Typically, when Jung described the empirical roots of his psychology, the nature of complexes and how they affect our experience and behavior, he reminded his readers and auditors of the historical background to that theory. In 1924 he wrote, “The psychic double is a commoner phenomenon than one would expect, although it seldom reaches a degree of intensity that would entitle one to speak of a `double personality'” (CW 17: ¶227). In 1939, he recommended the writings of Pierre Janet (Paris), Theodore Flournoy (Geneva), and Morton Prince (Boston), so that his readers would understand the premises on which he was working (CW 9i: ¶490). In 1951, he traced his own heritage from sixteenth-century medical alchemist, Paracelsus, through Mesmer, Charcot, Janet and Freud (CW 16: ¶231). Three years later, he cited cases of double personality, automatisme ambulatoire, and the researches of Janet to illustrate what he envisioned the complexes to be (CW 8: 383).

          Morton Prince's famous account of the Beauchamp case (The Dissociation of a Personality, 1905/08) has an honored place as the prototypical American description of multiple personality. The authors of more recent and popular accounts, such as The Three Faces of Eve and Sybil, have used Prince's book as a guide to observation and treatment -- perhaps ill-advisedly. For Prince was not diligent at “keeping his cultures pure,” as Janet recommended; he failed to notice that his words and actions might be suggesting the course of his patient's behavior and shaping her memories. But he understood the main point:

The dissociated and multiple personalities are not novel and freak phenomena, but are only exaggerations of the normal and due to exaggerations of normal processes, and it is for this reason that they are of interest and importance. For, being exaggerations, they accentuate and bring out into high relief certain tendencies and functional mechanisms which belong to normal conditions and they differentiate mental processes, one from another, which normally are not so easily recognized (Prince, 1914/21: 562).

          Complex theory is founded upon this natural dissociability of the human psyche, whereby the parts may act like alternate personalities, seemingly complete in themselves and frequently unaware of other “subpersonalities” inhabiting the same skin. Jung's idea of a human psyche comprised of a number of “complexes” closely resembles the dissociation school's “alternating personalities,” but without the amnesia for one another that the warring identities of multiple-personality patients display. People with multiple-personality are just like the rest of us, except that there is little or no connection between their complexes -- little or no recollection of what was happening minutes or hours ago when another part-personality was in charge. But even with us, each complex remembers better and more vividly the episodes comprising its part in our autobiography than it does the life stories of other complexes.

          Philosopher, Frédéric Paulhan, wrote a very influential phenomenology of the dissociable psyche in 1889, L'Activité mentale et les elements de l'esprit, that was read and cited by Janet, Alfred Binet, and Jung. It introduces three laws to describe the characteristics of dissociation:

1. The Law of Systematic Association: each image and memory tends to associate with others “which are able to be harmonized with itself,” work toward “compatible goals” and “comprise a system” (Paulhan, 1989: 88).
   
   
2. The Law of Inhibition: every such psychic element tends to interfere with and deny “the phenomena which it cannot assimilate in the interests of a common goal” (Ibid., 221).
   
   
3. The Law of Contrast: contrasting and opposed psychic states tend to alternate with one another and may sometimes function concurrently (Ibid., 315f).

          In his Principles of Psychology (1890), William James discusses such “Mutations of the Self” (240-59) and the laws of association (360-95). One of his more interesting examples concerns “co-conscious” [1] part-personalities in a congressman from the state of Connecticut in the late 1850's, Sidney Dean. Dean had the recurring experience of watching in amazement and some horror, as his own hand wrote out a philosophical treatise that challenged his own long-held beliefs:

When the work is in progress I am in the normal condition and simply two minds, intelligences, persons, are practically engaged. The writing is in my own hand but the dictation not of my own mind and will, but of another, upon subjects of which I can have no knowledge and hardly a theory; and I, myself, consciously criticize the thought, fact, mode of expressing it, etc., while the hand is recording. . . . There is in progress now, at uncertain times, not subject to my will, a series of twenty-four chapters upon the scientific features of life, mortality, spirituality, etc. . . . These were preceded by twenty-four chapters relating generally to life beyond material death, its characteristics, etc. . . . From my standpoint of life -- which has been that of biblical orthodoxy -- the philosophy is new, seems reasonable, and is logically put. I confess to an inability to successfully controvert it to my own satisfaction (James, 1890: 235).

          The opposition between Congressman Dean's conscious philosophy of life and that of his alternate personality is more conscious and full of detail than that found in most “somnambulists” of a century and more ago. More typically, the patient was a young woman, timid, pious and poorly adapted to her social environment, who one day turned up pregnant and had no idea how such a thing could have happened. Subsequently hypnosis uncovered the simultaneous existence of another personality, more bold, less respectful of conventions, more adept in social encounters, and sexually independent. Such more typical examples of dédoublement did not think their way through a separate philosophy of life; they simply lived it, acted it out. What their alternate personalities share with Dean's is the fact that they are “compensating” for the narrowness and inadequacy of the “first” personality. Again, psychic dynamics appears to arise from a tension between a waking attitude that seems to dominate all decision-making and an unconscious counter position (or several) whose aim is to restore (or discover for the first time) organismic balance in the psyche, the phenomenon that has induced Jung to speak of a “self.”

          The very possibility of a psyche comprised of alternating part-personalities, prompts a second look at Edelman's dynamic core -- the proto-ego that supplies us with the words we need to express our thoughts. For the instinctual, impulsive and less effete subpersonality of Prince's Miss Beauchamp and Janet's Lucie must have its own dynamic core, one that has separate memories, places its values in different areas of life, and strives for different goals than those of the first personality.

          Edelman, himself, is open to this possibility. In his most recent book, Wider Than the Sky (2004: 142ff), he speaks briefly of “alternations of the core and its interactions with non-conscious substrates.” To “somnambulistic” phenomena like hysteria, hypnotic trance and multiple-personality, he adds severing the corpus callosum (disconnecting the brain's two hemispheres) and such neuropsychological phenomena as “blindsight, prosopagnosia, hemineglect, and anosognosia.” [2] In all these cases, one part of the brain can be shown to act as though it “knows” what remains unknown to the conscious personality.

          Edelman speculates that “the core can split into a small number of separate cores, or even be remodeled constructively.” The “remodeling” might occur by redistributing and reallocating reentrant circuits. Essentially, this seems to mean merely that different “functional clusters” may occupy positions of greater dominance or have more influence as the dynamic core is reconfigured to support each of the several part-personalities or complexes.

          Damasio, too, is aware that these phenomena challenge to some extent his notion of core consciousness. Generally he seems defensive about them, reminding us that multiple-personality is “not considered normal” (1999: 142) or suggesting “that their proto-selves and core consciousness may be anomalous” (Ibid., 216). In a lengthy endnote, however, he treats the issue more seriously:

It is possible that instead of having one single set of rallying points for the generation of identity and personality, that is, one set of interconnected convergence zones/dispositions for one single identity and personality connected with one single organism, such individuals manage to create, because of varied circumstances of their past history, more than one master control site. I suspect that the multiple master control sites are located in the temporal and frontal cortices and that the switch from one master control to another enables the identity/personality switch to occur. [3] The switch would involve thalamic coordination. . . . In such patients, to a certain extent, it is reasonable to talk about more than one “autobiographical memory,” and more than one construction of identity and response manner, connected to different life histories and anticipated futures (Ibid., 354f).

          In reading this, I was disappointed that he did not mention his central hypothesis, that of the somatic marker. For there is no doubt that each part-personality has its own anxieties, its own skills, and its own relation to the body. Sometimes the patients described by Prince and Janet had different allergies when they were in one subpersonality rather than another. If there is an emotion-based somatic jolt that organizes the consciousness of a healthy ego and “binds” its sensory processing into a single scene, each complex must have its own somatic marker. For although each alternate personality knows only a part of the autobiography of the afflicted individual, each lives in an organized scene that is anchored in an experience of its own body. That somatic marker also grounds a relatively coherent partial history and a version of the individual's future. On the other hand, it is noteworthy that when pushed to speculate about the “switch,” Damasio points to “thalamic coordination.” In what follows, we will see that the thalamus is central to the formation, perpetuation, and resolution of complexes.

Jung's Complex Theory

          Around the time Jung changed the name of his psychological “school” to Complex Psychology, he addressed two rather different audiences with an overview of his mature thoughts on what he had learned thirty years earlier conducting Word Association tests at the Burghölzli. As the inaugural lecture (1934) for the chair he had endowed at Zurich's Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), he presented “A Review of the Complex Theory” (CW 8: ¶194-219). The next year, he devoted the third of his five-lecture series at the Tavistock Clinic in London to a summary of the same theory, illustrated by the dreams of a self-made man, an overambitious school headmaster who was determined to become a famous professor. His dreams revealed strong unconscious opposition to his conscious plans; and when he ignored them, he suffered a severe psychological crisis (CW 18: ¶145-227).

          When he speaks of a “complex,” Jung always means to describe a relatively independent and autonomous part of the unconscious psyche -- one of “an indefinite, because unknown, number of . . . fragment personalities” -- that “have a tendency to move by themselves, to live their own life apart from our intentions” (CW 18: ¶151). In the same lecture, he goes on to enumerate the following characteristics of a complex: (1) it has a sort of body with its own physiology so that it can upset the stomach, breathing, heart; (2) it has its own will power and intentions so that it can disturb a train of thought or a course of action just as another human being can do; (3) it is in principle no different from the ego which is itself a complex; (4) it becomes visible and audible in hallucinations; and (6) it completely victimizes the personality in insanity.

