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Complex as Little Personality

Complex as Little Personality

Jung’s Tavistock formulation is the decisive image. “A complex with its given tension or energy has the tendency to form a little personality of itself. It has a sort of body, a certain amount of its own physiology. It can upset the stomach. It upsets the breathing, it disturbs the heart — in short, it behaves like a partial personality” (Jung 1976, The Symbolic Life, CW 18). The complex is not a thought, a schema, or a cognitive structure; it is a someone. It has affect, will, and somatic expression.

The image is load-bearing for the entire post-Jungian tradition. Hillman takes it as the ground of his doctrine of personifying: the psyche speaks in figures, and the analytic task is to meet the figures as persons rather than reduce them to the ego. The plural-psyche is not a metaphor; it is the phenomenological reality to which the complex-as-personality image points. polytheistic-psychology draws the theological conclusion: if the psyche naturally disperses into partial personalities, then the polytheist’s pantheon is closer to the structure of the soul than the monotheist’s unity.

Stein notes the continuity of this image with the clinical phenomena of multiple personality, while insisting that the ordinary complex differs from dissociative identity disorder in degree, not kind (Stein 1998, Jung’s Map of the Soul). Every ego contains complexes; every complex is a potential little personality. The difference between health and pathology is the degree to which the ego remains in relation with its little personalities rather than being seized by them.

The classical parallel is the daimon — the personal intermediary power. What the Greeks personified as daimons, Jung re-describes as complexes; the psychological structure is one.

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