As he wept, I gently said, ‘now you are crying like a baby, like a baby who chokes
on his mother’s milk, like the boy nobody wants.’
He said, ‘I want him.’
I said, ‘Yes, you do. That’s new, you didn’t want him before.’
ComplexComplexes are neural networks through which sensations change first to feelings,
then to thoughts. Jung’s definition is ‘recollections, composed of a large number of
component ideas...The cement that holds the complex together is the feeling tone
common to all the individual ideas’ (Jung 1973). Samuels et al. (1986) say: ‘collections
of images and ideas, clustered round a core derived from one or more Archetypes,
and characterised by a common emotional tone. When they come into play (become
“constellated”) they contribute to behaviour and are marked by affect, whether a
person is conscious of them or not.’
Complexes shape unconscious habits, unfold from birth, through sexual
differentiation, initiation, courtship, parenting, ageing and gaining wisdom, to death
with its attending rituals. The archetypal core is humanized by rites de passage. Often,
religious ceremonies mark developmental stages (Sullivan 1987:27–51) with religious
signifiers to orient us in our social group.
A well functioning ego complex relates to Self through less conscious complexes
in a way similar to a Self relating to the collective through the cultural unconscious.
Henderson (1988:72–81) suggests information moves in both systems by a
transcendent function capable of mediating between opposites, say, dependence and
independence.
Religious ideas, by definition, ‘bind things back’, from a part to a whole. Ego moves
towards Self: Self moves from its own uniqueness to universality. Religious attitudes
create myths, shape perceptions, give meaning and purpose to suffering. ‘True
compassion is a powerful antidote to our own suffering because it counteracts
alienation’ (Young-Eisendrath 1996:59).
Jung viewed ‘religion’ as a psychological system. He defined Self as ‘the whole
range of psychic phenomena in man.’ Appearing in time, developing its archetypal
patterns a bit at a time, Self is an ocean, finite yet uncountable. Ego recognizes psychic
wholeness, maintains identity, personality, and temporal continuity (Jung 1971a). It
appears as ‘me’ in dreams and active imagination. The dream ego is not the ‘me’ of
the waking world, rather, the ‘me’ Self sees, or wishes ‘me’ to see (Whitmont and
Pereira 1989:18–22). Ego is a complex which tests reality.
Nakae Toju, a Japanese Taoist philosopher from the seventeenth century, who
used Ri as a name for world soul (collective), Ki as a name for world stuff (ego), and
Ryochi as a name for ‘Self’. Tao argues about ‘darkness, water, the “uncarved block”,
emptiness, energy, anti-action, transformation and self-likeness’ (McNaughton
1971). Like Buddhism and analytical psychology, Taoist philosophy takes the view
that psychic structure provides our route to the phenomenal world, to inner and outer
worlds, and to the collective. It says we know through our sense perceptions.
208 DALE MATHERS