A complex is a structure in the
unconscious that is
objectified as an underlying
theme—like a
power
Power most often refers to:
* Power (physics), meaning "rate of doing work"
** Engine power, the power put out by an engine
** Electric power
* Power (social and political), the ability to influence people or events
** Abusive power
Power may a ...
or a
status
Status (Latin plural: ''statūs''), is a state, condition, or situation, and may refer to:
* Status (law)
** City status
** Legal status, in law
** Political status, in international law
** Small entity status, in patent law
** Status confere ...
—by grouping clusters of
emotion
Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is currently no scientific consensus on a definitio ...
s, memories, perceptions and
wishes
A wish is a hope or desire for something. In fiction, wishes can be used as plot devices. In folklore, opportunities for "making a wish" or for wishes to "come true" or "be granted" are themes that are sometimes used.
In fiction
In fiction a ...
in response to a threat to the stability of the self. In
psychoanalysis
PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: + . is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a body of knowledge. In what might ...
, it is antithetical to
drive
Drive or The Drive may refer to:
Motoring
* Driving, the act of controlling a vehicle
* Road trip, a journey on roads
Roadways
Roadways called "drives" may include:
* Driveway, a private road for local access to structures, abbreviated "drive"
* ...
s.
Overview
An example of a complex would be as follows: if one had a leg amputated when one was a child, this would influence one's life in profound ways, even if they overcame the physical handicap. A person may have many thoughts, emotions, memories, feelings of inferiority, triumphs, bitterness, and determinations centering on that one aspect of their life. If these thoughts were troubling and pervasive, Jung might say they had a complex about the leg.
The reality of complexes is widely agreed upon in the area of
depth psychology, a branch of psychology asserting that the vast majority of the personality is determined and influenced by unconscious processes.
Complexes are common features of the psychic landscape, according to Jung's accounting of the psyche, and often become relevant in psychotherapy to examine and resolve, most especially in the journey toward individuation or wholeness. Without resolution, complexes continue to exert unconscious, maladaptive influence on our thoughts, feelings, and behavior and keep us from achieving psychological integration.
History and development of the idea
Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung ( ; ; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, ph ...
distinguished between two types of
unconscious mind
The unconscious mind (or the unconscious) consists of the processes in the mind which occur automatically and are not available to introspection and include thought processes, memories, interests, and motivations.
Even though these processes exi ...
: the
personal unconscious and
collective unconscious
Collective unconscious (german: kollektives Unbewusstes) refers to the unconscious mind and shared mental concepts. It is generally associated with idealism and was coined by Carl Jung. According to Jung, the human collective unconscious is popula ...
.
The personal unconscious was the accumulation of experiences from a person's lifetime that could not be consciously recalled.
The collective unconscious, on the other hand, was a sort of universal inheritance of human beings, a "species memory" passed on to each of us, not unlike the motor programs and
instinct
Instinct is the inherent inclination of a living organism towards a particular complex behaviour, containing both innate (inborn) and learned elements. The simplest example of an instinctive behaviour is a fixed action pattern (FAP), in which a v ...
s of other animals.
Jung believed the personal unconscious was dominated by complexes.
The term ''complex'' (german: Komplex; also ''emotionally charged complexes'' or ''feeling-toned complex of ideas''), was coined by Carl Jung when he was still a close associate of Sigmund Freud. Complexes were so central to Jung's ideas that he originally called his body of theories ''Complex psychology''. Historically the term originated with
Theodor Ziehen, a German psychiatrist who experimented with reaction time in word association test responses. Jung described a complex as a node in the unconscious; it may be imagined as a knot of unconscious feelings and beliefs, detectable indirectly, through behavior that is puzzling or hard to account for.
Jung found evidence for complexes very early in his career in the
word association tests conducted at the
Burghölzli
The ''Psychiatrische Universitätsklinik Zürich'' (Psychiatric University Hospital Zürich) is a psychiatric hospital in Switzerland. As a research hospital, it is associated with the University of Zürich. It is also called Burghölzli, after ...
, the psychiatric clinic of
Zurich University, where Jung worked from 1900 to 1908. Jung developed the theory out of his work on Word Association Test. In the word association tests, a researcher reads a list of 100 words to each subject, who was asked to say, as quickly as possible, the first thing that came to mind in response to each word, and the subject's reaction time was measured in fifths of a second. (
Sir Francis Galton
Sir Francis Galton, FRS FRAI (; 16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911), was an English Victorian era polymath: a statistician, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, prot ...
invented the method in 1879.) Researchers noted any unusual reactions—hesitations, slips of the tongue, signs of emotion. Jung was interested in patterns he detected in subjects' responses, hinting at unconscious feelings and beliefs.
In Jung's theory, complexes may be conscious, partly conscious, or unconscious.
Complexes can be positive or negative, resulting in good or bad consequences.
There are many kinds of complex, but at the core of any complex is a universal pattern of experience, or
archetype
The concept of an archetype (; ) appears in areas relating to behavior, historical psychology, and literary analysis.
An archetype can be any of the following:
# a statement, pattern of behavior, prototype, "first" form, or a main model that ...
. Two of the major complexes Jung wrote about were the
anima
Anima may refer to:
Animation
* Ánima (company), a Mexican animation studio founded in 2002
* Córdoba International Animation Festival – ANIMA, in Argentina
Religion and philosophy
* Animism, the belief that objects, places, and creatur ...
(a node of unconscious beliefs and feelings in a man's psyche relating to the opposite gender) and
animus (the corresponding complex in a woman's psyche). Other major complexes include the mother, father, hero, and more recently, the brother and sister. Jung believed it was perfectly normal to have complexes because everyone has emotional experiences that affect the psyche. Although they are normal, negative complexes can cause us pain and suffering.
