Complexes
A complex is an emotionally charged group of ideas, images and memories clustered around a common core. Jung discovered them early in his career through word-association experiments, where certain words would reliably produce hesitation, strong feeling or disturbance. Behind each disturbance, he found, lay a complex.
Everyone has complexes
Having complexes is not a sign of illness; everyone has them, and they are simply how the psyche organises emotionally significant experience. A complex forms around a core that is often archetypal, the mother, the father, power, inferiority, and gathers to it the personal experiences and feelings that belong to that theme.
When a complex takes over
What makes complexes clinically important is their autonomy. A complex can behave almost like a small personality of its own. When one is constellated, or triggered, it can take over: the tone of voice changes, old feelings flood in, and a person reacts not to the present situation but to the whole history the complex carries. We have all had the experience of behaving, in a charged moment, in a way that did not feel entirely like us. That is usually a complex at work.
“A complex is not a problem to be removed. It is a knot of feeling that has a history. The work is to know it well enough that it no longer runs the show from the dark.”
Philippe Jacquet
The mother and father complex
Two of the most common are the mother complex and the father complex: the charged inner patterns formed around our earliest experiences of being parented, which go on shaping relationships, authority and self-worth long into adult life. Bringing a complex into consciousness, in Jungian analysis, reduces its power to act unseen.
Book a consultation with Philippe Jacquet, psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, London.