Having a complex: a brief explanation of psychological complexes

In ordinary everyday conversation, when someone observes that a friend, family member, or colleague “has a complex” about something, we usually mean that they seem to have a “hot spot” about it, or that they seem to have a recognizable pattern of reactions to certain things. situations or topics.

These are observations of a good layman that capture two of the most central qualities of what psychologists call “complexes.”

1. They develop around psychological wounds.

2. They have a repetitive, stereotyped quality.

Carl Jung describes complexes

The first psychologist to describe and discuss this psychological phenomenon was Carl Jung. Jung wrote about what he called “idea complexes tuned by feelings.” The phrase was later shortened to “complex”.

However, your original description adds an important additional detail to our understanding of the complex.

3. Complexes have a particular emotional tone or value.

Complexes can be personal or impersonal.

There are certain situations that are so common and universal in the human experience that in all times and places, human beings seem to have developed complexes of ideas and behaviors around them.

complex archetype they are not personal. They arise around essential human experiences such as leadership, romantic love, death, birth, the image of the hero, the trickster, the wise man or woman, the child and many others.

• Our organized emotional and behavioral responses to these concepts suggest that they are inherent or instinctive reaction patterns in humans.

personal complexes have both a universal and individual look

Sigmund Freud’s famous Oedipus and Electra complexes describe the universal tensions within the parent-child relationship as the child realizes the limits and restrictions regarding his intimate relationship with his parent of the opposite sex. The intensity and problem-producing quality of this universal experience will vary depending on the real-life characteristics of the parents and the family situation.

• Fears of losing the love and support of parents, feeling inferior, feelings of competition with siblings or peers, fears of being rejected or excluded from the group are universally terrifying situations from which all human beings must psychologically defend themselves.

Because complexes are organized around a particular emotional tone, they can be positive or negative.

For example:

• A positive mother complex expects all older women or “motherly” figures to be loving and helpful, but a negative mother complex treats all women who trigger it as mean, demanding, or dangerous.
• An authority complex may automatically treat authority figures positively as saviors or negatively as exploiters.

How does a personal psychological complex develop?

A personal complex is a defense system that we develop after an emotional injury. It is a set of ideas, attitudes, expectations, behaviors… and the feelings that accompany them… that we unconsciously hope will avoid a similar disaster in the future.

The typical behavioral strategies developed within the complexes are common human relationship strategies:

Pleasing, appeasing, avoiding, aggressiveness, competition, withdrawal, and many others. The same response appears in every triggering situation, whether it is appropriate and helpful or not.

Several complexes can be activated at once.

It can function perfectly normal with most people around a conference table at work, but if you have a “sister complex” (about being competitive with your historical sister), that complex works like a computer application underneath. from the surface and automatically turns on when you have a particular colleague to talk to.

• You can be competitive with her without realizing it… even while you’re being perfectly reasonable with everyone else.
• At the same time, he might have a father complex at work that affects his responses to his supervisor and an abandonment complex that kicks in when his ideas are rejected.
• You could also have an inferiority or superiority complex that colors your interactions with others in a self-deprecating or self-aggrandizing way.

It’s easy to see how having complexes activated can cause endless tension and interpersonal misery.

“Today everyone knows that people ‘have complexes.’ What is less known, although much more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.” – CG Jung (1948, paragraph 200)

Complexes originally mean well and are meant to protect us from pain and danger.

But as they become automatic and autonomous, they can cause endless problems because when a complex is activated, we don’t really control it.

Jung said: “An activated complex puts us momentarily in a state of difficulty, of compulsive thought and action.” (Jung CW 8 p. 96)

A well-developed complex can accumulate around itself enough memories, experiences, and feelings to begin to function as a partial or “splintered” personality. If the triggering situation is strong enough, it can sometimes even temporarily hijack the ego. This state is called “identification with the complex” and in this situation the worldview of the complex temporarily takes precedence. When we leave one of these states we can say:

“I have no idea what happened to me,” “That was so unlike me,” or “I don’t know what came over me!”

These reactions capture the feeling that we have responded from a part of ourselves that was not really under our conscious control. There are even times when we cannot fully remember what we said while under the influence of a complex, or we may have the sensation that we have been “watching” ourselves say and do outrageous and uncharacteristic things.

When we see another person caught up in a complex, we may notice a noticeable change in expression, posture, or tone of voice and say, “He wasn’t himself.”

A complex is a distorting lens.

In order to maintain its integrity as a splintered personality and carry out the protective mission that is its raison d’être, the filter of a complex will filter out or dismiss as unimportant any new, confusing or contradictory information and will prefer to concentrate on those situations that support its vision of the world. world.

This is why a person who is trapped by a complex is so maddeningly unreasonable and so rejects contradictory information offered to him by others.

A woman who is gripped by a complex about men’s infidelity will never be reassured by her husband’s affirmations of love and assurances that he will not leave her, no matter how many ways he tries himself.

Identify the characteristic components of your particular complexes.

As you begin to examine the experiences that you observe or that are reported to be strange, you will probably notice that they always seem to occur in particular circumstances, such as…

• When your partner goes on a trip
• When you have been criticized for something
• When you experience or suspect rejection

…or with a particular type of person.

• Trying to please or interest a “fatherly” type of man
• Being jealous or competitive with a certain type of woman.
• Feeling “weak” whenever confronted with an authority figure

As you are able to predict when you may be activated, you will empower yourself to choose to take other types of action or to ignore the impulses of your complex.

Two other signs that someone is trapped by a complex:

• The emotions expressed seem too intense for the situation that triggered them.
• The language is peppered with absolutes and extremes: “always”, “never”, “no one ever”, “everyone always”.

Acknowledging experience “after the fact” is helpful because it allows you to engage in “damage control.”

The more adept you are at identifying your complex-driven behavior, the quicker you can say “I did it again” and take steps to repair the situation by apologizing, explaining, or trying again in a different frame of mind.

Because complexes fight for survival and arouse fear and resistance when we try to examine them, it is often helpful to work with an outsider.

These automatic responses need to be discovered and dealt with because a complex can act like a poorly trained attack dog, snarling and biting (or inappropriately snuggling) at friend and foe alike, causing terrible disruptions in your relationships with friends and colleagues who are based on fears, feelings and obsolete reactions.

A trusted psychologist, counselor, or friend can help you identify response patterns that are difficult to recognize from within, and help you experiment with alternative ways of dealing with your fears.

NB: If your therapist works in a cognitive-behavioral model (CBT), he or she may be more familiar with the term “schema,” which is another way of talking about the same phenomenon.

As you begin to oppose your complexes with conscious understanding and choose effective real-world strategies to deal with the “dangers” for which complexes were developed, they lose their power because they lose their need…and you can have the nice experience of having your longstanding complex-driven problems come crashing down like a house of cards.