Cultural

• Pyramids are remnants of ancient cultures.pyramid image by Horticulture from Fotolia.com
  
  Merriam Webster defines cultural as "of or relating to culture or culturing." In the context of "cultural complex," the meaning is complex. While culture is near limitless and indefinable, Professor Ifte Choudhury calls culture "the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving."
  
  

The Jungian Complex

• The psychologist's couch helps define our complexes.Abandoned couch image by MAXFX from Fotolia.com
  
  According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a complex is "a group of repressed desires and memories that exerts a dominating influence upon the personality."
  
  Carl Jung was a disciple of Sigmund Freud's who, after serious theoretical disagreements, took psychology in a very different direction than his teacher. Central to Jung's psychological framework was the idea of complexes. In Jung's model, each individual personality is built of a series of complexes. Central to each complex is an archetype. Thus, our personalities, built of complexes, which are in turn built of archetypes, are composed of universal human experiences and concepts.
  
  

Cultural Complex

• The cultural complex looks to find an explanation for group conflict.war image by mark smith from Fotolia.com
  
  As stated in their introduction, Singer and Kimbles developed the notion of a cultural complex from Jungian psychoanalytic theory to "build a new idea for the purpose of understanding the psychology of group conflict." The term is a synthesis of the academically loaded "cultural" and "complex." A cultural complex, then, is a psychological complex applied to the collective consciousness of a group, as well as its individual members. Thus, while the term is psychological in nature, it is also anthropological.
  
  

The Book

• "The Cultural Complex: Contemporary Jungian Perspectives on Psyche and Society," a compilation of essays edited by Singer and Kimbles, attempts to create a cohesive global definition of their theory. Headings in the book are "Collective trauma and cultural complexes," "Exploring racism: a clinical example of a cultural complex" and "Cultural complexes in the history of Jung, Freud and their followers," through which examples Singer and Kimbles hope to illuminate and broaden their basic introductory definition of cultural complexes. By applying their theory to an array of situations, the authors aim to show its universal applications.
  
  

Significance

• The Rwandan massacre serves as a cultural complex model.skull image by vb_photo from Fotolia.com
  
  In layman's terms, what Singer and Kimbles are saying is: Groups suffer from the same psychological complexes--such as inferiority, superiority and Oedipal--as individuals, and this is what leads directly to group conflict. To apply this to a historical situation, we need look no further than the Rwandan genocide. Between April and July of 1994, the Hutu people killed more than 800,000 Tutsis. The two ethnic groups, forced into a single country by colonial powers, had been at odds with each other for years. According to the "Cultural Complex" model, the Hutu group would have felt a superiority complex over the Tutsis, whose complex compelled them to commit mass murder.