A Complex (n.) is a cluster of energy in the unconscious, charged by historic events, reinforced through repetition, embodying a fragment of our personality, and generating a programmed response and an implicit set of expectations.
A Complex (n.) is a psychic content which is outside the control of the conscious mind. They have been split off from consciousness and lead a separate existence in the unconscious, being at all times ready to hinder or to reinforce the conscious intentions.
A Complex (n.) is not just something that we have, but rather something that can have us.
A Complex (n.) can harbour a wholly unconscious fantasy-system with a marked tendency to set itself up as a separate personality.
A Complex (n.) left to work itself out in the unconscious loses none of its original affect, though its outward forms change almost endlessly.
A Complex (n.) is a split-off portion of libido that has or is a fragmentary personality, a daimon felt as actual experience and not a figment of the imagination.
The Complex (n.) comes and goes as it pleases, a split-off entity living its own life in the dark, ready to block or boost the conscious mind.
A Complex (n.) is a skeleton in the cupboard — the sore spot we hate to be reminded of, which returns unbidden at the worst moment.
A Complex (n.) is not proof of inferiority but a node of psychic life: without these unresolved defeats, psychic activity would grind to a fatal halt.
A Complex (n.) is a possession: the more complexes a man has, the more possessed he is, and whatever I cannot shake off must somehow be stronger than me.
A Complex (n.) shows its real energy in a patient's 'irrelevant' talk — the hours she spends complaining about her servants measure it; irrelevance is never irrelevant.
A Complex (n.) was discovered in the noise of an experiment: what had always been logged as failures to react turned out to be the psyche's autonomous behaviour.
A Complex (n.) can have us — less known, and far more important, than the fact that people have complexes.
A Complex (n.) when active puts us under duress — compulsive thinking and acting for which the only fitting term is the judicial one, diminished responsibility.
A Complex (n.) is an emotionally charged image that behaves like an animated foreign body in consciousness: it can be suppressed by will, but never argued out of existence.
Complex (n.) behave like Descartes' devils: they slip the wrong word into your mouth, make you forget the name you are introducing, tickle your throat at the softest passage of the concert, and bid you congratulate the mourners.
Complex (n.) are unteachable, like the two elves the clergyman taught the Lord's Prayer: they tried their hardest, and still said “Our Father, who art not in heaven.”
Complex (n.) are splinter psyches — they appear personified in dreams when no consciousness holds them down, crashing round the house at night like the hobgoblins of folklore.
A Complex (n.) is most commonly made by moral conflict, which comes at bottom from the apparent impossibility of affirming the whole of one's nature.
Complex (n.) look like such absurd nothings that we are ashamed of them — but if they really were nothing, they could not hurt so much.