Complex (psychology)

A complex is a core pattern of emotions, memories, perceptions, and wishes in the personal unconscious organized around a common theme, such as power or status. Primarily a psychoanalytic term, it is found extensively in the works of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud.

An example of a complex would be as follows: if you had a leg amputated when you were a child, this would influence your life in profound ways, even if you overcame the physical handicap. You may have many thoughts, emotions, memories, feelings of inferiority, triumphs, bitterness and determinations centering on that one aspect of your life. If these thoughts were troubling and pervasive, Jung might say you had a complex about the leg.

Complex existence is widely agreed upon in the area of depth psychology, a branch of psychology that asserts the most significant parts of your personality are derived from your unconscious. It is a way of mapping the psyche, and are crucial theoretical items in therapy. Complexes are believed by Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud to influence an individual's attitude and behavior.

Carl Jung distinguished between two types of unconscious mind: the personal unconscious and collective unconscious. The personal unconscious was the accumulation of experiences from a person's lifetime that could not be consciously recalled. The collective unconscious, on the other hand, was a sort of universal inheritance of human beings, a "species memory" passed on to each of us, not unlike the motor programs and instincts of other animals. Jung believed the personal unconscious was dominated by complexes.

The term "complex" (German: Komplex; also "emotionally charged complexes" or "feeling-toned complex of ideas"), was adopted by Carl Jung when he was still a close associate of Sigmund Freud. Complexes were so central to Jung's ideas that he originally called his body of theories "Complex psychology". Historically the term originated with Theodor Ziehen, a German psychiatrist who experimented with reaction time in word association test responses. Jung described a "complex" as a 'node' in the unconscious; it may be imagined as a knot of unconscious feelings and beliefs, detectable indirectly, through behavior that is puzzling or hard to account for.

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