A crucial concept in Jung, Carl’s analytic psychology. A complex is an assemblage of images, ideas, associations with a consistent emotional tone, gravitating around one or more archetype. Complexes are the personifications of the archetypes, they are what the psyche knows and sees of the archetypes. This notion has passed into popular discourse and the connection to Jung is very often unknown. The best known and mostly wide recognized examples of complexes, after the ‘Oedipal complex’ (Freud, Anna borrowed the term from Jung) are the ‘father complex’ and the ‘mother complex’---what these point to is the fact that our relationship to certain people can, for a variety of radically differing reasons, resemble and share many of the same characteristics as our relation with our parents. Perhaps the most important implication, though, of the notion of the complex is that it presupposes that the self is neither unified nor singular but always multiple and in a state of flux. Further Reading: A. Stevens Jung (1994).