Complex…me?

About 100 years ago, CG Jung (the creator of Analytical Psychology) came up with an interesting test called the word association test.


It worked as follows:

1) Creating a random list of words: car, friend, sky, school, book…

2) The test administrator spoke a word and immediately the patient had to respond with the first thing that came to mind. Car and the person said walk; friend and the person said good, sky – blue, school – interesting etc.

3) In some words, the patient took too long to answer, he answered with the same word or with a word with the opposite meaning. In this case, there was an affect, an unconscious emotion. Analyzing the words that contained affection – or excess affection – it was possible to construct the history of the symptoms, of the patient’s psychic problem.

It was from this test that Jung started to use the term complex, which can be defined as a word – or group of words – loaded with affections, in general, unconscious.

The curious thing is that our self is also a complex, that is, the self is constituted by a series of words (proper name articulated to a particular story) that are loaded with affection. For example: if they ask me who I am, I can say that I am Felipe de Souza and I work with psychology. These words – Felipe de Souza / psychology are full of affection for me. The combination of affection with a series of words creates a complex. The ego is also a complex, but there are others like the famous Oedipus complex, by Freud and the inferiority complex, by Adler, about which I will write next.

For more: The Nature of the Psyche, Volume 2, Chapter 3: General Considerations on Complex Theory. Author: CG Jung. Publisher Voices.

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