Basic Needs and Complexes: Similarities between Feeling-Toned Complexes, Emotional Schema and Affective States

The aim of this paper is to examine feeling-toned complexes from a developmental psychological perspective. From this perspective feeling-toned complexes emerge when basic needs are not met. A very similar theory is put forward by Jeffery Young in his Schema Therapy (Young, Klosko, & Weishaar 2005). His basic needs concept, developed on the basis of empirical research, covers four basic needs which are: attachment, autonomy, and self-worth, as well as play and spontaneity. My proposition is to deal with this conceptual view from a Jungian perspective insofar as we can integrate the four basic needs, however adding a fifth: the basic need for meaning in the theory of feeling-toned complexes. Emotional schemas and feeling-toned complexes are then comparable patterns. The strengths and weaknesses of Analytic Psychology compared to Jeffrey Young's schema therapy are further discussed. The foundation of the feeling-toned complexes on unmet basic needs lends itself to including a further reference, namely Jaak Panksepp's neuroscientific findings. Panksepp formulates seven basic affective systems which I discuss first, then I focus on what could be gained from the basic needs concept and finally I turn to the feeling-complex in an attempt to integrate neuroscientific findings into complex theory.