COMPLEXES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 229, 27 September 1930, Page 1 (Supplement)

COMPLEXES.

POPULAR MISAPPREHENSION. IMPORTANCE OF REPRESSION. (By QUENTIN POPE.) What with their friends and the English Press, sal<3 a well-known English golf professions recently, it was no wonder that English golfers went to the tee against the Americans with an inferiority complex. For weeks they had been hearing nothing but the superior merits of their opponents; who could expect them to play well in such circumstances? Much the same tiling has been said by innumerable business men 011 the subject of New Zealand, especially during the past few months. Our inferiority has been drummed into us, ergo we have an inferiority complex, has been the theme. Now, all these good people who have been talking of inferiority complexes so glibly obviously know nothing about them. The term has been persistently misused in all countries, to the distress of the psychologists. Those psychologists have a great deal to bear nowadays. For no sooner had they coined a beautiful term, "rationalisation," to describe the process whereby we reason to support that which we do instinctively (in other words, finding intellectual endorsement of our prejudices), than it w-as stolen from them by economists in touch with modern German thought and applied to industry. And now, with the whole bright system of complexes nicely built up to explain so many things, the public refuses to understand the term, misapplies it, and threatens to remain perpetually ignorant -when the word is used correctly. Association. Association is tlie strength of modern psychology and the keyword to most systems of memory training. We tie up our ideas and emotions in little groups which we may raid at will and which turn over to us, once we go to the pigeonhole, such surprising facts f\s we may retain from having "done" Caesar s efforts at authorship on Gaul, the memory that our third fox terrier was named Caesar, and that he liked, abo\c all things, to pursue a Manx cat, and the memory that when we were ten we dropped an ice cream on the back of a man nick-named Caesar on account.' of his nose, that he cuffed us heartily— which accounts for the fact that ever since we have not been able to bear the sight of a red-haired man. Dissociation, conversely, represents an abnormal condition of mind, in which the usual connection between the various mental elements is lost.

Ordinary lapses of memory represent, dissociations iu normal people between tho idea or the object which cannot be called to mind, and the clue or stimulus idea which ordinarily sufficed to recall tlio thing 1 (1 wired to be remembered. Emotional dissociation, on the other hand, is represented by sudden changes of mood or of interest from one subject to another; things which, all of us have observed. When large combined groups of ideas and of emotions (complexes) become dissociated from other similar groups tlio resulting condition is tlio famous one of-"dual personality," or dissociation of personality, which is responsible for many insane conditions. The Complex Proper. Now wo may pass to the complex proper. Repression, as those know who have read the modern novel, is the bete noir of the modern psychologist. Repression is the extreme form of control of the sentiments —the self control which used to be preached at us and is now suspect. For if some emotions are to be regulated because of their strength or their weakness, others, which are judged harmful because of their ends, have to be repressed. And repressed they are. We all would destroy some things in our character if we could; as we cannot, we repress them and pretend that they are not there. In this sense we not only repress emotions, like our fear of the dark or dislike of wearing :i black hat, but also loves (our genuine liking for jazz when we move in musical circles) and most of our hates. These repressed fears, loves, dislikes, and whatnot are now called complexes, and these complexes lead us to behave in the oddest of ways. The golfer who was genuinely afraid of his opponent and trying to shove the thing out of his consciousness, as the English players referred to earlier, would not walk on the tee in a downcast manner waiting to be slaughtered; be would swagger 011 ten minutes late a.nd tell everyone in an audible tone that he expected the match to end in an hour. The weedy little man who is vociferous in support or his favourite Rugby team is concealing a consciousness of his inferiority, just as the aged spinster who is bitterly cynical about mere man is attempt- ■ ing to keep out of sight her regret at her single state. The workman who finds all his superiors fools, the specialist who is always explaining that the immense field of his subject leaves him little time for general reading and that he is proudly ignorant, both suffer from complexes. The thing is, of course, that these people are playing at a game of pretence. They are not hypocrites, they - are "desperately endeavouring to keep down out of sight a realisation which would hurt tliern. They have thus developed a. fully flowered complex in their attempt to prevent their love or their fear from being displayed 011 the surface and recognised. They are usually hiding it from themselves, and very often successfully.