Complex-ion

Re-blogging from Anacom.It's a mouth-full but very interesting read.


Psychology doesn’t have to be as complicated as it is often presented, but it does often work by a subtle and inverted logic that is well worth understanding and learning to deal with. Of particular importance is the logic behind what Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung popularized with the term “complex.”


A complex is a bundle of ideas, memories, attitudes, emotions, passions, and habits focused on a theme — for example, the “inferiority complex.” This theme can take over a person and affect how he feels and understands his situation. Talk to a person with an inferiority complex, and no matter how much you praise his talents and accomplishments, he will still feel inadequate. A complex is not reasonable and is not susceptible to reasonable argument. One aspect of a complex is that a person makes reasonable-sounding statements that actually are the complex speaking. A person with an inferiority complex, for example, may convince you that he needs another year of study or another set of credentials in order to be prepared for his vocation. Unless you listen closely and sense the neurotic jitters in his tone, you may not notice the complex hiding behind his reasonable deductions.


Someone with a mother complex may tell you very kindly and helpfully how to do something, and only later will you realize that this pleasant person would like to control your whole life. Another person may have a Narcissus complex. He can’t stop talking about himself and interprets everything in terms of his own situation. 

A complex is mostly unconscious, so the person talking has no idea that he or she is being controlled like a puppet by a deep-seated emotional obsession. Friends and lovers of such a person may know too well that something is wrong, but they have no idea what to do about it.

Psychologists often advise to “go with the symptom.” Don’t try to get rid of it or urge its opposite. It’s better to take the symptom as given, and try to deepen it. Therefore, to a friend with an inferiority complex, you could say, “It’s extraordinary how much I don’t know about my field, and yet I get along pretty well.” A person caught in an inferiority complex may need to discover that we all are ignorant of many things, all incapable and prone to error. Inferior means lower, and the inferiority complex may signal that a person has to join the human race.

It’s interesting how often the complex hides its polar opposite. The inferior person doesn’t let on how superior he feels deep down. The paranoid person doesn’t show how gullible he can be. 

In knowing these few simple rules about a complex, when you sense one in the otherwise reasonable statements of a friend or spouse, child or parent, you can glimpse the deeper, hidden issue with which you’re really dealing. And that is a step forward. Jung referred to a complex as a sub-personality. You may assume that you’re talking to your friend, when actually it’s Mr. Inferiority or Miss Paranoid at the other end of the conversation.

There is a temptation in the unaware listener to identify with the opposite of the position taken by the person caught in the complex. You listen to someone putting himself down, and you try to build him up. You hear someone warn about conspiracies, and you try to show that no such conspiracies exist. Your words, however, will be vacuumed into the vortex of the complex and interpreted accordingly. The inferior person will say, “It’s easy for you to talk about success; you have talent and ability. I have none.” The paranoid person will say, “You’re out to get me, like everyone else.”

One thing you can do, although it may seem as crazy as the complex, is to agree with the person, but speak more realistically and deeply. I knew a doctor who could never be convinced that he knew enough about medicine to practice comfortably. I tried to get him to tell me precisely where he was deficient. I got him to describe to me in detail how much he would never know and then to feel relatively comfortable with his ignorance.

We could all deal with the highly neurotic human condition by thinking more subtly about what is being said in all of our interactions. That unkind word you just heard may not be coming from the well-intentioned person in front of you but from a complex that speaks from a cave deep in the person’s psyche.


From: Spirituality & Health