          In “A Review of the Complex Theory,” Jung thanks Pierre Janet and Morton Prince for having discovered the extreme dissociability of the human psyche (CW 8: ¶202). In doing so, he does not mean to imply that everything our complexes do is a symptom of disorder. Thus, when he says, “Complexes are not entirely morbid by nature but are characteristic expressions of the psyche” (Ibid., ¶209), he presumably acknowledges that, by the Law of Association, repetition and habit-formation, certain helpful behaviors become automatic and “second nature” to us. For instance, bicycle riding involves a sensory-motor program that is originally learned with effort -- even painful trial and error -- but soon becomes a skill we perform easily without having to give it special attention. As a more mental example of a complex, the multiplication tables are an association program (“seven times eight is fifty-six”) whose automatic functioning we depend upon for our ability rapidly and almost effortlessly to solve our daily mathematical tasks. And if learning the multiplication tables was associated in our youthful experience with “traumatic” memories involving failure, browbeating parents and scornful teachers, everyday mathematical tasks may energize a debilitating complex. But neurotic or useful, each complex is organized to carry out mundane chores quickly and smoothly. In principle, this would leave our conscious attention free for more novel and unfamiliar challenges. Our benign complexes do exactly that, but the neurotic ones interfere with conscious functioning.

          These latter are the part-personalities Jung's theory is interested in. They disrupt our individuation process with biased and inaccurate interpretations of events in the world outside and with distorted images of ourselves. Such “feeling-toned” complexes “originate in trauma and moral conflict”; their roots extend deep “into [our] biology” and “reveal their character as splinter psyches” (Ibid., ¶203f). Thus, in the Word Association test, when Jung pronounced an everyday word like bed, the victim of insomnia, rape, or sexual impotence would react emotionally, stumble, and experience a delay in completing her task of voicing the first word that came to mind. A “disturbance” had occurred, a failure to react smoothly and without effort. A common, ordinary word had been “assimilated” to the intentions and worldview of a single-minded complex, “an insuperable tendency in the psyche” (Ibid., ¶195f). Furthermore, a complex-reaction like this is not unique to the test situation, “but also happens in every discussion between two people” when a word is spoken or an image evoked that “constellates” a complex in one of the speakers. Immediately, the conversation “loses its objective character and real purpose”; it gets side-tracked into the same old repetitive nonsense every time (Ibid., ¶199).

          Jung speaks of a complex becoming “constellated” when “an outward situation releases . . . an automatic process which happens involuntarily” (Ibid., 198). The scene before us arouses an emotional response, and the somatic marker of a part-personality jolts us into an alternate identity. For a lustful mood, the word bed arouses sexual imagery; for a state of fatigue brought on by nights of insomnia, bed conjures images of frustration and a powerful longing for rest. A word, object, or situation evokes (“constellates”) a set of associations and memories charged with a familiar and unresolved emotion, a picture of a painful, fearful or ecstatic condition. “A `feeling-toned complex' . . . is the image of a certain situation which is strongly accentuated emotionally and is, moreover, incompatible with the habitual attitude of consciousness. This image has a powerful inner coherence, it has its own wholeness and, in addition, a relatively high degree of autonomy” (Ibid., 201).

[W]hatever has an intense feeling-tone is difficult to handle because such contents are somehow associated with physiological reactions, with the processes of the heart, the tonus of the blood vessels, the condition of the intestines, the breathing, and the innervation of the skin. Whenever there is a high tonus it is just as if that particular complex had a body of its own, as if it were localized in my body to a certain extent; and that makes it unwieldy, because something that irritates my body cannot easily be pushed away because it has its roots in my body and begins to pull at my nerves. Something that has little tonus and little emotional value can be easily brushed aside because it has no roots. (CW 18: ¶148).

          This description of the biological roots of a complex strongly suggests the workings of something like a dynamic core that harnesses images of the outer-worldly situation, one's own subjective, bodily condition, and emotionally charged memories. Jung often said: “Everyone knows nowadays that people `have complexes.' What is not so well known . . . is that complexes can have us ” (CW 8: ¶200). He meant that the “energy” of a feeling-toned complex, the way it can mobilize psyche and body, is often much greater that that of the ego-complex with its conscious intentions. The ego simply becomes “assimilated” to the intentions of the complex, usually without realizing it has lost its way (Ibid., ¶207). Such powerful disruptions of our identity and intentions from an indefinite number of automatic sources within us, are evidently the psychological foundation for “demonology,” and the reason we sometimes ask ourselves with chagrin after such an episode, “What the devil has gotten into me?” (Ibid., ¶217).

Emotions and feelings. The expression feeling-toned complex is somewhat unfortunate in that it introduces a confusion in Jung's usual terminology. Some fifteen years after settling on the expression Gefühl-betonter Komplex to designate the emotional nature of a complex, while writing out his ideas on typology, Jung hit upon the necessity for distinguishing between “feeling” (Gefühl) and “emotion” (Affekt). In his writings from 1920 onward, he insists that -- unlike emotions -- feelings are “rational”; they assess of the value of an object or situation. Does it make me feel happy or sad, relaxed or anxious? Am I more or less happy and relaxed than I was yesterday? The fact that we can make such conscious comparisons with our “feeling function” is the reason Jung insists it is “rational.” Emotions, however, get down into the body and disturb our physiology; they interfere with rationality and reliable function. Emotion is not a “psychological function,” a way of relating to the world; it is a condition or state of the whole organism, rooted in the body and restricting psychic flexibility (CW 6: ¶723-29, 681). Clearly, therefore, complexes are emotionally toned. In fact, it might be most accurate to describe complexes as emotion-driven.

          It is perhaps not surprising that it took Jung fifteen years to appreciate the sharp contrast between feeling and emotion, since Pierre Janet insisted on pretty much the same distinction and was similarly inconsistent. For Janet, émotion described a “shock” to one's conscious integrity that lowered the “mental level” of one's conscious functioning:

In a state of emotion, we see the disappearance of the mental synthesis, the attention, the will, the acquisition of new memories, and at the same time we see the diminution or disappearance of all reality functions, the feeling of reality and the ability to take pleasure in it, or to have confidence or certitude. In their place we see [neurotic symptoms] (Janet, 1903i: 523).

In contrast to émotion, Janet used the expression sentiment to refer to our ability to make value judgments, what Jung would call feelings. Janet's German-speaking disciple, Leonhard Schwartz, in what is the only textbook of Janet's psychology (1951), translates sentiment as Gefühl (feeling). Sentiment, therefore, appears to be a relatively conscious recognition of the value of an object or situation -- not a shock to our mental synthesis, but a condition of relatedness. Nevertheless sentiment is more regularly used to name disordered neurotic feelings that are symptoms of the loss of ego-function, in that they overwhelm the personality. Under “sentiment ” in the index to one of Janet's volumes, for instance, there are about a hundred entries, beginning: “the feeling of discontent, of imperfection, of anorectic euphoria, of shame, of sacrilege,” etc. (1903i: 754). Such feelings are excessive and inaccurate views of reality that are at least neurotic if not fully psychotic. [4] Janet's use of the term sentiment, therefore, appears to describe the “feeling-tones” that characterize Jung's complexes. The fact that Janet made a point of praising Jung's Word Association papers for their clinical value (Janet, 1919: 604f) seems to confirm that the two psychologists were describing similar phenomena.

          In any event it is clear when a “feeling-tone” takes over, we are emotionally affected, and our capacities for reality testing and discrimination decline, along with the stability of our attention and the resolution of our will. Our “level of consciousness” (niveau mental) drops, and we can no longer criticize the plausibility and relevance of the scene that opens before our eyes. As in a dream, we have lost the capacity for critical reflection and slipped into “immediate belief,” the inability to doubt what we think we see.

          This is the essential trait of a complex having taken over the ego. Some event in the outer world constellates -- brings together into a familiar shape -- salient elements of the scene before me and retrieves, by the Law of Association, memories of similar scenes from the past. And these memories are charged with a familiar emotion strong enough to drive out reason. When a complex takes over, I fall into a sort of trance, where I cannot accurately present to myself the circumstances that challenge me. Instead I am transported to another scene, nearly a dreamscape whose apparent reality I am temporarily unable to doubt, though I may believe myself to be functioning more or less normally (the Law of Contrast). The emotional atmosphere of the complex blinds me to everything that does not conform to my altered perspective (the Law of Inhibition). “Emotion is a disorder that seems to arise at the moment a situation is perceived” (Janet, 1924: 155).

          Modern investigators like LeDoux, Damasio and Siegel agree with the distinction between emotion and feeling, but they reverse the mechanism. Jung believed that a feeling comes first and gives us an opportunity to make a conscious assessment of a situation, and that it becomes an emotion if it lingers long enough and is powerful enough to generate physiological effects and “get into the body.” Better instruments and techniques of investigation than those available in Jung's day have shown that emotion is generated first as part of the overt bodily response in brain, autonomic nervous system, and the like. [5] Secondarily, when we become conscious of the changes that have already begun in our body, such consciousness of our emotional state is called a “feeling” (LeDoux, 2002: 106). Damasio agrees, saying that feeling occurs only after the brain brings together in a “body loop” our sense of selfhood with the object that is bringing about changes in our proto-self. Feeling is the conscious registration of those changes (Damasio, 1999: 280). Elsewhere he says that emotion is public and “plays out” in “the theater of the body” where our associates may recognize its effects before we do. Meanwhile feeling is private, and “plays out” in “the theater of the mind” (2003: 28). “Feelings . . . offer us the cognition of our visceral and musculoskeletal state as it has been affected by pre-organized mechanisms [primary emotions] and by the cognitive structures we develop under their influence. Feelings let us mind the body . . .” (Damasio, 1994: 159).

