The Body Complex & the Cultural Core Dilemma

How do we love ourselves as we are, when our culture does not?

“Complexes are autonomous groups of associations that have a tendency to move by themselves, to live their own life apart from our intentions. I hold that our personal unconscious, as well as the collective unconscious, consists of an indefinite, because unknown, number of complexes or fragmentary personalities.” —CG Jung, The Tavistock Lectures¹

Last year, at a new doctor appointment:

“It says here that you have a history of eating disorders…” he looks up from his tablet to flick his eyes over my torso, perched at the edge of the examining table. “Well. You look good to me now!” His almost-flirtatious tone isn’t personal, I think, it’s reflexive; he’s a young male with chiseled features and glossy hair who’s learned that his natural charm will be an asset in his profession. Still, it’s lurking at the edge of creepy for me. I notice and set it aside, just needing to get through this interaction. “Let’s just take that out of there,” he says, swiping away a critical part of my medical and mental health history².

“Okay, blood pressure fine, hm…” he frowns. “This BMI is high.” Things have taken a turn. If this were a TV drama, the music would become more dramatic. His voice turns serious—the boyish charm has rounded a corner and become concerned, patronizing. “We’ll need to get some bloodwork done, see if there’s something else going on.” Now he avoids eye contact as he moves into what is clearly a practiced speech. “A higher BMI puts you at risk for heart disease, high blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes.”

Hang the f*ck on, I thought. Which is it? A minute ago, I “looked good” (gross, btw), now we’re worried about chronic disease? He didn’t ask about diet or exercise at all— Was this person even seeing me?

Henri Touluse-Lautrec, Woman Before a Mirror, 1897

The Body Complex

I was genuinely enraged by this interaction— not so much for myself, but for all of the individuals I know who have an eating disorder and would be triggered by this moron, and for all of the individuals I know who are in bigger bodies and who would be shamed or dehumanized by interactions like this one, and especially for those folks who fall into both groups (and whose eating disorders go undiagnosed due to systemic fatphobia in medical and mental health systems). Also, jackass, the BMI is not an accurate measure of health; it’s not even an accurate measure of fatness! You can read more about this here.

But I could also understand what was happening all too well. This doctor wasn’t seeing me anymore. He was in the grip of a complex— one that each of us knows intimately— the one that tells us one kind of body is better than another. The complex can vary depending on location, gender, age, demographic, but there are some commonalities. It almost always says that smaller bodies are better than bigger bodies, and that male bodies are preferable to female bodies. It values white bodies over darker bodies. It says fat bodies are inferior to thin bodies and healthy bodies are superior to disabled bodies.

Complexes, according to Jung, “are “feeling-toned ideas” that over the years accumulate around certain archetypes, for instance “mother” and “father.” When complexes are constellated, they are invariably accompanied by affect. They are always relatively autonomous.³” When a complex takes us over, we find ourselves doing and saying things that don’t feel like ourselves. They act like mini personalities that guide our thoughts, words, and behaviors, even when we don’t intend them to.

Building on this, Samuel Kimbles and Thomas Singer write about cultural complexes— the idea that these “feeling-toned ideas” of Jung’s can colonize not only an individual, but a culture:

“Much of what tears us apart can be understood as the manifestation of autonomous processes in the collective and individual psyche that organize themselves as cultural complexes.”⁴

When a whole culture is gripped by a complex, its power is magnified.

The body complex is a highly pervasive, pernicious, and, I think, especially infectious cultural complex. Closely interwoven with cultural complexes of race, patriarchy, capitalism, healthism and fundamentalism, it operates through images in our media; in our ideals about health and wellness; and in the larger systems that shape our society. In the exchange above, it both determined my doctor’s behavior, and my own angry response.

The “Core Dilemma:” How can I change in order to be loved?

The body complex is one of constant dissatisfaction— like all complexes, it’s centered around an archetype, which, by Jung’s definition, cannot be directly represented, but only glimpsed or imagined— in this case, operating as an elusive ideal that can never be achieved. Perfect beauty, the perfect body, remains an unattainable, unimaginable goal. This is why there’s no end to our longing: we can never be thin enough; we lack the perfect tooth gap; even too much symmetry feels wrong.

