Page:Jung - The psychology of dementia praecox.djvu/67

Rh indices for the complex-theory. In selecting my stimulus words I took care to employ as far as possible words in colloquial use, principally to avoid difficulties of understanding by the subject. It would be expected that an educated subject would react easily, but indeed this is not the case. At the very simplest words there appear obstructions and other disturbances which can be explained only by the fact that the stimulus word has excited a complex. But why should it be difficult to reproduce easily an idea which is closely connected to a complex? The emotional inhibition must be cited as the main hindering cause. The complexes exist mostly in a state of repression. As a rule one deals with most intimate secrets which are anxiously guarded and which one either does not wish to expose or is unable to do so. The repression may even under normal conditions be so strong that there exists a hysterical amnesia for the complex; that is, there is a feeling of an emerging idea, of a significant connection, but the reproduction is held back by vague hesitation. There is a feeling as though one wished to say something which immediately slipped away. That which slipped away is the complex-thought. Occasionally there appears a reaction which unconsciously contains the complex thought but the test person is blind to it, and it is only the experimenter who can lead him on in the right way. The repressing resistance may also show afterward a striking effect in the reproduction test. Amnesia influences by preference the critical and post-critical reactions. These facts show that the complex has a certain exceptional position in relation to the more indifferent psychic material. Indifferent reactions follow "smoothly" and generally have very short reaction times. They are always at hand for the ego-complex to dispose of at pleasure. It is different with the complex reactions! They appear only with opposition, and often when about to appear they again withdraw from the ego-complex. They are peculiarly formed; often they are the products of embarrassment, of which the ego-complex itself is unaware, often they merge into amnesia in contradistinction to the indifferent reactions which frequently possess great stability and are reproducible even after months and years. We see, then,