Ego and complex. Jung has left us with a small conundrum. Part-personalities are “in principle no different” from the ego, which is itself a complex (CW 18: ¶149). The ego-complex, to make things more complicated, may be “assimilated by” or “merged with” a feeling-toned complex. When this happens, normal ego-function is lost, the level of mental functioning drops, and we become automatons, unable to critically assess the presumed reality that faces us; we cannot escape compulsively repeating ourselves. What in the end is an ego, and how does it manage to maintain a high level of functioning in between episodes of merging?

          When Damasio tells us a somatic marker jolts the ego into existence at the same moment an outer worldly scene is “bound” into a unity in our brain and psyche, is it not the emotional significance of the scene that generates that “binding,” and its reception by my embodied me? But this is precisely what happens when a complex is “constellated”: a scene is bound together by an emotional response; a somatic marker locks me into a world of compulsive repetition. Somehow “true egohood,” a high mental level of functioning, is lost when a part-personality takes over.

          The complex that comprises the ego is the aggregation of all the little things I am aware of in the moment. When I move from watching a baseball game on television to writing an early draft of this book, my ego complex is profoundly transformed. Formerly I was worried about the visiting “closer's” fastball and whether it would “shut down” the home-town bats I had been hoping would generate a ninth-inning come back. Now I am wondering where exactly it is that Jung talked about complexes “merging” with the ego. In this instance, it is surely not a feeling-toned complex that has occupied my conscious field, but the take-over must be similar in the two cases. The ego's former concerns and worldview are forgotten also when the distorted dreamscape of a complex fills the entire field of my awareness. In either case, my “working memory” has forgotten what it was thinking about just moments before.

          For the ego to have “merged” with a feeling-toned complex seems to mean that the complex itself becomes the ego for a while. Proper egohood -- the capacity to think critically about my circumstances, to assess values accurately, to make adequate decisions, and to muster sufficient energy to carry them out -- has been lost. I no longer learn from past mistakes or envision a realistic future.

          Analytic psychotherapy aims at restoring proper ego-function, which means at least assisting my escape from anxious compulsions and distorted versions of my life-situation. To retrieve genuine ego-function means at least that I must start appraising my circumstances with accuracy. Therapy must free me from the irresistible pull of a disordered feeling reaction by careful examination and judicious assessment. It is my emotions that require investigation, analysis, and a rearrangement of priorities. To have an ego is to be able to identify such distortions, to find a new and more accurate approach to my life-situation, and finally to get back to the running dialogue of individuation.

Summary, the phenomenology of complexes. A complex is an organized, automatic response driven by a specific emotional state. It acts like an independent personality that shares my body and mind with me, even though its attitude toward the world and myself is largely alien to the “real me.” When “constellated,” it takes over my ego and reduces my critical reflective capabilities so that I am limited to a stereotyped and constantly repeated perspective governed by old memories that have a quasi traumatic character. They may be “bad” memories, like never being “good enough” to deserve my mother's love, or “good” memories, like the intoxication I crave in drunkenness or orgasm. But in either case, they drastically limit me.

          The organizing principle of a complex is its disordered feeling tone; and as soon as the body assumes the physiological state associated with that feeling tone, my consciousness of the world outside and of the me within is narrowed (Janet's rétrécissement du champ de conscience). In this limited condition, I see and respond exclusively to aspects of the world that are salient to the “personality” of the complex. As long as a complex operates unchallenged, each episode of its dominance adds new memories that stabilize its powers and broaden its scope. Any evidence to the contrary escapes notice.

          When Jung says that a complex can lead to psychosis, he means that with the lowering of the level of consciousness (abaissement du niveau mental), “the fascination of [the] unconscious contents [comprising the complex] gradually grows stronger and conscious control vanishes in proportion until finally the patient sinks into the unconscious altogether and becomes completely victimized by it” (CW 18: ¶154). He demonstrated the process of psychotic disintegration in his analysis of the seriously demented old dressmaker, Babette St., at the Burghölzli in 1907 (The Psychology of Dementia Praecox; CW 3: ¶198-316). The endlessly repeated nonsense of her schizophrenic “word salad” (“I am the Queen of Orphans and proprietress of Burghölzli Asylum; Naples and I must supply the whole world with macaroni”; ¶201) expressed nothing but the contents of her complex. “She is completely in the sway of the complex, she speaks, acts, and dreams nothing but what the complex suggests to her” (¶208). Schizophrenia represents the ultimate fate of one who cannot rise above the emotional compulsion of the complex. In Janet's language, the situation is more severe that that of an “immediate belief” that excludes critical thinking. Intelligence is reduced to its most “elementary” form (Haule, 1983: 257).

          Long before the appearance of psychosis, however -- and schizophrenia is a relatively rare result of our falling victim to a complex -- psychic process is significantly impaired. For if individuation is the free and flexible running of a pair of dialogues -- one with the public world and the other with the self within -- , it is clear that the constellation of a complex distorts that process. Neither the outer situation nor my own identity can be accurately appreciated. A feeling of hopeless impotence, for instance, leaves me unable to imagine myself competent enough to respond to the challenges that life throws at me, and also incapable of recognizing or remembering any instances in which I might have risen to a challenge and handled myself well. A complex locks me into a stereotyped condition, not unlike those rigid and childish alternate personalities described a century ago by Janet and Prince.

          We have already considered Jung's first line of approach [6] for dealing with a complex that brings the individuation process to a halt. He urges us to take the unconscious obstacle seriously as a personality with a perspective of its own that is different from ours. Hence, the spotless man of honor whose temper tantrums frightened his family should: (1) stop merging with his moodiness; (2) pay attention to the emotions that afflict him without acting them out and without criticizing them, as he would listen to the complaints of a real person; (3) once patiently listened to, he must criticize these views from his alternate personality as he would those of a reasonable and earnest colleague; and (4) allow this internal discussion to go on as long as it needs to (CW 7: ¶319-23). In brief, Jung describes a process of differentiating one's emotional reactions so as to break free of their compulsions.

          The first step, to stop merging with his moodiness, is the crucial one; for nothing will help until we realize that we are not ourselves but have been taken over by a complex. It is humiliating to recognize such neurotic behavior in ourselves, and we will defend ourselves against it. Thus, one of the most important functions of Jungian analytic therapy is to identify such a complex, reveal its stereotyped and inadequate nature, and aid the analysand's attempts to catch himself in the act of merging with its compelling emotion. The other three steps amount to an exploration of the Amfortas wound that keeps this aspect of our lives unexamined and its feeling values unclear and undifferentiated. In the end, we escape from habitually acting out the emotional rigidity of a complex by acquainting ourselves with its unexamined value system.

Complexes and the Neural Substrate

          Daniel J. Siegel of the UCLA School of Medicine describes what he calls a “state of mind” in terms that strongly resemble the characteristics of a complex. It is a pattern of activated brain systems (apparently something like a dynamic core) that are responsible for perceptual bias, a regulating emotional tone, interpretive models, and behavioral patterns. It coordinates brain activity in the moment and at the same time strengthens its own pattern of neural excitation so that it becomes more likely to be activated in the future (Siegel, 1999: 211). The brain “wires itself” outside of our awareness, and in doing so creates a condition of “self-fulfilling prophecy.” For example, if the amygdala signals “Danger!” the sensory innervations occurring at that moment will appear to the conscious mind as threatening. In this way, mental representations “become associated in memory with the feeling of danger” (Ibid., 133). Such a recurringly stable structure, when activated, filters everything we perceive in accordance with its feeling tone -- Paulhan's Law of Association (Ibid., 43). But on account of its traumatic nature, it remains outside our “narrative memory,” the ego's sense of itself -- Law of Inhibition -- and from this outside position is able to “intrude upon [one's] internal experiences and interpersonal relationships” (Ibid., 55) ) -- Law of Contrasts.

          Not unlike Jung, Siegel illustrates his position by describing a man whose temper tantrums frightened his wife and daughter. The man was prone to feel that he was “going out of his mind” when he felt rejected by either of them. He would respond by squeezing his daughter's arm or screaming at her in rage. He was too ashamed of his loss of control to be able to discuss his outbursts or to repair his relationship with his daughter. Siegel traced the origin of this complex behavior back to the man's relationship with his alcoholic father, who was prone to outbursts of rage.

The perception of his daughter's irritation with him induced a shift in his mental state. In memory terms, his present perception of her irritation was represented in his mind as a perceptual representation, or engram. This engram became linked with other representations connected with the perception of an irritated face (Ibid., 115).

          It is interesting that Siegel chooses the expression engram, for this is one of the terms Jung claimed as a precursor of his notion of an archetype. The term originated with Richard Semon in Germany in 1904 to designate a memory trace formed by changes in neural tissue, and therefore prone to be revived under the right conditions. The great early theorist of evolutionary biology, Ernst Haekel, praised Semon's idea of an engram as the “most important advance that evolution has made since Darwin”; and Jung's chief at the Burghölzli, Eugen Bleuler, also championed the term (Shamdasani, 2003: 189f). Since an engram is, by definition, a memory event learned by an individual in the course of her life, it is hardly a good model for describing inheritance according to natural selection. But the fact that an evolutionary biologist in 1904 should not notice this discrepancy probably suggests the reason Jung did not. Although not a good description of an in-born archetype, engram excellently describes a complex, for Jung characterizes complexes as compelling images derived from experience that imprint themselves by their emotional charge and frequent repetition. Here is further indication that a century ago Jung's theories were largely harmonious with a biology that was poorly understood then and remains consilient with biological facts that are better understood now.

