How Do Personal and Cultural Complexes Differ?
Detail of The Dream (1921) by Max Beckmann (1844-1950) St. Louis Art Museum / Public Domain
Detail of The Dream (1921) by Max Beckmann (1844-1950) St. Louis Art Museum / Public Domain
A Conversation with Psychiatrist and Jungian Analyst Thomas Singer
Feeling safe and at home in our environment is a basic human need, one necessary for survival. Once upon a time, survival required being able to read the sky for storms or recognize the proximity of a dangerous predator. Today, threats to our safety and security do not involve mammoth beasts but emerge from human actions or inactions and our own troubled psyches. One manifestation of the “threat to the stability of the self”[i] psychologists have identified is the idea of the “complex.” The American Psychological Association defines complex as “a group or system of related ideas or impulses that have a common emotional tone and exert a strong but usually unconscious influence on the individual’s attitudes or behaviors.”[ii]
In a 1935 lecture, Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung described how he understood complexes to work:
“A complex with its given tension or energy has the tendency to form a little personality of itself. It has a sort of body, a certain amount of its own physiology. It can upset the stomach. It upsets the breathing, it disturbs the heart – in short, it behaves like a partial personality. For instance, when you want to say or do something and unfortunately a complex interferes with this intention, then you say or do something different from what you intended.”[iii]
But do complexes only operate at the personal level? Does our unconsciousness and its discontents also make us vulnerable to false myths and group ideologies?
Dr. Thomas Singer
Dr. Thomas Singer, MD, psychiatrist and Jungian psychoanalyst, has spent years investigating cultural changes from a psychological perspective. He has expanded Jung’s original understanding of individual complexes to include how cultures are susceptible to powerful emotional forces from within groups that affect and infect entire populations. He is the editor of The Cultural Complex Series for Routledge, a series of books which explore cultural complexes in different parts of the world, including Australia, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Europe, Latin America, and the United States.
Many of us are feeling undone by the fracturing of our familiar reality and the threats to our personhood by prevailing chaotic conditions. It is therefore a pleasure to interview Dr. Singer. This will be the first in a series of three interviews.
Dale Kushner: What is a personal complex?
Thomas Singer: The notion of complexes originated with C.G. Jung and forms a core of the foundation for his understanding of the psychology of individuals.
Complexes are a normal part of everyone’s psychological makeup up. As naturally occurring phenomena, our personal complexes originate in our early family experiences. So, besides mother complexes, we have father complexes and sibling complexes. Based on our early experiences, we can also develop money complexes, power complexes, inferiority complexes and complexes around gender.
For the most part, we remain unaware of our complexes as they tend to remain unconscious and they can remain unconscious for a lifetime even though they can raise havoc with our capacity to work, to love, and to relate in a healthy way to the world around us and inside us. A typical complex for a young man can be a negative father complex which can express itself in conflicted relations with authority figures such as teachers, coaches, and bosses.
DK: What is a cultural complex and how does it differ from a personal complex?
TS: The notion of cultural complexes is a relatively new extension of Jungian theory. Jung worked on the theory of personal complexes at the beginning of the twentieth century and the cultural complex theory is the result of research at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Cultural complexes are based on frequently repeated historical experiences that have taken root in the collective psyche of a group and in the psyches of the individual members of a group, and they express archetypal values for the group such as the notion of freedom or the relationship to authority.
Cultural complexes can be thought of as the fundamental building blocks of an inner sociology. But, unlike the science of sociology, this inner sociology is not objective or scientific in its description of different groups and classes of people. Rather, it is a description of groups and classes as filtered through the psyches of generations of ancestors. It contains an abundance of information and misinformation about the different groups in a society.
Personal and cultural complexes can get mixed up with one another, but the content of a personal complex and a cultural complex are most often quite different from one another.
DK: What are the characteristics of a cultural complex so that one can recognize it?
TS: Personal and cultural complexes have the following characteristics:
1. They express themselves in powerful moods and repetitive behaviors. Highly charged emotional or affective reactivity is their calling card. These emotions can be triggered easily and can overtake any rational thinking.
2. Cultural complexes resist our most heroic efforts to make them conscious and remain, for the most part, unconscious.
3. They accumulate experiences that validate their pre-existing point of view and create a storehouse of self-affirming ancestral memories. One can witness this phenomenon in the highly siloed filtering of our contemporary news and social media that constantly reaffirms self-selecting memories that groups have about themselves and other groups.
4. The thinking of cultural complexes is not subtle or layered; it tends to be black and white. This type of thinking tends to affirm simplistic points of view that replace everyday ambiguity and uncertainty with fixed, often self-righteous, attitudes to the world.
5. In addition, personal and cultural complexes both have archetypal cores; that is, they express typically human attitudes and are rooted in primordial ideas about what is meaningful, making them very hard to resist, reflect upon, and discriminate.
6. Today, we can say that some of the cultural complexes that we are currently wrestling with have caused uninterrupted foul moods in cultures for centuries, if not millennia. Examples of this include attitudes to women and homosexuality. The cultural complex can possess the psyche and soma of an individual or a group, causing them to think and feel in ways that might be quite different from what they think they should feel or think.
As Jung put it: "We say or do something different from what we intended."[iv]
In other words, cultural complexes are not always "politically correct," although being "politically correct" might itself be a cultural complex.
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