 is emotion and complex. The idea is the centrality of emotion in the process and the relationship of emotion to Jung's idea of the psychological complex. For Sigmund Freud, it was the drive theory that was central to what moved things along. Jung was not part of his break with Freud was that he was not invested in the idea of a drive theory so much as tracking emotions because he saw the emotions as being related to the numinous qualities that came out from the archetypes and very much connected because what we call numinous, I'm not going to get into the whole history of the term or what it means, but it's sort of an experience of the sacred and emotional experience. When we have these really profound experiences Jung said that that's sort of characteristic of the experience of the encounter with an archetype. So we saw emotions as being central and related not to the drives but to the complexes on one hand and to the archetypes on the other. Jung's original conception of the complex was as a feeling toned complex. It was shortened to complex but originally the term was a feeling toned complex. There's an Israeli Jungian analyst named Errol Shalit wrote a wonderful book on complex and he sort of encapsulated Jung's ideas in this way. He says this is a quote from Shalit. He says complex denotes a network of associations, images, ideas, memories or the like clustered around a nuclear archetypal core of meaning and characterized and held together by a common emotional tone. Thus, still quoting Shalit here, thus the complex embodies three elements, an archetypal core around which personal experiences cluster and an emotional tone that serves as the gravitational force that holds this macrocosm together. And many people talk about it as being like an onion. On the outside is the surface symptoms as we see in this diagram on the right. There's the deeper down we get the associated as we kind of work on the complex. We get past the surface symptoms, see them as symbolic of something hopefully. And so by doing that we get to the associated experiences, past experiences, personal experiences. And as we get more and more working through it, emerging from the center and highly numinously charged is the archetypal core. And why would there be an archetypal core? Because when we have highly charged difficult experiences at any time in life, it's a certainty that other humans have had these experiences before. And that is what's archetypal about them. In other words, they're common and it's often very healing just to recognize that what we think is a very personal, maybe shameful, maybe hurtful experience that many, many, many humans throughout history have had these similar types of experiences. And when we get to that archetypal core, we begin to then have access to this numinous energy, access to releasing emotion and getting a better handle on developing. Again, when we're connecting with the archetypes, we're beginning to a, differentiate the ego from the unconscious. We're less possessed and sort of encased in that unconscious world. But we're also developing that dialogue and allowing that energy to flow so we have access to it, to do our work, to serve our families and our communities, etc. So when we embark on the project of individuation, the first thing we encounter on our inner journey, as we saw earlier, are the objects found in the unconscious, the personal unconscious. You don't refer to these collectively as the shadow. However, in practice, the elements, the sort of constituent parts of the shadow that we encounter are what Jung called the complexes. As Erol Shalit suggests, we first discover memories and images of personal experiences. After usually we're drawn, our attention is drawn to them because of some symptoms, some something that's interfering, the complexes intervening in ways that we usually do not want it to intervene in our lives. So we explore into it, and as we tease it apart, we find personal experiences, clustered around an archetypal core and held together by a common emotional tone. Hence Jung's term, a feeling-toned complex. So our initial dialogues and other active imagination exercises would likely revolve in one way or another around whatever our individual complexes are. And again, not only are we going to have a perhaps an aptitude or a tendency towards a certain kind of active imagination, in other words, some people art, some people movement, some people writing things down. Jung obviously very intellectual, loved myth. He'd just written symbols of transformation. So he wrote this very mythic kind of book in a mythic kind of scroll with his red book. Someone else, for me to do that might not be ideal. For someone else, it might not be ideal. We want our own typology and our own personal experiences and ideally our own complexes to dictate to one degree or another where it's going to go. Because the dialogue certainly at first, this dialogue with the unconscious, is going to have to go through, have to deal with complexes in one way or another.