          Joseph LeDoux also describes a mechanism that resembles the constellation of a complex. He says, “in order for a memory to appear in consciousness, the associative network has to reach a certain level of activation, which occurs as a function of the number of components that are activated and the weight of each activated component” (Ibid., 212). If he had spoken of “emotional tone” instead of “weight,” it would have been clear that he was describing the phenomenon of a complex. Elsewhere, however, he describes what makes an experience memorable -- it is the release of adrenalin from the adrenal glands, and adrenalin is released when an emotional stimulation activates the brain's amygdala, which “turns on all sorts of bodily systems, including the autonomic nervous system” (Ibid., 206ff). Thus again, it is an emotional charge, the psychic equivalent of the body having been placed in a characteristic state of arousal. This is what activates a network of associations, makes them memorable, and renders their image of the world and what we should do about it nearly irresistible.

The Archetypal Nature of Emotion

          Animals most likely to survive and pass their genes on to future generations are those whose in-built structures (anatomy, nervous system, etc.) are well-adapted to typical circumstances. Such phylogenetic structures are most beneficial when the right behavioral patterns can be generated without internal debate, indeed without reflective consciousness, making them automatic, swift, unchanging and largely successful. By this means food is efficiently found, dangers avoided, sexual opportunities acted upon. To accomplish such everyday feats, an animal needs a reliable system for evaluating every critical situation that is typical for its species. “Emotions” are what we call these in-born patterns of immediate evaluation. Their corresponding states of bodily arousal and the action patterns they generate “express” the emotion. “Under normal conditions,” Llinás says, “fixed action patters are only liberated into action by the generated emotional states that precede them” (2002: 227).

          Damasio has articulated this issue very clearly. He speaks of the constellating event as an encounter with an “emotionally competent stimulus” (ECS). This is what we have been calling the emotionally salient object or situation that some part-personality within us is always on the lookout to identify and react to. It is the constellating object of circumstance. Damasio's ECS is detected unconsciously and automatically, before we can direct our attention to it (Damasio, 2003: 60). Unconscious recognition of the ECS initiates an inherited (archetypal) program that activates specific neural maps of the body; and these contribute to the release of neurochemicals that change the state of the body, arousing it physiologically, focusing its attention, preparing it to survive a crisis (Ibid., 53).

In a typical emotion, then, certain regions of the brain, which are part of a largely preset neural system related to emotions, send commands to other regions of the brain and to most everywhere in the body proper. The commands are sent via two routes. One route is the bloodstream, where the commands are sent in the form of chemical molecules . . . The other route consists of neuron pathways and the commands along this route take the form of electrochemical signals which act on other neurons or on muscle fibers or on organs (such as the adrenal gland) which in turn can release chemicals of their own into the bloodstream.

The result of these coordinated chemical and neural commands is a global change in the state of the organism (Damasio, 1999: 67).

          Along with the amygdala, that “turns on all sorts of bodily systems, including the autonomic nervous system,” the hypothalamus plays a crucial role in triggering archetypal emotions. They belong with some half dozen other brain structures, to what is called the limbic system, the brain's emotional center. The hypothalamus sits at the base of the forebrain where it serves as an interface between forebrain and more primitive lower brain areas (LeDoux, 1996: 82). It samples the body's internal environment (temperature, sugar and salt levels in the bloodstream, etc) and orchestrates internal preparations for such things as sex, hunger, thirst and sleep (Zeman, 2002: 60f). Llinás calls the hypothalamus the “master switch” to turn on everything that is required to set a fixed action pattern into operation. This includes motor, cognitive and emotional elements (Llinás, 2002: 162). The hypothalamus accomplishes these things primarily by releasing into the bloodstream a variety of neuromodulators that alter “the internal milieu, the function of the viscera, and the function of the central nervous system itself” (Damasio, 2003: 62). This is the operation of the “hairnet” of neural fibers that “leak neuromodulators like an old garden hose,” what Edelman calls the brain's value system. Emotional changes are initiated by a host of chemical agents, including norepinephrine (noradrenalin), serotonin, acetylcholine, dopamine, histamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin (Ibid.; Edelman & Tononi, 2000: 89).

          These molecules have a variety of different effects, and act upon a variety of different targets. The mechanisms by which such archetypal patterns are produced are not well understood, but it does seem likely that each emotion involves a different set of circuits, a different combination of neurotransmitters, and a different set of organs (LeDoux, 1996: 106). In this way, each emotional pattern is governed by its own “discrete system” (Damasio, 1999: 62). Each emotional unit has its own set of “natural triggers,” such as certain aspects of a predator's appearance, sound, and smell, as well as a set of “learned triggers” associated with the animal's history, such as locations where it escaped death or found a mate (LeDoux, 1996: 127). Emotional experience, therefore, involves associations between these inherited patterns of bodily excitation and the animal's memory of the occasions on which they were triggered. Strengthening such links, as we learned in the previous chapter, appears to be one of the main functions of dreaming. Clearly it is necessary for every animal's survival to have both an emotional armamentarium and a mechanism for “teaching” those in-born patterns how to react to a lived environment. Alternating experiences of strengthening the associations and learning to discriminate among associated elements make possible a growing sophistication in the animal's awareness of its states of emotional arousal, the nuances we detect in them, and the meanings they carry (Nathanson, 1992: 231).

          Donald L. Nathanson, Professor at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia and disciple of seminal affect theorist, Silvan S. Tomkins, has assembled a set of photographs of infant and adult human facial expressions and bodily postures illustrating the “social displays” that belong, universally, to the human organism and that are generated by value-assigning patterns in the neural substrate (Nathanson, 1992). Nothing makes it more evident that inherited brain structures lie behind universally recognizable behavioral patterns (archetypes) than the cross-cultural similarity of emotional expressions in the human face. Under the influence of an emotional change of state, we cannot resist “making” such faces. We may be able to play them up to make stage dramas comprehensible or to move one another to pity or admiration. On the other hand, we can try to conceal them behind a “poker face” to hide our weaknesses or our intentions and to resist manipulation. Furthermore, as we move from one region of the world to another, the expressions on people's faces are as much the same as their bearers' biochemistry, but the degree to which facial expressions are exaggerated or hidden is very much culturally determined. Emotional displays in face and body are as archetypal as language insofar as they are universally human, but their expression is influenced by cultural expectations.

          In emphasizing the priority of bodily state over conscious feeling, Nathanson goes so far as to claim that, “It is awareness of its own facial display that tells the infant what affect has been triggered” (Ibid., 61). Surely he does not mean to say that the infant has to see its own reflection in a mirror to know how it feels. Rather he means to tell us that the process of learning to interpret the meaning of our typical bodily states occurs within a context of interpersonal communication. He appears to agree with the stance Greenspan and Shanker articulate in their book, The First Idea (2004), that we discussed in Chapter 4, regarding the gradual socialization process by which emotional/gestural dialogues between mother and infant structure the little one's brain and lead him down a primate path toward language. Nathanson is less interested in language. His interest is in the process by which we learn how to feel. And he agrees with Greenspan and Shanker that an infant's emotional experience begins with global, undifferentiated states of overwhelming affect that are gradually tamed and interpreted through interactions with parents and other care-givers. In this way, too, whatever cultural differences there may be in social displays of emotion, they are learned together with the autobiographical process of consciously sorting out those several affective states (LeDoux, 1996: 119).

          Primatologist Frans de Waal implicitly extends the argument for the archetypal nature of emotions by demonstrating that emotional displays are not only universal within a species, but often also across species. His favorite example compares the behavior of Richard Nixon in the privacy of the White House on the night before he resigned the presidency with that of alpha chimpanzee, Luit, on the day he was deposed from his position of dominance at the Netherlands' Arnhem Zoo. For Nixon's reaction, de Waal cites Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book, The Final Days: “Between sobs, Nixon was plaintive. . . . How had a simple burglary done all this? . . . [He] got down on his knees . . . leaned over and struck his fists on the carpet, crying aloud, “What did I do? What has happened?'” (de Waal, 1998: xiii; 2001: 304). The chimpanzee, Luit, was deposed by a coalition of two males, Nikkie and Yeroen, who declared their united intent by ostentatiously “mounting” one another before him:

Luit reacted by collapsing in a heap, screaming and rolling around in the grass, and beating the ground and his own head with his fists. His two opponents stood screaming in chorus with Luit for a short time, watching his tantrum, but then they walked away together, leaving an inconsolable leader for other members of the group to try to comfort (de Waal, 1998: 126).

          Such parallels between primate species ought to build a foundation for determining which emotions are basic enough to qualify as primary archetypes, matters of pure inheritance. To my knowledge, we have at this time little more than anecdotal evidence for such definable primate patterns. But this has not stopped researchers from attempting to draw up a list of the “basic” or “primary” emotions. While most of these lists address the human condition, only, it is likely that most such in-born archetypal patterns have cognate forms in our primate relatives. Probably most would be shared by all mammals; and, given the primitivity of emotional expression patterns, many may also be shared by reptiles. The earliest such list was made by Charles Darwin (1872) in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. Several of the authors frequently cited in the present volume have also ventured a list. On the basis of nine such sources, [7] I find strong agreement on the following six universal patterns of emotion: joy, anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and surprise. Surprise was specified by only five of the nine while all, or all-but-one, of the authors agreed on each of the other five.

          If it were possible to specify the electrochemical dynamics behind each of these six archetypal emotions, it would exceed the limits of this chapter to try to describe them all. In what follows, we shall consider LeDoux's research investigating the dynamics of fear. He has described the universal pattern of fear as it manifests in the neural substrate, and he has also pointed the way toward what we can do about our fear by way of taming it, differentiating it, and rendering it a conscious “feeling” that can be used for accurate orientation to the world outside and to the forces of the greater self within. He shows us how we can liberate ourselves to some degree from the debilitating effects of fear as a shock to the psyche so that we can use it as a tool in our individuation process.

