archetype.guide

Concept

Complex

A cluster of associations held together by a shared feeling, which behaves with a will of its own. Jung’s first and best-evidenced concept, from the word-association experiments of 1904 to 1909, and the thing an archetype is said to sit at the core of.

A feeling-toned core and the associations bound to it, moving a little by themselves. Stimuli pass; when one touches the cluster the reaction is larger than the occasion, and the stimulus is held back and released late.

What was written

Definition

A complex, in Jung’s usage, is a group of ideas, memories and images bound together by a common emotional tone, which acts partly independently of the person’s conscious intentions. Everyone has them. They show themselves when a word, a situation or a person touches the cluster and the reaction that follows is larger, faster or stranger than the occasion warrants. Jung’s own summary was that complexes are autonomous groups of associations that tend to move by themselves and live their own life apart from our intentions.

The concept is prior to the archetype and more modest. It arose from a measurable experiment rather than from mythological comparison, and Jung held onto it to the end: in 1935 he told an audience that the personal and the collective unconscious alike consist of an unknown number of complexes, or fragmentary personalities. In his later theory a complex has two parts. The outer part is personal, built from experience and often from trauma. The inner part, the core, is archetypal. A mother complex, on this account, is a person’s accumulated experience of their actual mother gathered around an archetypal image of the Mother that no one taught them.

History

The word came to Jung from the Zürich psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, and the evidence came from the word-association experiment that Jung ran at the Burghölzli clinic from 1904. Subjects heard a stimulus word and answered with the first word that came to mind, while the experimenter timed the reply and recorded the pulse and breathing. Delays, odd answers, repetitions and failures to respond clustered around certain words, and the clusters pointed to a hidden knot of feeling. Jung called it a feeling-toned complex. The studies were published as Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien (1906) and fill CW 2.

He gave the concept its plainest form thirty years later in London:

A complex is an agglomeration of associations, a sort of picture of a more or less complicated psychological nature, sometimes of traumatic character, sometimes simply of a painful and highly toned character. — C. G. Jung, Tavistock Lectures (1935), Lecture Two, CW 18

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

In the same lecture he defined neurosis as a dissociation of personality caused by incompatible complexes: having complexes is normal, but a complex too contrary to the conscious attitude splits off and finds indirect expression in symptoms.

The link to archetypes came later. In the 1934 essay “A Review of the Complex Theory” (CW 8) and in the writing of the 1940s Jung described the nuclear core of a complex as partly innate, and this is where the two concepts join: the complex is personal in its material and archetypal in its organising centre. Murray Stein (1998) reads the complex as an inner image, an imago, that is made of psyche and can be mistaken for the person it represents, and notes Jung’s early finding that complexes run in families, with strikingly similar patterns between parents and children. Andrew Samuels (1985) treats archetype and complex together as the two halves of one theory. In the dynamic-systems reading of Saunders and Skar (2001), the complex is the primary unit and the archetype as such becomes dispensable: complexes self-organise from experience without needing an inherited form behind them.

The word-association experiment remains the one part of Jung’s work that mainstream psychology adopted, in altered form, as a measure of implicit response.

Sources

  • Jung, C. G. (1906). Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien. Barth. In English as Experimental Researches, CW 2.
  • Jung, C. G. (1934). A review of the complex theory. CW 8 ¶194–219.
  • Jung, C. G. (1935). Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice (The Tavistock Lectures). Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968. Lectures Two and Three and Discussion Five. Also CW 18.
  • Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-05904-6. Chapter 2.
  • Stein, M. (1998). Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction. Open Court. ISBN 978-0-8126-9376-8. Chapter 2.
  • Saunders, P., & Skar, P. (2001). Archetypes, complexes and self-organization. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 46(2), 305–323. https://doi.org/10.1111/1465-5922.00238