Part of why we get stuck is that there is a complex blocking our will, our intentionality, at least as strong as our hope for moving forward. Sometimes resolution, intentionality, willfulness, or concerted, sustained effort is enough to get unstuck, and we get through the blockage.

finally, are within us.

is that all of our stuck places track back to the twin existential threats to our

There's always someone haunting someone—haunting someone And you know who I am Though I never leave my name or number I'm locked inside of you . . .

Of all his insights, the complex is perhaps the most practical of his gifts.

So, complexes per se are neither good nor bad. What matters is how they play out in our lives. Or, very pragmatically, what do they make us do or what do they keep us from doing?

Thus, what is most troubling about complexes is their capacity to remove a discriminating judgment from this moment of consciousness, assert, even impose, a historic view generated from an earlier, more likely disempowered place in our history.

Remember that Jung said when he heard the word mother he thought unreliable and when he heard father he thought powerless. Where did he come by these associations other than by having had a history in which these entities were loaded up with valences?

the persistence of the past.