Fear: An Archetypal Pattern in the Neural Substrate

          The amygdala is the most important brain structure for producing the subjective feeling of fear and all the bodily changes of state that make that feeling possible. LeDoux says the amygdala has handled fear responses in all animals since dinosaurs walked the earth, making us “emotional lizards” (1996: 174). Artificial electrical stimulation, alone, to the amygdala will generate a sense of foreboding danger; and an epileptic seizure (i.e., an organic “electrical storm” centered in the amygdala) will produce an overwhelming sense of fear (Ibid., 172f). The fear response, however, is evidently not solely about recognizing and retreating from danger; for when an animal's amygdalae are both damaged, it loses the ability “to muster the vehemence required for the initiation and completion of even the simplest of acts” (Llinás, 2002: 164). Thus, it appears that the fear response presumes a capacity in an animal unconsciously to choose among a variety of courses of action; and as though to make sure the animal knows how crucial for its survival these choices are, the amygdala generates a powerful state of arousal.

          There are two amygdalae, almond-shaped structures, [8] each located below one of the temporal lobes of the cortex and a center of the brain's emotion-generating “limbic system.” The amygdala plays a key role in conditioning an animal to its environment by generating bodily states that correspond to what we consciously recognize as hate, pain and fear. When both amygdalae have been removed, we are rendered incapable of fear and rage, and no longer have any urge to compete or to cooperate, or any sense of our place in the social order (Goleman, 1995: 15f). The amygdala generates affect at an automatic, preconscious level of functioning. The fight-or-flight reactions, governed by adrenalin and our autonomic nervous system, are activated so automatically by the amygdala that we are already in a state of bodily shock before we become conscious of the situation and its significance. We “react to danger rather than think about it” (LeDoux, 1996: 247).

          As is often the case with medical science, the function of a brain structure -- in this case the amygdala -- was learned by observing the effects occasioned by its removal. A woman known by the initials D.R., suffered from such a severe form of epilepsy that she had her amygdalae on both sides surgically damaged in an effort relieve her symptoms. The operation was successful as regards the epileptic symptoms, but D.R. lost her ability to recognize fear in the faces of other people and also had some difficulty identifying angry faces. She could recognize people's identity well enough and whether they were sad or happy, but she could not recognize emotions in the range of danger and threat. Thus the amygdala has at least two functions related to the fear response: it recognizes fear in others and mobilizes a set of bodily processes that place our body in a state of fear.

          A third, related, function of the amygdala has to do with fear-conditioning: learning what objects and situations demand a fear response. LeDoux reports on experiments with rats that have learned a fear response to an non-natural stimulus (a “conditioned stimulus”). An example of a conditioned stimulus would be a tone that is sounded prior to delivering a small shock to a rat's feet through the floor of its cage. After the tone has been paired with the shock a few times, the rat's fear response to the artificial stimulus will be indistinguishable from what it displays before a cat. A cat is a “natural trigger,” what Damasio calls an “emotionally competent stimulus” (ECS) that is in-born, while the artificial stimulus is a learned ECS and becomes associated with the in-born fear-producing processes only secondarily. In both cases the animal responds to the ECS as though the question of its survival is at stake. A rat's fear response involves “freezing” (complete immobility) along with changes in blood pressure and heart rate. At the same time, the autonomic nervous system is aroused, lowering the pain response, increasing the sensitivity of the reflexes, and elevating stress-hormone levels in the bloodstream (from the pituitary and adrenal glands) (LeDoux, 1996: 144). This pattern of activation is universally mammalian -- even reptilian. It has been the survival system of choice for about 150 million years; and the human species has not tampered with it, except perhaps to become more conscious of how it feels and how it may be tamed and integrated.

The wheel of fear. The amygdala is not alone in generating fear. LeDoux calls it “the hub in a wheel of fear.” It receives (a) information about what threatens through signals from the sensory maps of the cortex, (b) sensory information interpreted by the thalamus, (c) emotionally-toned memories that provide context from the hippocampus, and potentially, (d) extinction of the fear response from the medial prefrontal cortex. The medial PFC shuts down the fear response in rats when repeated soundings of the “conditioned stimulus” (the tone) are not followed by a shock (Ibid., 170). The first three structures in the “hub of fear” provide the amygdala with the value-laden life-situation that confronts it. The amygdala says, “Assume the fear-state!”; and the body's chemistry changes. Some processes are tuned down, others tuned up; a posture is struck, a facial expression assumed. Only the medial PFC fingers the knob that turns down the volume.

          This business of turning down the volume will be crucial when we discuss becoming conscious of our emotional state and learning to differentiate among the situations that have confronted us in the past in comparison with what we face in the present moment. But first, we need to know more about the other three structures in the wheel of fear.

          The thalamus sits well below the cortex, but its neurons are like cortical neurons in not having their axons sheathed in myelin to insulate their electrical signals; therefore it is “gray” in appearance like the “gray matter” of the cortex. The thalamus constitutes the sides and ceiling of the third ventricle. [9] We are already familiar with a ribbon of neuropil along each side of the hypothalamus (bottom of the third ventricle), for this forms the center of Panksepp's seeking system. The thalamus receives information about the state of the body from the spinal cord, brain stem and cerebellum, and it receives sensory information about the outer world directly from the sense organs and again from the sensory maps of the cortex. In addition, the thalamus shares reentrant circuits with the sensory cortex, so that information is processed, shared, and reprocessed. It is part of Edelman's thalamo-cortical meshwork, the analytic part of the brain that is involved in establishing meanings and relationships.

          The thalamus, therefore, is wired between three different structures: the body, the sensory cortex that is oriented to the outer world, and the amygdala. It brings together me, the world, and evaluation -- the three components necessary to establish my life-situation in the moment. Filled with Damasio's convergence zones, the thalamus can potentially answer the question, “What confronts me right now, and what should I do about it?” It presents the amygdala with value judgments, “We've been here before, and we better get out!” But it makes them thoughtlessly. As a convergence zone, it is informed only by similarities from the past and functions like a complex or an archetype. When constellated, it does the same thing every time. Because it is so much in the thrall of emotion, it is the more primitive partner in the thalamo-cortical dialogue.

          We should not overemphasize the importance of the thalamus in the wheel of fear, for LeDoux says the amygdala receives “low level inputs” from the sensory regions of the thalamus. In comparison, the sensory cortex provides “higher level” information. We need say nothing more about the sensory cortex, since we considered it at great length in the previous chapter. But, despite its importance, the sensory cortex does not dominate the amygdala's information system, since the hippocampus provides a still higher level of information that is “sensory independent” (LeDoux, 1996: 168). It plays a significant role in the amygdala's decisions.

          The hippocampus is a small seahorse-shaped [10] structure on the inner part of the temporal lobe of the cortex, found on both sides of the brain, that is essential for the acquisition of new, explicit or “declarative” memories. Because such memories can be “declared,” they are at least potentially conscious. Discovery of hippocampal function occurred when brain science stumbled onto another historical lesson. A twenty-seven year-old male patient, generally known only by the initials H.M., had both of his hippocampi surgically removed in an effort to reduce his disabling epileptic seizures. The operation proved successful as far as the epilepsy was concerned, but it left him unable to acquire new memories. What he had known before the operation was retained, but the ablations left his brain unable to create memories of new people, objects, situations and events. He became unable to recognize the post-operative therapists that he worked with every day.

          The hippocampus, itself, is not a memory bank but “more like the hub of a spider web” of neural connections, where it works like “a central processor in a computer,” as regards the making of new memories (Freeman, 2000: 101). The hippocampus' usefulness in the conscious work of assessing the feeling-value of a situation is, therefore, fairly evident; for only if we can compare present circumstances to past events in terms of their emotional significance can we make good judgments about how to conduct ourselves in the present.

          Research on birds and mammals -- including rats, rabbits, monkeys, and humans -- has demonstrated that “damage to the hippocampus interferes with conditioned fear responses.” This means that the things animals learn to associate with dangerous situations cannot be retained without a functioning hippocampus. The fact that both mammals and birds respond this way to hippocampal damage implies that reptiles must have similarly equipped brains; for they are relatives of the common ancestor of birds and mammals. This seems to be another indication that we are emotional dinosaurs (LeDoux, 1996: 171). Experiments have been done with rats that have learned to fear a tone that warns of a coming shock and then subsequently have had their hippocampi damaged. When placed back into the experimental cage, they continue to freeze in response to the sounding of the tone; but unlike intact rats, they do not freeze upon being placed in the experimental cage itself. They associate the tone, but not the cage, with the fear-causing shock. Normal rats would associate both with the shock (Ibid., 168). Furthermore, humans with hippocampal damage act a bit like Damasio's impulsive gamblers: they know and can discuss the relationship between the conditioned stimulus (the cage in the case of the rats) and the unconditioned stimulus (shock); but when placed back in the experimental context, they do not act as though they recognize the larger significance of their situation (Ibid., 173).

          Thus it appears that the function of the hippocampus is not merely to produce new memories, but also to appreciate the meaningfulness of emotional context and to be able to update contextual meanings on the basis of experience. It is not the individual elements that are important to the work of the hippocampus, but rather their composite significance. “The sights and sounds of a place are pooled together before reaching the hippocampus, and one job of this brain region is to create a representation of the context that contains not individual stimuli but relations between stimuli” (Ibid., 168). In short, the hippocampus' contribution to the amygdala is to provide background and context for the scene that confronts us at the moment.

