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A complex is a group of partially or totally unconscious psychic content (representations, memories, fantasies, affects, and so on), which constitutes a more or less organized whole, such that the activation of one of its components leads to the activation of others.

Freud did not coin the term "complex." At the end of the nineteenth century, it was occasionally used in psychiatry to designate a collection of ideas belonging to a subject. Freud used it in this sense in 1892 in a sketch written in preparation for his "Preliminary Communication." He wrote that in hysteria, "the content of consciousness easily becomes temporarily dissociated and certain complexes of ideas which are not associatively connected easily fly apart" (1940-41 [1892], p. 149). Shortly after, he used the term again in Studies on Hysteria (1895d), specifically in the case of Emmy von N. Josef Breuer, coauthor of the Studies, wrote, "It is almost always a question of complexes of ideas, of recollections of external events and trains of thought of the subject's own. It may sometimes happen that every one of the individual ideas comprised in such a complex of ideas is thought of consciously, and that what is exiled from consciousness is only the particular combination of them" (1895d, p. 215n).

In the ensuing years, the idea that at the heart of a neurosis there was a collection of ideas and affects specific to the subject and organized around a traumatic sexual experience became central to the development of psychoanalysis—even though subsequently Freud rarely used the term "complex" to designate such a set of ideas. He did add an essential modification to the previous psychiatric conception in positing that, for the most part, such a collection is made up of unconscious processes and remains unconscious itself.

In 1906 he explicitly discussed the term "complex" for the first time in an article on "Psycho-Analysis and the Establishment of Facts in Legal Proceedings" (1906c). He paid homage to Eugen Bleuler, and more particularly to Carl Gustav Jung, whom he had just met, and praised the method of "word association," which was developed by Wilhelm M. Wundt and practiced by Jung. This experimental method consisted of giving a subject a series of "stimulus words" and asking the subject to react as quickly as possible. The time that it takes the person to respond and the nature of their response are assumed to indicate a "complex." Freud, in this work, defined a complex as "ideational content" charged with affect (p. 104).

From then on, he used the term frequently to designate the "nuclear complex of neurosis," that is, "the father complex" (1909d, p. 208n; p. 200ff.), which he designated as the "Oedipus complex" starting in 1910 (1910h, p. 171). Similarly, he began to speak of the "castration complex" (1909b, p. 8).

After he split with Jung, Freud withdrew the praise that that he previously bestowed upon him. Thus he wrote, in his History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (1914d), that the "theory of complexes" proposed by Jung did not actually attain the status of a theory and had not "proved capable of easy incorporation into the context of psycho-analytic theory" (p. 29), even though the term itself had become common in psychoanalytic usage. In other words, Freud adopted the term to give meaning to his own metapsychological constructions, but rejected the theory of Jung himself.

The following points should be emphasized:

1. There is an obvious difference between the popular use of the term "complex" in contemporary culture and its more specific usage in the psychoanalytic literature. In this regard, what Freud described in 1914 remains the same today: "None of the other terms coined by psycho-analysis for its own needs has achieved such widespread popularity or been so misapplied to the detriment of the construction of clearer concepts" (1914d, pp. 29-30). In contemporary psychoanalytic writings, the term is hardly ever encountered anymore except in two closely connected situations: references to the Oedipus complex and the castration complex.
2. As surprising as it may seem, there has been scarcely any coherent theoretical reflection on the notion of the "complex" as such, except insofar as it is related to other terms used to designate an organized set of mental processes and activities ("structure" and "system," for example). The difficulty arises from the need to distinguish and yet coordinate two different levels. The first describes the structure of the psyche as being the same, at least in its broad outlines, in every human being; such features would be, at least in theory, constitutive of the psyche itself (this is the case with the Oedipus complex and its corollary, the castration complex). The other level is that of individual variations, that is, the particularities of such a fundamental structure taken as a function of personal history, of imagos, of the play of identification, etc. The study of such particularities is the very object of psychoanalytic treatment. But the temptation to group complexes into "families" led over time to the proliferation of "new complexes," generally named after mythological figures. There was the "Electra complex," the supposed feminine version of the Oedipus complex; the "Jocasta complex," which designated the maternal counter-Oedipus; and even the "Ajase complex," which referred to the guilt that is linked in Japanese culture to the desire to kill the mother (Kosawa, 1931/1954). Thus there is a danger of falling into a purely descriptive typology in which the coherence of the Freudian metapsychology disappears and its explanatory power is lost. But in fact, not one of these proposed complexes has survived.
3. Insofar as it relates to a fundamental structure, a complex is in itself not characteristic of this or that neurosis. Only its functionally disruptive manifestations and fixations can rise to the level of pathology.

In the definitions given above, a complex is "a group of ideas." Josef Breuer correctly noted that these ideas could be or could become conscious, but that what is "exiled from consciousness" is their "particular combination." However, we cannot remain at the level of ideas in the strict sense: memory traces, fantasies (at every level, from conscious to unconscious), and imagos, for example, all enter into this "combination." Moreover, what accounts for the effect of the complex is its quota of affect, and also its drive force. Thus, the study of an individual complex in the treatment leads to a topological consideration of all the related defenses and the retroactive reworkings that combined to set up a functional structure of this kind.

ROGER PERRON

See also: Compensation (analytical psychology); Complex (analytical psychology); Ego (analytical psychology); Femininity; Nuclear complex; Oedipus complex; Oedipus complex, early; Projection and "participation mystique" (analytical psychology); Psychology of Dementia praecox; Word association.