Our complexes act as dynamic intermediaries in the life-long dialogue with the unconscious, determining the ways in which archetypes and instincts enlarge ego-consciousness. Shalit provides us with a conceptual scaffold with which to examine the inner structures and assumptions that underpin our everyday actions, discussions, loves and hates. Includes case material. The complex is the key to our inner world. The images in our dreams reflect the complex meeting ground between the archetypes of the vast unconscious and the realm of personal ex peri ence. The complex carries material from the unconscious into consciousness. Sometimes the major roads are blocked, and communications maintained only “over inconvenient and steep footpaths” (Freud). When refused entrance into consciousness, the complexes become phantoms in the shadow. “The fact that complexes are painful is no proof of pathological disturbance. Suffering is not an illness; it is the normal counterpole to happiness. A complex becomes pathological only when we think we have not got it.” C. G. Jung