          Thus, sitting at the center of the “wheel of fear,” the amygdala receives: (a) sensory analysis of the scene before us from the cortex, (b) background and context from the hippocampus and (c) an evaluation of the life situation from the convergence zones of the thalamus. When all of these things come together ominously for the amygdala, it sounds the alarm by initiating sequences of neural circuit activation and neurochemical distribution that prepare the body to face the worst.

Learning to Differentiate the Fear Response

          Pierre Janet's distinction between an “emotional shock” that lowers the level of mental functioning and a “feeling” that, accurately or not, evaluates a life-situation has also been made by Joseph LeDoux. He distinguishes a moderate emotional arousal during memory formation, which fosters the development of strong memories, from an excessive emotional arousal that results in memory impairment by inhibiting the hippocampus. It appears, therefore, that when amygdala activation is kept in the middle range, memory retrieval is facilitated because the emotional state generated on previous occasions is recreated, “at least in part” (LeDoux, 2002: 222f). Such amygdala participation becomes unnecessary later on when we have learned how to avoid or otherwise handle the specific danger that once threatened us. When our life-situation has been “tamed” in this sense, the amygdala is no longer necessary for survival because fear is no longer aroused (LeDoux, 1996: 251). Malcolm Gladwell gives us an example of such taming in the training procedures for police officers who need to be desensitized to the potentially debilitating emotional shock of facing criminals firing guns. The technique is to create realistic situations in which the officers are actually shot, but with plastic capsules rather than bullets. “By the fourth or fifth time you get shot in simulation, you're OK” (Gladwell, 2005: 238). Evidently the hair-trigger amygdala calms down when the hippocampus learns to contextualize a situation as being manageable.

          At the other extreme, it has been found that when conditions of severe stress persist for a long time, the dendrites of the neurons comprising the hippocampus begin to shrivel up. They essentially shut down their capacity to receive new information. In this way the “shock” of remaining under constant emotional stress actually results in a decline in our brain's capacity to contextualize such situations. The hippocampus' decline can even become irreversible and has been found to be associated with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Vietnam veterans (LeDoux, 1996: 242). Perhaps something of this sort occurred in the brain of Jung's patient, Babette St., who fell under the influence of a single complex and remained there so long that eventually even the coherence of her repeated phrases was lost and her dementia proceeded to the point of “word salad” nonsense. [11]

          In between the fully tamed situation, when the amygdala's participation is no longer necessary, and the damaging situation, when the amygdala is in overdrive, we find what LeDoux calls “emotional feelings.” Here are feelings in the sense of Jung's “feeling function,” accurate evaluative assessments of life-situations. “Emotional feelings result when we explain emotionally ambiguous bodily states to ourselves on the basis of cognitive interpretations . . . about what the external and internal causes of our bodily states might be” (Ibid., 47). Damasio's position is very much the same: a feeling is a conscious grasp of our emotional state; ideally it makes possible a “flexibility of response based on the particular history of [one's] interaction with the environment” (1994: 133). Furthermore, Damasio lists two sorts of benefits conscious feelings give us: (a) they permit “integration of large sets of information that can be brought to bear on a current situation” and (b) they “prompt the brain to process emotion-laden objects and situations saliently” (2003: 177). It seems to me that this is precisely the sort of thing Jung had in mind when he claimed that feeling is a “psychic function,” a tool for relating to the world and to ourselves.

How feelings are differentiated. When we apply such findings to the individuation process, we can say that an emotion-driven complex lowers the level of our mental functioning, setting our body into a state of emergency. In this condition, we lose our ability accurately to assess our life-situation. That is, we can no longer see that what confronts us right now is in some important ways different from similar situations we have faced in the past. We have very little power of discrimination or nuance. Individuation cannot proceed so long as we cannot accurately relate to the “two collectivities” (public world and collective unconscious). We require moderate emotional arousal in order to be engaged with our lives, attentive to what is happening, able to remember crucial facts, and the like. But we are bound to encounter emotional shock when the amygdala rings an alarm bell that implies we have been in a similar situation in the past and found it traumatizing. We immediately become too scared to think straight.

          Jung based his ideas about the nature of the psyche and the process of analytic therapy on the premise that complexes can be handled. At least slowly and gradually, we can become conscious of their automatic interference in our lives, regain our psychic integrity, and return to the path of individuation. We can depotentiate disorienting emotions and derive useful feelings from them. Such is Jung's phenomenological description for differentiating our feelings so as to free ourselves from autonomous complex-reactions and raise our mental level from that of “immediate belief” to that of “reflective judgment” and conscious choice.

          LeDoux has found a mechanism in the neural substrate to account for this differentiation as it applies to the emotion of fear. He studied the response to a warning tone (conditioned stimulus) in the brains of rats, first by selectively severing neural pathways until the effective ones were discovered, and then by the use of tracer chemicals that revealed the progress of a neural message in bright colors, when observed under a microscope.

          There are two pathways by which the thalamus communicates with the amygdala. The thalamus is the site where the complex-reaction originates in a convergence zone that remembers only similar events from the past and the emotion they inspired. By one route to the amygdala, the automatic complex-reaction proceeds unchallenged, and by the other it is subjected to criticism. Along the direct pathway, the thalamus says: “Here it is again, get ready!” LeDoux calls this the “low road” because it by-passes the cerebral cortex and never rises to the top of the brain. The low road is “down and dirty,” but fast and effective. It provides exactly the response an animal needs when a saber-tooth tiger steps out from behind a rock: “Don't think, just run!” The other pathway from the thalamus to the cortex is the “high road,” for it passes through the cortex and makes possible critical reflection and discrimination: “Yes, that is a saber-tooth tiger, but there's no need for panic; it's just a mother carrying her cub. If I stand still, she'll ignore me” (LeDoux, 1996: 155-70).

          The thalamus, we must recall, is central to what Edelman calls the thalamo-cortical meshwork, the primary analytic circuits of the brain. They make consciousness possible by way of their intensive reentrant circuits by which information is passed back and forth between thalamus and cortex, allowing for parallel and simultaneous reception of signals, analysis, reply and repetition. Discrepancies between the various forms of the message as it is passed back and forth alerts the brain to novel and notable information, which, in turn, makes consciousness possible. Through its reentrant conversations with the cortex, then, the thalamus derives new information for evaluating the original sensory input, e.g., the tone the rat hears, the saber-tooth our ancestor saw. In this way inputs from two sides to the amygdala are changed; both thalamus and cortex develop new messages. The assessment of our life-situation becomes nuanced, meaning is added. This is what differentiation provides. LeDoux puts the matter in everyday terms: “The Beatles and the Rolling Stones (or, if you like, Oasis and the Cranberries) will sound the same to the amygdala by way of the thalamic projections but quite different by way of the cortical projections” (1996: 162).

          There is more to say about the contributions of the cortex. To this point, we have spoken of the cortex in its role as sensory analyst communicating with the convergence zone of the thalamus. The sensory maps of the cortex, located in the posterior of the brain, are responsible for processing the objective features of our life-situation and what we choose to do about it. For the more active, intelligent engagement of the cortex in our life choices, we must look to the prefrontal cortex (PFC).

          As we learned in the previous chapter, the PFC inhibits primitive, stereotyped compulsions encoded in inherited pathways and in the emotional memory system. This is precisely what the thalamo-amygdala circuits are: the alarm and the generation of fight-or-flight reactions are the inherited pathways; the convergence zone in the thalamus is the emotional memory system. Unchecked, such low-road circuits keep us responding automatically with primitive, stereotyped compulsions. Delaying their automatic response leaves room for clear thinking, reflective judgment, and plans for the future; and this is the role of the PFC. The strongest evidence for this is the fact that loss of the PFC results in loss of restraint, the inability to inhibit aggression, and the failure to exercise judgment. Damasio describes the situation this way:

When circuits in posterior sensory cortices and in temporal and parietal regions process a situation that belongs to a given conceptual category, the prefrontal circuits that hold records pertinent to that category of events become active. Next comes activation of regions that trigger appropriate emotional signals, such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortices, courtesy of an acquired link between that category of event and past emotional-feeling responses. This arrangement allows us to connect categories of social knowledge -- whether acquired or refined through individual experience -- with the innate gene-given apparatus of social emotions and their subsequent feelings. Among these emotions/feelings, I accord special importance to those that are associated with the future outcomes of actions, because they come to signal a prediction of the future, an anticipation of the consequence of actions (2003: 147).

          Once the “key `off' switch for distressing emotion” is thrown in the PFC (Goleman, 1995: 26), we are provided time and opportunity for careful consideration of past similarities with the present situation as well as anticipated outcomes for several potential choices. Having reached this level of consciousness, we have escaped the compulsions that characterize complexes. Neurobiology, then, has discovered the evidence in the neural substrate for both complex-formation and complex resolution. Undifferentiated feelings produce complexes on account of LeDoux's “low road” of amygdala activation, a primitive neural design selected by evolution to insure potentially life-saving responses at lightening speed. At the same time, complex reentrant circuits in the thalamo-cortical system, including the slower-moving but more fully analytic PFC has been evolution's solution for introducing flexibility of response and the multiplication of choices required by primates. For the primate survival strategy of sociality has clearly pushed evolution in the direction of a larger and larger neocortex, as Robin Dunbar's (1996) grooming-and-gossip research has demonstrated. Psychic process -- a.k.a. individuation -- involves overcoming complex-formation through analysis and differentiation; the capacity to do so is equally a product of natural selection.

