Tags: [[Jungian psychology]] According to James Hollis: > "Of all [Jung's] insights, the complex is perhaps the most practical of his gifts. There is not a single therapeutic hour when I do not think about complexes, recognize their presence, and realize that we are always struggling with compelling spectral presences that have the power to usurp and manage this present hour, and to subvert all the possibilities of this moment into replicative history." Jung borrowed the term "complex" from the Berlin psychiatrist Theodor Ziehen to refer to dissociated energies that caused disturbances in consciousness. He discovered these disturbances when he conducted word association experiments on patients at the Burghölzli, the psychiatric hospital at the University of Zürich. He found that ordinary words could have profound effects on people, because their psychoactive histories had imbued them with a strong reactive charge. James Hollis again: > Back when I was teaching in college I used to demonstrate a complex by walking into class and calmly saying, “Please take out a piece of paper and a pen.” While the request and its images are essentially banal, students' hearts would seize up and they would be flooded with anxiety. Why? Because who has not been threatened by surprise exams? While my sentence was quite ordinary, the history it activated was not. And beneath the level of the pop quiz anxiety lies a far deeper, archetypal need—the need to feel approved by the other, the need to feel safe, the need to be protected. All of this material is activated by this most ordinary of sentences: “Please take out a piece of paper and a pen.” > ... complexes per se are neither good nor bad. What matters is how they play out in our lives. Or, very pragmatically, what do they make us do or what do they keep us from doing? To what degree, and in what specific moments of choice, does history govern? Thus, what is most troubling about complexes is their capacity to remove a discriminating judgment from this moment of consciousness, assert, even impose, a historic view generated from an earlier, more likely disempowered place in our history. > The term Jung used to describe the experience of a complex was Ergriffenheit, the state of being seized or possessed. In other words, when a complex hits, whether benign or malign in its effect upon us, we are seized by history, possessed by the past. In such moments we are led to choices that produce patterns, repetitions driven by the spectral influences of our history, and serving for good or ill to bring about the same old, same old. No, we do not stand before the mirror in the morning and say, “Today I will do the same stupid, self-defeating things I have done for decades.” But by day's end, we will have, predictably, done exactly that. > > Try telling a person in the grip of a complex, exhibiting rage, anxious obeisance, or avoidance, that he or she is in one and they will not only deny your assertion but most likely have a ready justification. In fact, one may safely say, in a pseudo-scientific theorem: wheresoever ready rationalizations exist, thereunto a complex is being protected. --- Source: Hollis, James. _Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives_. Asheville, North Carolina: Chiron Publications, 2013.