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The author's purpose is an attempt to fill a lacuna to the extent that he develops a general theory of the complexes which will give both the student and the practising therapist an overview of this area in terms of diagnosis and therapy. Almost all textbooks of analytical psychology have a chapter on the complexes, but there is no book that presents a differentiated overview of all the possibilities of complex theory.
In the first section of the book, Professor Dieckmann presents an extensive review of the literature surveying the multiplicity of complexes and their descriptors. There is a discussion of those based on characteristic attitudes or behaviours, those that can be derived from human drives, those based on archetypal images and the individuation process. For diagnostic and clinical purposes, he narrows this field considerably when he writes that, in his judgement, all complexes derive from two fundamental complexes - the mother complex and the father complex.
The author then discusses derivatives of these fundamental complexes and the ways in which their derivation from the mother and father complex is useful diagnostically. He further delineates the mother and father complex by differentiation into positive and negative, elementary and transformative characteristics. The positive and negative aspects are further defined by the characteristics ascribed to those poles. For instance, he writes, under the ‘positive elementary character are subsumed characteristics such as giving birth, liberating, constructing, being born again, rebirth. The negative aspect, in contrast, subsumes holding fast, capturing, diminishing, illness, and death’.
Having laid the groundwork for his thesis, Dieckmann devotes the remainder of the book to examining aspects of complex theory. The structure of the complex is an in-depth chapter which explores Jung's discovery of complexes, how he understood them and how he defined them. In ‘The relationships of the ego-complex to the individu