Archetypes and Complexes: Understanding Your Inner World

Ever completely overreact to something and not understand why?

Someone makes a harmless comment and you’re seething for the rest of the day. Or you meet a new person and feel an instant, irrational dislike. Or you fall head over heels for someone you barely know.

That’s a complex running the show.

Jung identified two forces operating beneath the surface of your conscious mind: archetypes and complexes. They’re related, but different. Archetypes are universal patterns—the Hero, the Shadow, the Trickster, the Great Mother. They show up in myths, fairy tales, and dreams across every culture because they’re baked into the human psyche. You didn’t learn them. They’re already there.

Complexes are more personal. They’re clusters of emotionally charged memories and associations that form around a core theme—usually from your early life. Jung called them “splinter psyches,” and that’s exactly what they feel like. Little autonomous personalities living inside you, hijacking your reactions when you least expect it.

The mother complex shapes how you relate to nurturing, dependency, and boundaries. The father complex influences your relationship with authority and discipline. The puer aeternus—the eternal child—keeps you chasing novelty and running from commitment. These aren’t labels. They’re patterns. And they’re running in the background whether you know about them or not.

Jung put it bluntly: complexes are the real puppet masters behind every symptom. They show up whenever you overreact, whenever you’re seized by sudden rage, anxiety, or depression.

So what do you do about it? You start noticing. When a situation triggers a reaction that’s disproportionate to what actually happened, that’s a complex activating. Instead of just riding the wave, you ask: why did that hit so hard? What’s underneath this? Where have I felt this before?

That inquiry—honest, patient, repeated over time—is the beginning of making the unconscious conscious. You can work with these patterns through active imagination, through dreams, through creative expression. But it starts with paying attention.

The goal isn’t to eliminate your complexes. That’s not possible. The goal is to stop letting them drive the car while you sit in the back seat wondering why you keep ending up in the same places.