According to Jung…every complex consists primarily of a “nuclear element,” a vehicle of meaning, which is beyond the realm of the conscious will, unconscious and uncontrollable; and secondarily, of a number of associations connected with the nuclear element, stemming in part from innate personal disposition and in part from individual experiences conditioned by the environment. […] Once constellated and actualized, the complex can openly resist the intentions of the ego consciousness, shatter its unity, split off from it, and act as an “animated foreign body in the sphere of consciousness.”

Jolande Jacobi, Complex/Archetype/Symbol in the Psychology of C.G. Jung

Narrow, one-sided formulations kill the life of the psyche, whose mobile, dual face, seamed with paradoxes, refuses to such endeavors its secret, which can never be captured by strict conceptual methods. Its essence remains forever ambivalent and evades all efforts to unveil it. Yet, says Jung, it is “the only immediate experience we can have and at the sine qua non of the subjective reality of the world.” Thus in the last analysis any attempt to formulate psychic phenomena in terms of language is doomed to imperfection, because the means of expression can never be fully adequate to the subject matter.

Jolande Jacobi, Introduction. Complex/Archetype/Symbol in the Psychology of C.G. Jung

Jung also said:
Since we cannot develop backwards to animal consciousness, there remains nothing for us to do but advance into the more difficult pathway to higher consciousness.
Pauvre de nous!

Anaïs Nin · The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume I: 1931-1934