Understanding and Resolving “Feeling-Toned Complexes”
A Zoom session offered by the C.G. Jung Foundation in New York City about “Feeling-Toned Complexes” — those emotional eruptions that bedevil all of us — seemed timely and helpful for a Pandemic-gripped nation that, if I am any example, remains on the shadow side of life. The very session, where people spoke freely and generously about psychological issues, had a palliative effect in itself.
The instructor took the class through Jung’s early career and the advances he and his associates made in developing what we today call analytical psychology. The beginning of the story seems simply enough. Jung expanded on the “word association” test developed by a nineteenth century British psychologist to detect dementia and found a basis for a more generalized psychology.
In short, the word association test consisted of a physician reading one-hundred words to a patient and measuring the patient’s response in terms of time lapse and the nature of the actual association. But, as Jung notes in “A Review of the Complex Theory,” even though the average speed of the response and the quality was important, perhaps equally important was a relatively subsidiary result that revealed how the experiment was actually disturbed “by the autonomous behavior of the psyche, that is, by assimilation. It was then I discovered the feeling-toned complexes, which had always been registered as a ‘failure to react.’”
For Jung the discovery of feeling-toned complexes, and the assimilation caused by them, show that early views stating that one couldn’t investigate isolated psychic processes, had merit. Jung writes that “There are no isolated psychic processes; just as there are no isolated life processes.” He explains further that a seemingly simply association test can give rise to what he calls a “constellation,” a term that means an outward action, such as in a test, “releases a psychic process in which certain contents gather together and prepare for action.” When a person is constellated it means he or she has taken a position and can be expected to react in a specific way. But, as Jung notes, the constellation is an automatic process which happens involuntarily and, therefore, a person is unable to stop it. The constellated contents are definite complexes possessing their own psychic energy. If the experiment is the word association test, the complex will influence its course in the extreme by invoking disturbed reactions or less likely, the subject will hide by a definite mode of response, like a canned reaction. Jung notes that at times educated people with strong wills can control the complex but this appears the exception and is usually in play when the complex shrouds something of great personal value.
For Jung the association test was of interest because no other psychological experiment reproduces the psychic situation of the dialogue as well and at the same time makes fairly accurate quantitative and qualitative evaluations possible. For Jung, from a scientific point of view, a feeling-toned complex is the image of a certain psychic situation which has a strong emotional pull that is incompatible with habitual consciousness. “This image has a powerful inner coherence, it has its own wholeness, a relatively high degree of autonomy, that is subject to the control of the conscious mind to only a limited extent, and therefore behaves like an animated foreign body in the sphere of consciousness.” Jung notes that the complex can be usually be repressed by the act of will, but cannot be banished. It will arise again when the suitable opportunity presents itself.
Our instructor at the zoom session suggested that we are often taken over by a feeling-toned complex during times of anger, high stress, and trauma when we find ourselves using words and images from the primitive brain. The language has a handy batch of sayings to take the steam out the occasion: “I wasn’t myself, the devil made me do it, it’s not in my nature.” Perhaps there is some truth in these utterances because emotion keeps the complex alive and it will continue to spread, and in Jung’s language, “metastasize.” The non-clinical description, “I was caught in a complex,” has more than a ring of truth.
A feeling-toned complex rules when something from the past has not been made conscious and resolved. Perhaps some past experience has not been metabolized. Perhaps there is something from the past still alive. Perhaps an unresolved trauma reappears in its unconscious, unresolved form.
The instructor suggested that trauma can be a powerful source of the complex and, left unresolved, can be passed down through generations. Mothers, fathers, siblings, partners, educators and so on can be all be sources of generational complexes. It is certainly not rare that families don’t want all stories told. Jung notes that many of his patients felt persecuted by their parents long after they are dead. He also notes that because the weight of the parents is so powerful, some cultures have developed a whole system of ancestor-worship to propitiate them. (As an aside, I am discovering some of this first-hand while writing “When War Becomes Us,” a novel about war, wounding and trauma through three generations of my family.)
The teacher made it very clear that we should not feel we are destined to be “caught in a complex.” We certainly have the neuro-plasticity to deal with complexes that bedevil us. However, she did suggest that we can shrink but can’t completely eliminate the problem. Certainly, analysis is an option. In any event self-evaluation is the key. I might ask: what am I carrying? What am I hiding? And just where did that self-loathing come from?
She spoke about using “guided imagery” as a way to soften the complex. In a sense, as long as I can talk about a trauma, the hypothalamus won’t shut down from an emotional overload. As long as I can metabolize the image and symbol, I am in control of the complex. In this sense we need a symbolization process that transforms a feeling-toned complex or a trauma into words. This strategy can help defuse the affects. In my conversation with the complex, I am conversing with another part of me. As long as a complex is unconscious to the light of day, it can rule one’s life. Often, it will be in control of me and self-loathing is the likely result. “Road rage” offers a very good example of how a feeling-toned complex can fester and then erupt at the least provocation.
Freud suggested that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious. Jung disagreed with Freud and this became the reason for their professional break. For Jung this “road,” which in his opinion was not very royal, was the complex which is the architect of the dream and its symptoms. For Jung this road was more “like a rough and uncommonly devious footpath that often loses itself in the undergrowth and generally leads not into the unconscious but past it.”
And for Jung, this is precisely the issue. For him, fear of the complex is a bad signpost because it always points away from the unconscious and back into consciousness. Complexes are so unpleasant that most people avoid dealing with them at all costs. Jung suggests that the conscious mind thinks that complexes are unseemly and must be repressed or avoided. He suggests that to the uninitiated ear his discussion of the complex “may sound like a description of primitive demonology or of the psychology of taboos. This peculiar note is due simply to the fact that the existence of complexes, of split-off psychic fragments, is a quite perceptible vestige of the primitive state of mind.” He cautions that he uses “primitive” in the sense of “primordial.” Jung suggests that with the wars of the first part of the twentieth century as a guide, humankind has been slow to move out of its primitive state. So, he was inclined to think that “autonomous complexes are among the normal phenomena of life and that they make up the structure of the unconscious psyche.”
Let me end on a personal note. I have been keeping a dream journal for more than twenty years, beginning after the death of my mother. Following Jung’s logic with the complex being an architect of the dream, I have found this journal-keeping a great help in me identifying the ticks that might possess me.
(Quotes about Jung are from his “The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche,” Vol. 3 of CW, particularly. “A Review of the Complex Theory.”
