The problem is not that we have complexes but that complexes have us. Some complexes are useful in protecting the human organism, but others interfere with choice and may even dominate a person's life. Complexes are always more or less unconscious; they are charged with energy and operate autonomously. Although usually activated by an event in the present, the psyche operates analogously, saying in effect, "When have I been here before?" The current stimulus may be only remotely similar to something that happened in the past, but if the situation is emotionally analogous then the historically occasioned response is triggered. There are few who do not have an emotionally charged response around such issues as sex, money and authority because they are usually associated with important experiences in the past. Of all the complexes, the most influential are those internalized experiences of parents we call the mother complex and the father complex. These are generally the two most important people we have ever encountered. They were there for the laying of the keel and the launching of the vessel. It was their treatment of us and their strategies toward life to which we were exposed. For example, Hemingway's macho heroes represented, among other things, the overcompensation by the child from Oak Park, Illinois, for the fear of women he acquired from a mother who wanted him to be a girl and who was emotionally seductive and invasive even when he reached adulthood. Franz Kafka was so dominated by his powerful father that he saw the universe itself as powerful, remote and indifferent. This is not to suggest that these and others have not created important art, for they surely have, but the form and private motive of their creativity was to work through, compensate for, and if possible transcend, the primal parent complexes. So we all live out, unconsciously, reflexes assembled from the past. Even in early childhood, a growing split develops between our inherent nature and our socialized self. Wordsworth noted this two centuries ago when, in "Ode on Intimations of Immortality," he wrote: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy,... At length the man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.4 For Wordsworth, the socialization process was a progressive estrangement from the natural sense of self with which we are born. In Eugene O'Neill's play, A Long Day's Journey Into Night, the mother presents the case even more tragically: None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it. And once they're done, they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever.5 The ancient Greeks perceived this split some twenty-five centuries ago. Their tragic figures were not evil, though they might sometimes commit evil deeds; they were persons bound to what they did not know about themselves. The hamartia (sometimes translated as "the tragic flaw," but I prefer "the wounded vision") represented the lens through which they made their choices. Out of the accumulation of unconscious forces and reflexive responses, choices were made and consequences followed. The tragic sense of life articulated in those grim dramas suggest that all of us, protagonists in our private dramas, may lead tragic lives. We can be driven by what we do not understand about ourselves. The liberating power of Greek tragedy was that through suffering the hero came to wisdom, that is, a revised relationship between inner truth (character) and outer truth (the gods or fate). Our lives are tragic only to the degree that we remain unconscious of both the role of the autonomous complexes and the growing divergence between our nature and our choices.
— James Hollis
Hollis is precise about the mechanism: the complex does not announce itself. It borrows the energy of a present moment and retrofits a historically shaped response onto it, so that what looks like a reaction to what is happening now is actually a reflex assembled from something that happened long before the current scene existed. The psyche's question — *when have I been here before?* — is not a question it asks aloud. It answers itself, automatically, before reflection can intervene.
The Hemingway and Kafka examples are worth slowing down over, not as biography but as structural illustration. Both men were extraordinarily productive. The creativity was real. Yet the *form* of the creativity — the macho overcompensation, the vast indifferent father-universe — was not chosen out of freedom; it was recruited to manage a wound that preceded the work. This is what makes the passage uncomfortable. The output does not redeem the complex, and the complex does not cancel the output. They run together. The tragic sense Hollis is drawing from the Greeks does not ask whether Kafka was a great writer; it asks what vision Kafka was *bound to* — and whether he, or we reading him, ever fully distinguishes the art from the wound that commissioned it.
Hamartia as wounded vision rather than moral flaw changes everything. The protagonist is not corrupt; the lens is ground wrong from the start.
James Hollis·The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife·1993