Psychotherapy

          To this point we have followed the concept of individuation to see that the ideal of psychic process involves bringing consciousness in contact with unconscious realities so as to keep ego apprised of the larger psychic reality within which it operates. Problems arise for individuation when one is side-tracked by complexes, which originate in an organism's automatic responses to crisis-like situations and then perpetuate themselves through convergence zones (sensory centers in the thalamus, in the case of fear) that see every new emotion-generating situation as another instance of an old pattern. Such automatic and relatively unchanging reactions do not allow for sufficient analysis of one's momentary life-situation to ensure accuracy of perception and adequacy of response. Individuation is impossible so long as an accurate grasp of one's life-situation cannot be formed. Fortunately, emotion-driven complex-reactions can be reduced when an individual learns to restrain automatic responses in the interests of conscious reflection. The brain is wired to make complex resolution possible, and it makes sense to conclude that an effective psychotherapy will introduce techniques to assist in the process of differentiating our feelings and acquiring a more accurate and objective view of the life-situation that confronts us.

Jung's four stages. From time to time in the course of his career, Jung described psychotherapy as a four-stage process. The earliest version of this argument is to be found in the series of nine lectures, titled “The Theory of Psychoanalysis” (CW 4: ¶203-522), he gave at Fordham University in New York City in September, 1912, while the second and last installment of Symbols of Transformation was still at the printer. Jung designed the lectures as an outline of psychoanalysis as he had come to see it while writing Symbols. Designed for a clinical audience and much easier to follow than the argument of Symbols, the Fordham lectures were presented as the latest version of the growing field of study that Jung understood psychoanalysis to be. Freud resented any reshaping of his original ideas and was prepared to find in the Fordham lectures a more radical version of Jung's growing heretical tendencies: “I am very eager to read your English lectures, I hope they will meet with vigorous opposition on the part of our fellow analysts; my own opposition, even if it outlives my reading of the lectures, would be too self-evident to make an impression” (McGuire, 1974: 532).

          In the first, Fordham, version of the four stages, Jung listed confession (¶431-5), analysis of the transference (¶436-42), resolution of the transference (¶443-51) and the prospective function of dreams (¶452-4). These are roughly parallel to the stages outlined in an article he wrote for the Swiss Medical Journal [12] in 1929, “[The] Problems of Modern Psychotherapy” (CW 16: ¶122-174). This is the most complete account of the four stages, now known as, confession, elucidation, education, and transformation; and it belongs to the period of his career when Jung was completing a practical overview of his theory and method -- as we have already seen in our treatment of Two Essays in Analytical Psychology (CW 7). A very brief and incomplete version of the four stages was repeated in 1932 (CW 11: ¶519); and an outline of the first three stages appeared in 1935 (CW 16: ¶24f). In these presentations, many of the same phrases are used each time, and it is clear that the 1929 version remains the blueprint.

          Confession. Jung notes that possessing personal secrets alienates us from our community and that “unconscious secrets” -- including the concealment of our emotional reactions -- are more injurious than conscious ones. Hiding such personal matters from others and from ourselves, unless motivated by sincere religious beliefs, [13] is bound to lead to bad moods, irritability and over-virtuousness, if not neurotic symptoms. A full cathartic confession is called for, that is to say, “not merely the intellectual recognition of the facts with the head, but their confirmation by the heart and the actual release of suppressed emotions” (CW 16: ¶134). Confession of the suppressed shadow, however, is only the beginning: (a) because there is unconscious shadow material which people resist discovering, (b) a sincere, heart-felt confession will bind the patient, emotionally, to the therapist, and (c) sometimes the patient will become fascinated with unconscious material “at the expense of his adaptation to life” (¶138).

          The most important of these, to judge from the amount of space Jung devotes to it, is the dependency upon the analyst that is likely to develop out of the empathy and feelings of mutuality that made confession possible. This is the heart of what Freud called transference. Jung discusses the transference next, but treats it as much in the manner of Pierre Janet as in that of Freud. Janet spoke of the patient's need to be dependent (besoin de direction), saying that it is the key to therapy insofar as it makes the patient wish to follow the therapist's guidance. Furthermore, it functions as an index to measure the patient's recovery, for the more the neurosis is left behind, the weaker the need for direction becomes (Haule, 1986). Jung says, dependency on the therapist is “a new neurotic formation,” but it “brings to light contents which are hardly ever capable of becoming conscious” by way of catharsis. The transference, therefore, “is the cardinal distinction between the stage of confession and the stage of elucidation” (¶139, 141).

          Elucidation. “The transference relationship is especially in need of elucidation” through interpretation, particularly of dreams (¶144f). Interpretation provides a “reductive” explanation of the patient's feelings, fantasies, and dreams; it leads backwards into the past and downwards into the unconscious, to the presumed origins of the complexes in question (¶146). Elucidation must be pursued carefully and empathically lest it be destructive. Its aim is to loosen the patient's “fixation” on the worldview of the complex (cf. Janet's idée fixe) and to make it “untenable” (¶148).

          Clearly, Jung is speaking here of the differentiation process we have just described, or at least its first stage, where the patient has to step back from the automatic emotion-driven response generated in the convergence zones of the thalamus so as to provide room for a more considered, nuanced, and accurate understanding of one's life-situation. The stage of elucidation, however, is modeled on a Freudian reductive analysis of the symptoms and fantasies -- finding their origins in early life. It ends at the point where the patient realizes that the old way of responding cannot succeed.

          Education. Freudian reduction has to be followed by Adlerian education to teach the patient how to function adequately as a social being, a responsible member of society (¶150). Having discovered that the old ways are inadequate, the patient needs to appreciate “how he arranges his symptoms and exploits his neurosis in order to achieve fictitious importance” (¶151). [14] The patient must be drawn “out of himself and into other paths” (¶152). During this phase, when the automatic complex-reactions have been discredited, clearly the analyst takes advantage of the patient's “need for direction” to conduct a discussion of the nature of the patient's life-situation and what a more adequate “reality function” would reveal. The aim is evidently the development of a realistic dialogue between the ego and the social world, the outer half of the dual dialogue that is genuine individuation.

          Transformation. The first three stages aim for “normality,” which is an appropriate goal “for the unsuccessful” (¶161). Transformation aims beyond normality in search of “satisfaction and fulfillment . . . in what [the patient] does not yet possess” (¶162). There is no way, however, for the therapist to know in advance what the patient needs in this regard. Consequently, the treatment can only be “the product of mutual influence in which the whole being of the doctor as well as that of his patient plays its part.” Their two personalities, each with their “fields of consciousness [and] an indefinitely extended sphere of non-consciousness . . . are often infinitely more important for the outcome of the treatment than what the doctor says and thinks.” Both must be transformed (¶163).

The newest developments in analytical psychology confront us with the imponderable elements in the human personality; that we have learned to place in the foreground the personality of the doctor himself as a curative or harmful factor; and that what is now demanded is his own transformation -- the self-education of the educator. . . . What happened to the patient must now happen to the doctor, so that his personality shall not react unfavourably on the patient. The doctor can no longer evade his own difficulty by treating the difficulties of others . . (¶172).

          Clearly, Jung's ideas about transformation are both less specific and more demanding than anything discussed in the previous three stages. The stage of transformation also goes beyond what we have discussed in this chapter and points to our Part III. Exploration of the nature of transformation became a predominant preoccupation during the last thirty years of Jung's life and was approached in terms of mutual influence between analyst and analysand, as well as through the notion of “experiencing the archetype,” an enlarging and insight-providing state of consciousness. We shall, therefore, leave discussion of these matters to later chapters of this book.

          The task of the patient. The four stages just presented concentrate on the task of the psychotherapist. Scattered throughout Jung's works, however, are references to what the patient must do. One of the most lucid of these is a letter written in 1945 to Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, the wealthy Dutch woman who sponsored yearly Eranos Conferences at her villa, Casa Gabriella, overlooking Lago Maggiore in the Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland. There, beginning in 1933 and continuing to 1988, long after both she and Jung were dead, experts from a multitude of fields related to Jung's interests were invited to present some of their most recent thinking on the year's chosen topic.

          Jung's letter is evidently a response to a cry for help. Frau Fröbe was sixty-four in 1945, and had been a widow since 1916, the year her twin daughters were born (Bair, 2003: 412). It seems that one of the daughters, now twenty-nine, had recently complained that Fröbe had been a neglectful mother, more concerned with administering the Eranos Conferences than with nurturing her daughters. In her pain at this accusation, Fröbe had written to Jung, needing to know what she should do at this late date about her sorrow and her guilt. Here is the substance of his letter:

The opus consists of three parts: insight, endurance, and action. Psychology is needed only in the first part, but in the second and third parts moral strength plays the predominant role. . . . It is conflicts of duty that make endurance and action so difficult. Your life's work for Eranos was unavoidable and right. Nevertheless it conflicts with maternal duties which are equally unavoidable and right. . . . There can be no resolution, only patient endurance of the opposites which ultimately spring from your own nature. . . . Admit that your daughter is right in saying you are a bad mother, and defend your duty as a mother towards Eranos. . . . The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. . . . (Letters, i: 375).

          The “opus” is a reference to alchemy, on which Jung was working industriously at the time of the letter, but here he means to describe the life-work of coming to grips with the unconscious. He implies that Fröbe already has sufficient insight and therefore does not need psychotherapy. There is “no resolution” to the sort of internal conflict from which she suffers. She must be unflinchingly honest with herself and not diminish either side of the battle raging within her. He makes no attempt to console her and insists that she admit she has been a “bad mother.” What is essential is having the “moral strength” to hold these two painful truths steadily in her awareness.

          Transformation, it appears, comes at the end of painful endurance. In Part III we shall look more closely at Jung's notion that the opposites must not only be endured, but the tension they generate held steadily in consciousness. Allowing oneself to be pushed to the limit by one's own internal conflict brings conscious and unconscious together, generates powerful autonomic responses, and makes transformation possible.

