When a complex is imagined as a distinctly separated entity, a full “person,” equal to my notion of ego in intentions, mood, and willfulness, then my relations to my complexes will be as in a dream where they are no more or less real than the dream “I.”
When the complex is fully personified, I can perceive its specific qualities and yield to it the specific respect it requires. In Lou Salome’s sense, I am now able to love it. What was once an affect, a symptom, an obsession, is now a figure with whom I can talk.
In Jung’s sense we are reversing history in our souls, for by personifying I restore to the disease its God and give the God its due. “To serve a mania is detestable and undignified, but to serve a God is full of meaning.”¹
— Re-Visioning Psychology, ch 1
¹ CW 13