The death-blow to Jung’s Christian faith came when he felt nothing at all at his confirmation, the religious initiation of which he had been led to expect much. A good deal of his later work can be viewed as a quest to replace the faith he had lost.Renown came first to Jung from his research on word association, in which a person’s responses to stimulus words can reveal complexes: groups of related, often repressed, ideas and impulses that bring about habitual patterns of thought or behavior. While a young psychiatric resident, Jung read the just-published book by Freud on the interpretation of dreams. Freud’s revolutionary idea of attributing unconscious motivation to human behavior resonated with similar thoughts Jung was entertaining at the time, and Jung proceeded to devise an experimental method, called the Word Association Test, which could be seen as providing an objective, scientific basis for some of Freud’s ideas. Jung used the psychogalvanometer as a tool for hitting upon a complex.

In psychology a complex is generally an important group of unconscious associations, conflicting beliefs that stand on their own like a splinter identity, or a strong unconscious impulse, lying behind an individual’s condition. Jung described a “complex” as a node in the unconscious; it may be imagined as a knot of unconscious feelings and beliefs, detectable indirectly, through behavior that is puzzling or hard to account for. Complexes such as the ‘Guilt Complex’ drain energy and integrity from the conscious Ego. What is unconscious tends to be projected onto others: attributed to other people or external situations. The projection may lead to an erroneous perception such as when you think your friend is angry while he himself feels quite content. To resolve the complex may give significant relief.  Gregory Mitchell

associations i am making today would connect jung’s ideas summarized here with that of the logos in the origin of stories:  evolution cognition and fiction book, and the ideas on the metaphorical basis of the subjective self i just read in the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, and the ideas of a quantum system running our minds, along with a macro system which works as a measuring device for essentially amplifying these quanta, as detailed in the self-aware universes: how consciousness creates the material world, which i am reading right now.