So, which of the following complexes do you have? There are many, and you are bound to have one or two or three.
Let's start with the most famous complex. It's the Sam Vaknin video complex. An inability to not watch, to ignore Sam Vaknin's latest video. It's a very pernicious condition, untreatable, lifelong and irreversible.
Just kidding, of course, there is no such complex yet.
My name is Sam Vaknin, I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, a very complex former visiting professor of psychology and currently in the faculty of CIAPS.
And today we're going to discuss complexes.
Now, for those of you who are not in the know or have just joined the channel for some oblivious, insane reason, there's a previous video I've made and uploaded yesterday about complexes, a general introduction to complexes.
So, let's delve right in and begin to discuss the various complexes.
The first complex is the Martyr complex. The Martyr complex is when you put the welfare and well-being and interests of other people first ahead of yours. When you sacrifice and compromise your own well-being and welfare and interest in order to somehow cater to other people's needs, to gratify them, to meet their expectations and to fulfill their wishes.
This is a form of self-harm and it is very common in people who have been parentified. When they were growing up, the roles were reversed. They were treated as adults and they were expected to behave as parents do. The child comforted the parent, the child took care of the parent, the child catered to the parent's needs, the child created an environment in which the parent could prosper, mitigate anxiety and generally function. This is adultifying and parentifying and this kind of child grows up and does not acknowledge and does not validate his or her own feelings, puts other people first.
That's the Martyr complex.
The next one is very famous, that's the persecution complex. These are people who are hypervigilant to the extreme. One could even say paranoid to some extent, suspicious of everyone.
Paranoid ideation is very common in the persecution complex, the belief that everyone is out to get you, everyone is conspiring against you, you are in the center in the focus of some malign intentions and planning.
Most of these beliefs are delusional, they are unfounded but people with the persecution complex are hyper aroused, they are in the state of hyperarousal, they are constantly alert and typically the persecution complex is the outcome of trauma, especially in early childhood but not necessarily could be trauma later in life and/or some concomitant or separate mental health issues.
The next one is the brother-sister complex, also known as the brother complex. It's applicable to any sibling with a very strong attachment, obsession and even incestuous ideation towards another sibling.
This is usually rooted in parental problems when the children had to fend off for themselves and support each other or create coalitions against abusive and traumatizing parents. It could also be the outcome of social anxiety, the sibling feels safe, rejection and abandonment are not anticipated, so the sibling becomes the social circle and the sibling later becomes the target of erotic and sexual desire.
The next apropos erotic and sexual desire, the next complex is the Casanova complex.
People with Casanova complex are typically men who adore and worship and are addicted to women. Casanova was an 18th century Italian what else adventurer and author Giacomo Casanova and men with Casanova complex are charming, they're attractive but they are unfaithful, they're disloyal, they are itinerant and so being desultory they desire multiple lovers and multiple partners and they're incapable of cathexis, they're incapable of getting emotionally invested in the process.
The complex usually is the outcome of an insecure attachment style and an innate belief that one is unlovable, unacceptable, so there's a pursuit of intimate affairs with women which are intimate on the surface but they have no depth and no longevity so as not to be rejected.
It's as if the men with a Casanova complex like a butterfly fleets from one flower or like a bee fleets from one flower to another in order to not get attached, to not get committed, to not get bonded and to avoid the inevitable rejection, abandonment and humiliation.
Typically such men have problems with a father figure and they emulate or simulate an imaginary substitute father figure which is essentially godlike and narcissistic.
A very close skin of the Casanova complex is the Don Juan complex.
The Don Juan complex is more geared towards the pursuit of sexual encounters while the Casanova complex men seeks pseudo intimate relationships, short-term brief affairs but very intense in the sense that they stimulate intimacy.
The Don Juan men, again it's a men usually but not necessarily. The Don Juan person is not interested in even a pretension of intimacy or a modicum of intimacy, anything to do with intimacy. He or she is interested only in the pursuit of sexual encounters.
These people tend to focus on seduction, on sexual conquests, on bedding as many men or women as they can and this is known today as sexual addiction.
We are not quite sure what are the antecedents and the etiology of the Don Juan complex, what makes people develop, what causes them to develop Don Juan complex but it's believed that it is some kind of self-harm or self-abuse, a constriction of life, narrowing life by eliminating experiences such as intimacy and love.
In a proper love the god complex, a person with a god complex, believes themselves to be infallible, incapable constitutionally of committing any mistakes and any errors. They always write, they lack empathy and they display narcissistic traits.
Let it be clear not everyone with a god complex is a narcissist, actually only a minority are, but they have what Len Sperry called narcissistic style.
These people are also defiant and contumacious. They have a problem with authority and they are perfectionists. They judge other people in comparison with their own high standards.
So they set people up for failure. They on purpose establish an environment where people would fail, where people would be defeated, standards that are impossible to meet.
Again the etiology of the god complex is unknown but it involves probably some genetic predisposition and some early childhood experiences and etiology very similar to narcissism.
The god complex is the exact opposite. It is also known as autoplastic defenses.
It's when people blame themselves for everything that goes wrong around them and in other people's lives.
