Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

It’s a Complex Life 11
are influenced by them and how they interfere with our conscious
intentions. As long as we are unconscious of our complexes, we are
prone to being overwhelmed or driven by them. When we understand
them, they lose their power to affect us. They do not disappear,
but over time their grip on us can loosen.
A complex is a bundle of associations, sometimes painful, sometimes
joyful, always accompanied by affect. It has energy and a life
of its own. It can upset digestion, breathing and the rate at which
the heart beats. It behaves like a partial personality. When we want
to say or do something and a complex interferes, we find ourselves
saying or doing something quite different from what we intended.
Our best intentions are upset, exactly as if we had been interfered
with by another person.
Complexes can take over to such an extent that they become
visible and audible. They appear as visions and speak in voices that
are like those of definite people. This is not necessarily a pathological
symptom (e.g., schizophrenia). Complexes are regularly personified
in dreams, and one can train oneself so they become visible
or audible also in a waking condition, as in the practice of active
imagination. 3 It is even psychologically healthy to do so, for when
you give them a voice, a face, a personality, they are less likely to
take over when you’re not looking.
The existence of complexes goes a long way toward explaining
both multiple personality disorders and what the helping professions
call lost memory recovery. An early trauma is often at the
root of such cases. What may happen in response to a painful traumatic
event is that the ego dissociates. The self-regulating function
of the psyche is activated and creates a complex that dis-remembers
the event—it gets buried among the detritus of ongoing life. 4 Like
any other complex, it lies dogg-o in the unconscious until something
happens to trigger it.
3 See below, pp. 106ff.
4 See below, pp. 55ff., for commentary on the self-regulating function of the psyche,
a keynote belief in the practice of Jungian analysis.