Complex

The complex is the foundational empirical unit of Jungian analytical psychology. Jung’s word-association experiments at the Burghölzli in the first decade of the twentieth century demonstrated that autonomous, affectively charged clusters of representations organize behavior below the threshold of conscious awareness — interrupting, intruding, distorting, and occasionally possessing the ego. A complex, in Jung’s mature formulation, is a feeling-toned grouping of images, memories, and affects organized around an archetypal core.

The complex is load-bearing for the Seba tradition because it is the modern empirical restatement of what the Greeks called the daimon: an autonomous psychic agency that speaks, acts, and is suffered. The autonomous complex becomes, in Hillman, the personified figure of the soul; in Kalsched, the archaic self-care system; in the archetypal reading, the god behind the symptom.

Relationships

• carl-jung
• complex-as-little-personality
• daimon
• archetype