What have I done wrong? I must have done something wrong. It's my fault. I shouldn't behave differently. If only I had acted in a different manner all of this would have been avoided.
These people are overly critical of themselves, of their choices, decisions and actions and they are beset and besieged by guilt.
It is normal to feel guilt. It's healthy, it's socially condoned, it is a form of social regulation and that's not the problem.
When we hurt someone's feelings, when we misbehave, our conscience alerts us and these interjects cause us to feel guilty.
But if this happens most of the time or all the time something's wrong with you.
The reasons for the guilt complex are varied and any number of experiences can lead to it but typically it involves a bad object, a series of voices inside the individual, usually parental voices but not only. Peer voices, role model voices that inform the individual that they are inadequate, unworthy and lovable because they constantly misbehave and they should feel guilty.
Another problem is behavior, the hero or savior or rescuer or fixer or healer complex.
People with the hero or savior complex are always on the prowl. They are proactive, they seek victims and I'm saying victims because they victimize people. They are looking to rescue someone, to save someone but not because they are altruistic or empathic or charitable because they would like to brag about it and they would like to sustain their own grandiose inflated self-perception.
Some people with a hero or savior complex believe that they are on a cosmic mission. Others think that it will make them a better person and this will be recognized.
So it's always about appearances and self-aggrandizement. People with this complex seem to feel good when they're helping others but it's not about helping others, it's about feeling good and they are very deceptive, they're very misleading.
They often pretend to be or purport to be victims of abuse, they are victimhood identity. They pretend of fake empathy and compassion and they're attentive and they are all over you and these are actually warning signs.
Hero or savior complex is sometimes linked to childhood trauma, mostly abandonment and initially the person wanted to save or to rescue a parental figure. It's also common in people who had to take on adult responsibilities, for example caring for younger siblings when they were young, so people who were parentified.
Inferiority complex first described by the inimitable Adler. People with inferiority complex see themselves as less than other people, less capable, less adequate, less accomplished, less worthy, less something.
Many times this self-deprecating, self-depreciating, self-devaluating self-perception leads people within inferiority complex to overcompensate.
They project their insecurity onto others, they attribute to others their own weakness which they wish to disown and reject and they feel resentment and they feel enormous envy.
That's a very complex, very common psychological complex and it is at the heart of mental health disorders such as covert narcissism.
Many things can lead to the development of these conflicts including as usual childhood traumas, experiences, doubts and even innate, probably genetically predisposed personality traits.
One very famous, possibly the most famous complex is the Oedipus complex.
The Oedipus or Oedipal complex refers to feelings of romantic love towards opposite sex parent. Now usually the son's romantic love towards his mother and rivalry, hate towards his father.
The complement of the Oedipus complex is the electra complex where the daughter has cohabism, romantic love, erotic and sexual attraction towards her father and rivalry, hate towards her mother.
So the Oedipus complex involves definitely a pronounced component of sexual attraction and jealousy to go with it and the jealousy is very virulent, very destructive.
Freud was the first to describe the Oedipus complex Jung electra complex and they are certain that it happens between ages three and six.
So the daughter's psychosexual competition with the mother, the electra complex and the son's psychosexual competition with the father, the Oedipus complex. All these have to do according to early conceptions of the Oedipus and electro complexes with a fear of being castrated, penis envy and all kinds of things.
You can ignore all these baggage, nonsensical baggage.
It stands to reason that when there's a male and a female regardless of ages there would be some attraction, erotic, sexual or other.
Society has put in place deep inside our minds taboos and inhibitions to prevent situations of actual sexual encounters or sex between mothers and sons, daughters and fathers in order to maintain the fragile family unit to make sure that the family functions without innate internal tensions which are irreconcilable.
And this leads me to the parental complex, mother complex or father complex. It's commonly referred to as daddy issues or mommy issues. I've dedicated at least two videos to this topic but the clinical term is a parental complex.
It's a dysfunctional relationship between parent and child. The person grows up trying to fix the broken relationship with the specific parent through via other relationships. It's like always trying to find a substitute mother or a substitute father and then fix the initial unfixable relationship via the new relationship.
A negative father or mother complex is formed due to a father or mother who physically or emotionally were dead metaphorically speaking, absent, self-absorbed, detached, disengaged and this caused the child to withdraw because it hurts when the parent is dead or absent.
And so lack of interest in difference towards the child, abuse of the child, traumatizing the child, instrumentalizing the child, purifying the child, all these can lead to parental complex.
Clinical psychologist Denise Grobela explains a negative father or mother complex may have been formed due to a father and or mother who was physically or emotionally absent, self-absorbed, detached, disengaged from and uninterested in the child.
A negative parental complex can manifest in self-doubt and or idealization of others but may also include profound self-alienation which may manifest in self-hatred and or dissociation, says clinical psychologist Denise Grobela.
And finally the Romulus and Remus complexes. The name is derived from the brothers who founded Rome.
Remus was jealous of his brother Romulus and eventually killed him and this sibling rivalry is common though luckily it seldom ends in murder.
Here's a list of complexes now go do your homework and identify the complex that's most typical of you. It's very rare to find someone without any complex whatsoever and maybe we are one of the lucky and rare ones.
Have fun in this complex world.