I have difficulty understanding what a complex is.
Would you please provide some examples of a complex? (psychological term)
Or I should phrase my questions better: What sort of behaviors of a person would make you think that he or she has a complex?
For instance, if told my friend that “You are very intelligent, I am not as intelligent”. would that be a sign of inferiority complex?
An inferior complex would manifests itself in insecurity.
Like, say there’s a group of friends–almost all of whom have have advanced degrees. And one of the friends only has a HS diploma. She feels like no one takes her seriously because she doesn’t have the bona fides that they do. So whenever the group is together and the girls start reminiscing about their college days, she starts bragging about how important her job is and how much money she makes.
A superiority complex, on the other hand, looks completely different. I don’t even know if it truly exists. But my understanding is that a person with a superiority complex is often perceived as inferior by others because they don’t care about how they rate.
Simply defined, a complex is just a set of thoughts, emotions and behaviors that are centered around a common subject. It is deeply integrated into a persons psyche and influences their behavior, emotional state and decision making on a subconscious level.
If you saw a man killed by a falling piano and every time you see a piano you are troubled by the set of emotions and memories that are triggered, or you involuntarily act out in some way that troubles you or others, you could be said to have a piano complex. ’
From there it gets a lot more complicated and depends on which school of psychology you ask.
If you were asking Jung, the pioneer of the term every sort of behavior would make you think a person has a complex. He theorized that we are all shaped by our complexes. It’s just a question of what they are and how we developed them. He also theorized that we have common, ancestral complexes that are innate. Freud would probably insist a penis was the cause of all complexes at some deep level. The two actually parted ways with each other over a disagreement about this very subject. Since those days the term has been popularly overused to mean any manifestation of distress, fear, anger, fixation or other response to a given subject.
Another thing worth looking into that is along the same vein is ego defense mechanisms.
I used to have an inferiority complex; but then I realized I was simply inferior. :o