Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

10 It’s a Complex Life
“Head”— “bed” (0.8 sec.)
“Marry”— “together” (1.7 sec.)
“Woman”— “friend” (2 sec.)
“Home”—(long pause) “none” (5.6 sec.)
—and so on.
Then the examiner takes you through the list a second time, noting
different responses to the same words. Finally you are asked for
comments on those words to which you had a longer-than-average
response time, a merely mechanical response or a different association
on the second run-through. All these had been flagged by the
examiner as “complex indicators.”
My experience of the Word Association Experiment was both
illuminating and deflating. It convinced me that complexes were
not only real but were alive in me and quite autonomous, independent
of my will. I realized they could affect my memory, my
thoughts, my moods, my behavior. I was not free to be me—there
was no “me”—when I was in the grip of a complex.
Freud described dreams as the via regia to the unconscious; Jung
showed that the royal road to the unconscious is rather the complex,
the architect of both dreams and symptoms. In fact, Jung originally
gave the name “complex psychology” to his school of thought, to
distinguish it from Freud’s school of psychoanalysis.
The activation of a complex is always marked by the presence of
some strong emotion, be it love or hate, joy or anger, or any other.
We are all complexed by something, which is to say, we all react
emotionally when the right buttons are pushed. Or, to put it another
way, an emotional reaction means that a complex has been constellated.
When a complex is activated we can’t think straight and
hardly know how we feel. We speak and act according to the dictates
of the complex, and when it has run its course we wonder
what took over.
We cannot get rid of our complexes, simply because they are
deeply rooted in our personal history. Complexes are part and parcel
of who we are. The most we can do is become aware of how we