The Concepts of Complexes & Libido Flashcards
Where did Jung’s concept of the complex take root?
While working at Burghölzli Hospital in Zurich, he undertook the development of a word association test as a means of detecting the unconscious roots of mental illness.
What are the two components of a complex?
A group of psychic representations & and the distinctive feeling attached to that group of representations.
Are complexes conscious or unconscious?
Both. They may be unconscious—repressed due to the painfulness of the related affect or unacceptability of the representations—but they can also be made conscious & at least partially resolved.
Describe the nature of complexes.
Any complex has elements related to the personal & collective unconscious. A disturbed relationship with one’s mother may result in a mother complex, or, a group of representations of “mother” w/ a particular feeling attached to that group of images. The preexisting archetype of “mother” in the collective can magnify, distort, or alter both the feeling & the representational aspect of the mother complex within one’s own psyche. All complexes have an archetypal component making them the “via regia” to the personal & collective unconscious.
How can complexes be utilized in a positive way?
Complexes can be both positive & negative. Conscious knowledge of the scope and affect of a complex can serve to modify its negative consequences whenever a particular stimulus constellates the complex.
What is the first requirement for one to understand the psychoanalytic term libido?
One must recognize the psyche as a dynamic system, as opposed to the early European bias that reduced all mind functions to biological or neurological processes.
Define libido.
Freud borrowed the term from the Latin, meaning “desire, longing, or urge”, to describe the fuel on which this psychic system ran, the drive energy that came to be repressed, channeled, displaced, or sublimated by various psychological processes. Jung simply identifies libido as “psychic energy”
How does Jung’s theory of libido differ from Freud’s original conception?
Jung rejected Freud’s emphasis on sexuality & idea that the mind is a simple push-pull of drive & defense w/ libido as the grease. Jung states: “libido for me means psychic energy, which is the equivalent to the intensity w/ which psychic contents are charged”