One of the key differences between Jungian and Freudian theory is that Jung's thought posits several different kinds of complex. Freud only focused on the
Oedipus complex
The Oedipus complex (also spelled Œdipus complex) is an idea in psychoanalytic theory. The complex is an ostensibly universal phase in the life of a young boy in which, to try to immediately satisfy basic desires, he unconsciously wishes to h ...
which reflected
developmental
Development of the human body is the process of growth to maturity. The process begins with fertilization, where an egg released from the ovary of a female is penetrated by a sperm cell from a male. The resulting zygote develops through mitosi ...
challenges that face every young boy. He did not take other complexes into account except for the
Electra complex
In neo-Freudian psychology, the Electra complex, as proposed by Carl Jung in his ''Theory of Psychoanalysis'', is a girl's psychosexual competition with her mother for possession of her father. In the course of her psychosexual development, the ...
, which he briefly spoke of.
After years of working together, Jung broke from Freud, due to disagreements in their ideas, and they each developed their own theories. Jung wanted to distinguish between his and Freud's findings, so he named his theory "analytical psychology".
Jung's theory of complexes with key citations
![Psychological complex according to Jung (en)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Psychological_complex_according_to_Jung_%28en%29.jpg)
The ego itself can be thought of as a complex, not yet fully integrated with other parts of the psyche (namely, the superego and the id, or unconscious). As described by Jung, "by ego I understand a complex of ideas which constitutes the center of my field of consciousness and appears to possess a high degree of continuity and identity. Hence I also speak of an ego-complex".
Jung often used the term ''complex'' to describe a partially repressed, yet highly influential cluster of charged psychic material split off from, or at odds with, the conscious "I".
Daniels described complexes in 2010 as "'stuck-together' agglomerations of thoughts, feelings, behavior patterns, and somatic forms of expression".
Concerning its nature as feeling-toned, Jung wrote "
complexis the image of a certain psychic situation which is strongly accentuated emotionally and is, moreover, incompatible with the habitual attitude of consciousness. This image has a powerful inner coherence, it has its own wholeness and, in addition, a relatively high degree of autonomy, so that it is subject to the control of the conscious mind to only a limited extent, and therefore behaves like an animated foreign body in the sphere of consciousness."
Some complexes can usurp power from the ego and can cause psychological disturbances and symptoms resulting from the development of a
neurosis
Neurosis is a class of functional mental disorders involving chronic distress, but neither delusions nor hallucinations. The term is no longer used by the professional psychiatric community in the United States, having been eliminated from th ...
.
Jung described the autonomous, self-directing nature of complexes when he said
On the other hand, Jung spoke of the "differentiating functions" as essentially the healthy development of useful complexes, yet not without bringing about often undesirable side effects.
In ''
Psychological Types'', Jung describes the effects of tensions between the dominant and inferior differentiating functions, often forming complexes and neuroses, in high and even extremely one-sided types.
In archetypal psychology
Suffering contains complexes; complexes contain
archetypes
The concept of an archetype (; ) appears in areas relating to behavior, historical psychology, and literary analysis.
An archetype can be any of the following:
# a statement, pattern of behavior, prototype, "first" form, or a main model that ...
; archetypes contain the
myth
Myth is a folklore genre consisting of Narrative, narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or Origin myth, origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not Objectivity (philosophy), ...
s of
deities
A deity or god is a supernatural being who is considered divine or sacred. The ''Oxford Dictionary of English'' defines deity as a god or goddess, or anything revered as divine. C. Scott Littleton defines a deity as "a being with powers greate ...
; this
figurative analogy A figurative analogy is a comparison about two things that are not alike but share only some common property. On the other hand, a literal analogy is about two things that are nearly exactly alike.
The two things compared in a figurative analogy ...
is used to understand the afflicted subject.
Complexes and subpersonalities
Jung conceptualized complexes as having a high degree of autonomy, describing them as ‘splinter psyches’ that form the basis for ‘mini-personalities’, whom he called the ‘little people’.
This provided the foundation for later expansion of the idea, most notably by British Psychotherapist
John Rowan, who referred to them as
subpersonalities, each one operating as a 'semipermanent and semi-autonomous region of the personality capable of acting as a person'.
The work of Rowan and others led to the widespread use of techniques by which psychotherapists encourage clients to express the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of their various subpersonalities, as a way of facilitating the integration of diverse characteristics, part of what Jung called
individuation
The principle of individuation, or ', describes the manner in which a thing is identified as distinct from other things.
The concept appears in numerous fields and is encountered in works of Leibniz, Carl Gustav Jung, Gunther Anders, Gilbert Sim ...
.
Examples
See also
*
View (Buddhism)
View or position (Pali ', Sanskrit ') is a central idea in Buddhism. In Buddhist thought, a view is not a simple, abstract collection of propositions, but a charged interpretation of experience which intensely shapes and affects thought, sensati ...
*
Family romance
The family romance is a psychological complex identified by Sigmund Freud in an essay he wrote in 1909 entitled "The Family Romances." In it he describes various phases a child experiences as he or she must confront the fact that the parents are ...
*
Freudian psychology
*
Jungian psychology
Analytical psychology ( de , Analytische Psychologie, sometimes translated as analytic psychology and referred to as Jungian analysis) is a term coined by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, to describe research into his new "empirical science" ...
*
Condensation (psychology) In Freudian psychology, a condensation (german: Verdichtung) is when a single idea (an image, memory, or thought) or dream object stands for several associations and ideas.
In dreams/symptoms/jokes
Freud considered that "dreams are brief, meagre ...
*
Anima and animus
References
Bibliography
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Complex (Psychology)
Psychoanalytic terminology
Analytical psychology
Freudian psychology