“=What Is a Complex=?” Reduced to its lowest terms, a complex is a group.  It may be simply a group of associated movements, like lacing one’s shoes or knitting; it may be a group of movements and ideas, like typewriting or piano-playing, which through repetition have become automatic or subconscious; it may be merely a group of ideas, such as the days of the week, the alphabet or the multiplication table.  In all these types it is repetition working through the law of habit that ties the ideas and movements together into an organic whole.  Usually, however, the word complex is reserved for psychic elements that are bound together by emotion.  In this sense, a complex is an emotional thought-habit.  Frink’s definition, which is one of the simplest, recognizes only this emotional type:  “A complex is a system of connected ideas, having a strong emotional tone, and displaying a tendency to produce or influence conscious thought and action in a definite and predetermined direction."[24]

[Footnote 24:  Frink:  “What Is a Complex?” Journal American Medical Assoc., Vol.  LXII, No. 12, Mar. 21, 1914.]

Emotion and repetition are the great welders of complexes.  Emotion is the strongest cement in the world.  A single emotional experience suffices to bind together ideas that were originally as far apart as the poles.

Sometimes a complex includes not only ideas, movements, and emotions, but physiological disturbances and sensations.  Some people cannot go aboard a stationary ship without vomiting, nor see a rose, even though it prove to be a wax one, without the sneezing and watery eyes of hay-fever.  This is what is known as a “conditioned reflex.”  Past associations plus fear have so welded together idea and bodily manifestation that one follows the other as a matter of course, long after the real cause is removed.  In such ways innumerable nervous symptoms arise.  The same laws which form healthy complexes, and, indeed, which make all education possible, may thus be responsible for the unhealthy mal-adaptive association-habits which lie back of a neurosis.  Fortunately, a knowledge of this fact furnishes the clue to the re-education that brings recovery.

A complex may be either conscious or unconscious, but as it usually happens that either all or part of its elements are below the surface, the word is oftenest used to mean those buried systems of the subconscious mind that influence thought or behavior without themselves being open to scrutiny.  It is these buried complexes, memory groups, gathered through the years of experience, that determine action in uniform and easily prophesied directions.  Every individual has a definite complex about religion, about politics, about patriotism, about business, and it is the sum of these buried complexes which makes up his total personality.