Our personal body projects run the gamut from trying to optimize our gut microbiome to weight-loss injections or getting new ink. What drives this relentless efforting? Why are we dissatisfied as we are? If the underlying narrative is that we need to change, what are we trying to achieve? Who would we be, or what would we have access to, if we finally got our bodies “right”?

For many of us, the body complex operates as a reenactment of what NARM (the NeuroAffective Relational Model) calls “the core dilemma.” When children are not met with the support, care, or attunement they need, they do not blame the caregiver, or the environment— they blame themselves.

We do this, says NARM founder Larry Heller, to “preserve the idea of love in the world,” because it is far better to see ourselves as “the bad child of good parents” than it is to even imagine that we are the good child of parents who don’t love them. So begins a lifelong strategy of goal-oriented “self-improvement” behavior: if I am unloveable as I am, how can I change, in order to be loved?

On a collective level, we all face this core dilemma. If we replace caregivers with peer group, church, school, government systems, we can see that in order to be accepted/acceptable; in order to be safe, or respected, or to receive critical care or services; in a profoundly biased culture and more especially a fascist one, we must change.

Can we accept ourselves?

Every complex has a positive and a negative pole. Understood as a solution to our core dilemma, our body complex can be a life-saving strategy. Yet in its most negative sense, and especially when it comes to eating disorders, I see the body complex as Famine, Horseman of the Apocalypse— terrible, hollow-eyed, hungry, never satisfied.

This is why I believe that recognizing and accepting our own body complexes is essential, especially if we are in a helping profession. When we are faced with a client who has their own body complex (i.e., every client ever), our own body complex will be triggered. If we’re not aware of this potential, we are more likely to inadvertently collude with their complex.

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Victor Vasnetsov, 1887. Left to right: Death, Famine, War, Conquest

While Konermann is not specifically referring to the body complex in the quote below, I think it is especially pertinent, given 1) the universality of the complex and 2) the highly charged atmosphere of the global political climate, which offer ideal conditions for negative body complexes to arise:

“The place we come from as therapists when we offer certain interventions affects the client's phenomenology more than the intervention itself. The stronger the internal dynamics of self-shaming and self-rejection, the more this principle applies. We need to understand that goal- orientation on the part of the therapist, even if it is done with "good intentions", is unconsciously processed by the client as a lack of acceptance. In this case, both therapist and client collude around the orientation of "how can you be different?" which is a repetition of the lack of connection and attunement that the child experienced in the first place.”

—Tobias Konermann⁵

What does collusion look like here? Commenting positively on someone’s weight loss; saying “good for you!” when they tell you they’re engaging in a new habit. I know! These seem like really positive, and even innocent comments. We can provide more neutral support by saying, “Sounds like that’s something you’re feeling good about!” or reflecting back what they’ve said: “Cutting out sugar feels like an important step for you right now.” I promise that, especially for some individuals, this has the potential to make a world of difference.

As far as our own body complexes— I don’t ask that we try to get rid of them— I think that’s impossible. If we do our best to simply be aware of them in our dealings with other humans, we can go a long way toward reducing potential harm, and healing early wounds of the “core dilemma.” This is a radical act of resistance.

1. C. G. Jung, The Tavistock Lectures. 1935. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 18, The Symbolic Life, translated by R. F. C. Hull, edited by Gerhard Adler and Michael Fordham, Princeton UP, 1977, pp. 1–182.

2. There are so many things wrong with how he handled this that it really needs its own separate post. Suffice it to say, this is not how a medical professional should talk to anyone about their eating disorder.

3. C. G. Jung, “A Review of the Complex Theory.” The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 8, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, translated by R. F. C. Hull, edited by Gerhard Adler and Michael Fordham, Princeton UP, 1960, para. 201.

4. Thomas Singer and Samuel L. Kimbles, The Cultural Complex: Contemporary Jungian Perspectives on Psyche and Society (Brunner-Routledge, 2004).

5. Tobias Konermann, How NARM Expands the Psychotherapeutic Landscape, Apr. 2024, https://tobias-konermann.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/How-NARM-Expands-the-Psychotherapeutic-Landscape.pdf.