I just made the happy discovery that Jung was heavily influenced by a turn-of-the-century French school of psychology which I have never even heard of before this, Dissociationism.

This article details it further: From Somnambulism to the Archetypes: The French Roots of Jung’s Split With Freud.

There’s a bunch of stuff in here which I want to hold onto and come back to, so here goes:

Rejecting (forever) the concept of mental Newtonian forces, they held that every aggregation of ideas and images possessed, in some measure or other, its own personality. The guiding image for this was the phenomenon of multiple personality…

Hot shit! So it turns out polytheistic psychology isn’t as new as it may seem. Here’s more, the first two “laws” of Dissociationism:

1. The Law of Systematic Association. “Every psychic fact tends to enter into partnership with and to give rise to psychic facts which can harmonize and cooperate with itself toward a common goal or toward compatible goals which can comprise a system.

2. The Law of Inhibition. “Every psychic phenomenon tends to impede the manifestation and development of or to banish from sight the psychic phenomena which it cannot assimilate according to the law of systematic association, that is to say the phenomena which it cannot assimilate in the interests of a common goal.”

The first one sounds a lot like what they call memeplexes. The second relates very closely to what I normally call the cultural immune system, and the role of evil in a religious story-system.

Apparently, Freud was also influenced by the dissociationists, but ultimately moved beyond it it. He posited that the normal psyche was more or less “unified” and that the dissociative state was pathological (the dissociationists thought it more ordinary).

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.

Also…

The image guiding Jung’s thought is that of multiple, simultaneously active, subpersonalities. Jung is thinking spatially (centers of aggregation) while Freud thinks temporally (sexual stages)…

Ah, here we go, JACKPOT! This is the fullest explanation I’ve ever read by Jung about just what a complex is. It’s apparently from his Tavistock Lectures:

“Complexes are autonomous groups of associations that have a tendency to move by themselves, to live their own life apart from our intentions. I hold that our personal unconscious as well as the collective unconscious, consists of an indefinite, because unknown, number of complexes or fragment personalities.”

In the same lecture, Jung enumerates 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 dramatized in our dreams, poetry, and drama; (5) it becomes visible and audible in hallucinations; and (6) it completely victimizes the personality in insanity.