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My Interest in the problem of authority is primarily clinical. The caricature of the patient over-dependent on his analyst enjoys great popularity in jokes, literature and films, where it is assured of easy derision; but for the analyst such a patient presents a difficult problem and one on whom he not infrequently exercises his skills in vain.
In clinical practice we meet with the authority complex in very different forms. Sometimes it is the basic motive for the therapy when fears of dominating or superior personalities constitute the chief symptoms. In other instances it is completely ego-syntonic and so embedded in the character structure of the patient as to escape all recognition for what it is. This type of patient suffers frequently from compulsion symptoms, failures in relationship and difficulties in his work. In yet other cases the clinical picture is characterised by severe psychosomatic disturbances. With many colitis sufferers, for example, the picture emerges of an unconscious background which shows that they are still living their lives in the shadow of a powerful mother image, dark, ill-defined and of wide-ranging authority. The symptoms of over-submissiveness displayed by many depressives are often connected with the same shadowy maternal authority figure.
The varied clinical aspects of the very diverse forms the authority complex can take indicate that it is not a matter of clinical diagnosis so much as a matter of a finding by means of depth psychology accompanied by differing symptomatologies. If we put clinical diagnosis, symptom-orientated and phenomenalistic first, and diagnosis of the conscious personality and the persona—in the usual psychological sense—second, then diagnosis of complexes, i.e. of unconscious contents, will come third; and with this diagnostic arrangement in the background we shall find we can always come to grips with the common and far-ranging factors which underlie the extensive and very different forms that problems of au