Complex - An unconscious psychic content made up of associated ideas and images clustered around a central core. The core is an archetypal image. When constellated, affects emerge which upset the psychic balance and interfere with the customary functioning of the ego. Every complex has an archetypal core, and the core consists of a pair of opposites. If we identify with one part of the complex, one of the pair, the other is unconscious and we will know it only in projection, i.e., it truly belongs in our own personality but, for various reasons, we cannot own it and so it will land on some thing, place, or person. An example of this identification/projection mechanism could be in a mother-complex. If the personal mother was a too-good, always available, always a giving mother for us, that is the kind of mother we most probably will introject. The negative mother, the other part of the archetypal mother, we will find in the world, perhaps in a person, an institution, or even in the matrix of our lives (interestingly enough, mother and matrix derive from the same root word.) We could speculate in a similar way on the father-complex. You can see how important, how vital, it is for each of us to reconcile, to the degree that we are able, the opposites that belong to the archetypal core of our complexes.