Le Quatrième Pentamètre

The Dream

Possession according to Jung is "a primordial psychic phenomenon" that "denotes a peculiar state of mind characterized by the fact that certain psychic contents, the so-called complexes, take over the control of the total personality in place of the ego, at least temporarily, to such a degree that the free will of the ego is suspended." Though the possessed might imagine they have free will, their freedom is an illusion. They are unwittingly being used as an instrument for some "other" energy or force to incarnate and express itself through them.

Having complexes is not necessarily pathological, as everyone has them. What is pathological, however, is thinking we don't have complexes, which is the precondition that makes us most vulnerable to possession. Jung clarifies, "Everyone knows nowadays that people 'have complexes.' What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us." The more complexes we have, the more we are possessed. We don't need to get rid of our complexes, rather, we need to become consciously aware of them. What is important is what we do with our complexes.

Complexes are the psychic agencies which flavor and determine our psychological view of the world. To quote Jung, "The via regia [royal road] to the unconscious, however, is not the dream...but the complex, which is the author of dreams and of symptoms." Thematically organized (such as the power-complex, savior-complex, mother-complex, inferiority complex, etc.), the complexes are the vehicles that flesh out the rich repository of contents of the underlying archetypes, giving the formless archetypes a specifically human face.

Complexes are the living elemental units of the psyche, acting like the focal or nodal points of psychic life, in which the energy charge of the various archetypes of the collective unconscious are concentrated. An emotionally-charged complex acts like the epicenter of a magnetic field, attracting and potentially assimilating into itself everything that has any resonance, relevance or is related to itself in any way. This inner process can be seen as it en-acts itself in the outer world when we come in contact with someone who has an activated complex and we find ourselves drafted into their process, picking up a role in their psyche. This is an outer reflection of how a complex can attract, co-opt and subsume other parts of the environment, both inner and outer, into itself. Complexes, when split-off from consciousness, can potentially engulf and possess the whole personality.

"Possession" is an interesting word. It conjures up immediate associations of the Devil, who, mythologically speaking, is the one who "possesses" us, in the demonic sense of the word. Jung, however, differentiates his meaning of the word "possession" from the meaning associated with the Catholic Church, for example, when he writes, "The Church's idea of possession, therefore, is limited to extremely rare cases, whereas I would use it in a much wider sense as designating a frequently occurring psychic phenomenon." Possession, psychologically speaking, is to identify with a complex of the unconscious, and become taken over by it such that we act it out in, as and through our lives. Who among us hasn't done this? Who among us shall cast the first stone

~ Paul Levy, Awaken the dream