What Is Your Complex?

This guide, in the form of a dictionary, is designed as an attempt to help interested readers reach an even better understanding of "that inner or underground world that exists in all of us and acts according to its own particular modalities". What are complexes? For Jung, "psychological fragments embodied in people"; for Marie Bonaparte, "the organs of our psychic anatomy"; for Freud, "the guide to human behaviour in the world"; while for Jacques Lacan, "in them can be found the same characters typified by folklore, fairy tales, stories or plays for children and adults that have shaped humanity over the centuries..." Each of us is defined by one complex more dominant than the others, which perhaps decides our fate far more than, say, a zodiac sign. That is why the question that gives this book its title takes on much more important value for the very way we live. This dictionary-style guide, using the words and explanations of the masters of psychoanalysis and its specialists, is designed as a first attempt at an organic system of the prevailing doctrine on this subject, to help interested readers reach an even better understanding of "that inner or underground world that exists in all of us and acts according to its own particular modalities".