without ever being made conscious. In Jungian psychology the aim of treatment is not to remove a complex but to make it conscious and integrate it. Being able to put its energy to deliberate use counts as a large step in individuation.

The route to integration is told as three movements: first noticing that the complex is there, then feeling out its emotional content fully, and finally turning that energy toward something creative. An artist converting a childhood wound into the energy of the work is the plainest example. Dream analysis is one of the more effective aids to that process; talking with a complex inside a dream builds the bridge that carries unconscious material over to consciousness.

One thing to watch for: don't let the naming be the end of it. If calling something your mother complex makes you feel the matter has been explained, that name has become a new mask, and the complex goes on working behind it.