Parallels in the neural substrate. The heart of any psychotherapy is its ability to help the patient manage emotional states, to rescue awareness from the automatic reactions occurring in convergence zones that by-pass analysis and reflection. LeDoux suggests that the reason psychoanalytic work usually takes so long is that neural connections from cortex to amygdala “are far weaker than connections from the amygdala to the cortex,” making it easy for “emotional information to invade our conscious thoughts, but hard for us to gain control over our emotions” (1996: 265). The other obvious reason psychotherapy is a slow process is that brain circuits are stabilized through repetition and that existing networks, each driven by feeling-toned associations, fire more easily than new circuits can be built. In this way, “repeated experiences of terror and fear can be engrained within the circuits of the brain as states of mind” (Siegel, 1999: 33f).

          The earliest, foundational circuits are established in infancy, the likely origin of fearful and confident personality profiles. This is why Freud was correct in his “reductive method.” Deeply rooted emotion-driven patterns that are inadequate to current life-situations can be undermined by building new cortical connections, when an individual gains some conscious insight into how her habitual patterns operate and why they are counterproductive. But such changes are frightening to contemplate and not likely to be tolerable unless some degree of security can first be established. If internal feelings of security and trust were not established in infancy, a healthy secure attachment must be built in later life. In therapy, the condition necessary for such confidence-building will take the form of the “positive transference” Jung described in his third stage (CW 16: 150-60) and that Janet called the “need for direction.”

          Psychotherapy is truly effective when it can build sufficient confidence in the patient to allow flexibility of response and the capacity to develop new attitudes. This is the only way we can escape from compulsive fixations governed by thalamus and amygdala. It is the reason Jung insists that a reductive approach to symptoms and fantasies must follow the confession stage of therapy and be followed in turn by a positive transference.

Therapy is just another way of creating synaptic potentiation in brain pathways that control the amygdala. The amygdala's emotional memories, as we've seen, are indelibly burned into its circuits. The best we can hope to do is to regulate their expression. And the way we do this is by getting the cortex to control the amygdala (LeDoux, 1996: 265).

          Jung's choice of the word education to describe his third stage has not been favored by most psychodynamic theories in the twentieth century. They have preferred more mysterious and compelling phrases, such as, “breaking down the resistance,” “metabolizing projections,” and “structuring a self.” But education and learning may be the most accurate way to describe the process by which “synaptic plasticity” is achieved (LeDoux, 1996: 9). “The reason animals can learn is that they can alter their nervous systems on the basis of external experience. And the reason that they can do that is that experience itself can modify the expression of genes” (Marcus, 2004: 98). Specifically, the genes whose expression is modified (turned on or off) are those that manufacture the proteins which alter the synapses, “hardening” the wiring in some and “softening” it in others.

          According to Edelman, learning is “the means by which categorization occurs on a background of value to result in adaptive changes in behavior that satisfy value” (1992: 118). Values, for Edelman, refers to feeling-tone and emotion. He means that a rational reassessment of one's life-situation has to be based in feelings that are adequate to the adaptation one hopes to achieve. He does not speak in this regard of transference, but that would be the most likely source of “background values” in the psychotherapeutic meeting where the patient is undergoing the Adlerian re-education Jung describes. Edelman does say that conscious learning requires conscious attention which will employ a considerable percentage of the cortex. Practice will make learning automatic so that cortical involvement will decrease with time (2004: 93f). In the course of learning, “the brain constructs maps of its own activities that categorize, discriminate, and recombine the various brain activities occurring in different kinds of global mappings” (1992: 109).

          Learning, therefore, involves perceptual recategorizing, building new memories, and linking the resulting maps with value systems that belong to different brain systems than those responsible for the mapping: “The sufficient condition for adaptation is provided by the linkage of global mappings to the activity of the so-called hedonic centers and the limbic system of the brain in a way that satisfies homeostatic, appetitive, and consummatory needs reflecting evolutionarily established values” (1992: 100). Edelman describes, here, what might be called the re-education of emotional circuitry through building new neural networks connecting thalamus, hippocampus, and amygdala with the cortex. Furthermore, such re-education proceeds within the limits of phylogenetic (archetypal) patterns.

Ego's narrative. When the work of elucidation and education succeeds, long-lasting changes are effected in brain circuits; but what matters most is having these newly created or organized circuits integrated with the dynamic core (Edelman & Tononi, 2000: 176). In effect, psychotherapy will not have lasting effects unless the habitual “shape” of the dynamic core is altered. In Jung's language, this would mean that the contents of the ego-complex and the most accessible sectors of the personal unconscious are altered by psychotherapy. The results may be described in various ways, “integration” (Jung), “global mapping” (Edelman), “cognitive reframing” (Goleman); but the phenomenological/experiential end result of such processes is that we begin to tell different stories about who we are. “Psychotherapy works by changing people's narratives” (T. D. Wilson, 2002: 180).

          While in a complex-ridden state, I am sure to tell repetitive stories about myself -- how people take advantage of me, why no one seems to appreciate my intelligence or my contributions; or perhaps it will be about how thoughtless and selfish people are, how dangerously they drive, how gladly they inconvenience others for their own selfish advantage; possibly it will be about immigrants with strange accents and customs and how they are ruining the country; maybe my stories will all be about how arrogant and autocratic my superiors are, or how stupid and incompetent those placed under my authority. Such whining, raging, and self-exculpating stories are nearly always an indication that I am protecting a narrow, distorted, and vulnerable self-image. My dynamic core is supplying me with narrative material to keep my neurotic sense of self-superiority justified and implicitly unchallenged. There is no chance of my embarking on a real individuation journey, for I tell myself incessantly (and erroneously) that I am already as perfect as I can be.

          If I follow Jung's advice and allow the complex to speak to me of everything I hate to hear and then engage it in dialogue (the method suggested in Two Essays, CW 7) or if I submit to the process of confession, elucidation, and education (CW 16: ¶122-74), I open up these, obsessive, narrow and defensive categories that my convergence zones have built and maintained, and bring my cortex to bear on my life-situations. My stories about who I am and my relations to my neighbors, colleagues and rivals -- not to mention my parents, children and siblings -- change, too. Much more of objective reality enters my stories; my stories themselves become more flexible and original, more open to novelty, more tolerant of challenge. Wisdom may even replace knowledge. No longer knowing all, I become an avid learner. When ego's narrative starts here, psychic process as individuation can be lived.

 

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1. This term was coined by Prince to refer to subpersonalities that function simultaneously, rather than alternatingly.
   
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2. Blindsight is the ability to respond to objects in a “blind spot” due to neural damage. Prosopagnosia is the inability to recognize faces, although other actions the patient performs seem to indicate that parts of the brain not involved in seeing do respond to it. Hemineglect is a stroke victim's failure to notice the half of her body afflicted with paralysis. Anosognosia is the condition of being unaware of one's illness.
   
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3. A century ago, many of the multiple-personality patients spoke of feeling a “click” in their heads when the switch occurred.
   
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4. Bleuler and Jung believed that they would have diagnosed nearly all of Janet's patients schizophrenic (Ellenberger, 1970).
   
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5. Modern researchers have verified William James' position on emotion of a century ago (I become scared because I find that my heart is beating rapidly and my palms are sweating) -- one of a very few of James' positions that Jung did not adopt.
   
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6. There is a second line, variously described as “experiencing the archetype,” “the transcendent function” and “mutual influence,” which will be saved for Part III of this book.
   
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7. The nine are: Charles Darwin (via LeDoux, 1996); Silvan Tomkins (Nathanson, 1992); Paul Ekman (LeDoux, 1996); Robert Plutchik (LeDoux, 1996); Philip Johnson-Laird & Keith Oatley (LeDoux, 1996); Jaak Panksepp (1998); Antonio Damasio (1999; 2003); Christopher Badcock (2000); and Daniel Goleman (1995).
   
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8. Amygdala means “almond” in Greek.
   
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9. Thalamos means “bridal chamber” in Greek. We now know it is filled with “convergence zones” (Damasio) where sensory data and emotional valuation are “married”; but the narrow chamber-shaped appearance of the thalamus recommended its name to early anatomists who had no idea of its function.
   
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10. Hippocampos means “seahorse” in Greek. Bear in mind that the seahorse has a very long, forward-curving prehensile tail as well as a horse-shaped head and thorax. The hippocampus is likewise a very long, narrow, curved structure.
    
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11. In his 1907 book on Dementia praecox, Jung speculated that a “toxin” is created when the dominance of a single complex persists for too long a time, and that this toxin renders the condition irreversible and destructive of the personality: “In such cases one feels tempted to attribute causal significance to the complex, though with the above-mentioned proviso that besides its psychological effects the complex also produces an unknown quantity, possibly a toxin, which assists the work of destruction. At the same time I am fully aware of the possibility that this X may arise in the first place from non-psychological causes and then simple seize on the existing complex and specifically transform it . . . (CW 3: ¶195).
    
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12. Schweizerisches Medizinisches Jahrbuch.
    
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13. Sincere religious beliefs constitute an exception insofar as they remove an issue from the sphere of the merely personal and give it communal and transcendental significance. (I do not conceal these matters for my own aggrandizement but for the sake of the community and in accordance with the will of God.) In Jung's view, sincere religion is unconscious psychology, and psychology is only necessary today because religious claims can no longer be sincerely held by most modern individuals.
    
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14. In this phrasing, Jung deliberately employs the language of Alfred Adler, who, he says, has diminished the role of the unconscious but, by way of compensation, has set up educational institutions and procedures in several countries.