Why We Keep Returning to the Same Emotional Patterns
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert.
A feeling may pass while the pattern organising it remains. Jungian complexes and a mathematical idea called a kernel offer a way to think about why we get stuck in some emotional situation and what it might mean to change.
Imagine an ordinary evening. You send a message to someone you love. They read it. No reply arrives. You put the phone down, make tea, pick it up again. Within minutes, the silence has acquired a meaning. Perhaps you have become tiresome. Perhaps something has changed between you. Soon you are angry. That person has just ghosted me! Then you are embarrassed by your anger. You imagine all kinds of justifications: maybe he or she has died, had an accident, or been kidnapped! You sound ridiculous to yourself. You decide you will stop caring, which lasts approximately as long as it takes to check the phone again.
Let us stay with this imagined scene, because something interesting is happening. Several emotions have come and gone, yet the situation still has only one convincing explanation: you are about to be left.
How much has really changed between the anxiety, the anger, and the withdrawal? Emotionally, quite a lot. In the organisation of the experience, perhaps very little.
Jung's account of complexes gives us a way to approach this peculiar mixture of movement and repetition. A complex gathers memories and images around a strong emotional charge and can acquire a degree of autonomy from our conscious intentions. We may understand a situation perfectly well in the morning and find that understanding strangely unavailable by evening.
In our example, an abandonment complex would involve much more than the thought that someone might leave. The body tightens. Earlier disappointments become easier to recall. An affectionate exchange from yesterday suddenly seems less convincing. Attention keeps returning to the unanswered message. A whole version of the relationship takes shape around the silence.
I find it useful to think of such a complex as an affective and embodied attractor: a configuration towards which experience repeatedly tends. Here, an attractor can include a family of related states. Anxiety, accusation, shame, and retreat may all belong to it. Moving between them can feel exhausting while leaving the underlying expectation almost untouched.
The mathematical idea of a metastable region offers one possible way of making this more precise. A process can keep moving within a region while transitions beyond it remain comparatively rare. Applying that idea to a Jungian complex is a hypothesis. Its value would depend on whether it helps us describe something we can actually observe.
An unexpected companion to this line of thought comes from the work of Donald Hoffman and his collaborators, now developed at the Trace Institute. Their research uses Markov kernels to describe transitions between possible experiences.
The word sounds more forbidding than the basic idea. A kernel assigns probabilities to what can happen next, given a current state. Imagine a deliberately simple model containing only calm, curiosity, and fear. From fear, another moment of fear might be more likely than curiosity. From curiosity, a movement towards calm might become easier. These are illustrative possibilities, not measured facts about emotions.
The state tells us where we are. The kernel describes the probabilities of the next step.
In “Fusions of Consciousness”, Hoffman, Chetan Prakash, and Robert Prentner connect kernels for perception, decision, and action into what they call a qualia kernel, describing a sequence of experiences. Their larger theory treats consciousness as fundamental. That is a theoretical commitment; a matrix of probabilities cannot establish it. The Institute also presents its proposed links to the foundations of physics as conjectures.
What interests me here is a more limited possibility: could this mathematical language help describe the paths through which a complex sustains itself?
A complex would not simply be a kernel. In the connection proposed here, the kernel describes transitions, while the complex is the recurring organisation those transitions help maintain. The distinction matters. It keeps a psychological concept from becoming a mathematical label without gaining any precision.
There is also a condition we should take seriously. In a Markov model, the fully specified present state contains all the information from the past needed to predict the next step. Calling someone “afraid” is unlikely to describe that state sufficiently. Their expectations, bodily condition, and present relationship may matter enormously. A useful model would have to account for these, and test whether its assumptions hold.
Another idea in the Trace researchers' work concerns what is available to an observer. A trace chain follows successive visits to a selected subset of states. Suppose a wider process moves among A, B, C, and D, but an observer registers only A and D. The transitions they observe can still carry the influence of passages through B and C.
This suggests an analogy with a familiar difficulty in understanding ourselves. We remember being comfortable at dinner, then furious on the way home. Between those moments there may have been a tightening in the chest, a slight feeling of exclusion, an image we barely noticed, and an assumption we never put into words.
The mathematical result does not demonstrate a theory of the unconscious. It does, however, give us a useful question: what happened along the way that our account of the evening leaves out?
Sometimes careful attention changes the story from “I became angry for no reason” to something much more specific. We begin to recognise a sequence. That sequence may include a real injury, an old expectation, or both. Understanding it requires attention to what actually happened between people, as well as to what happened within us.
Let’s return to the unanswered message. How readily does the possibility of abandonment become dominant? Once present, how long does it organise the evening? How much authority does it acquire over what we remember and do? And can anything that happens next modify it?
That last question is easily overlooked. The eventual reply might bring relief, yet leave the expectation of abandonment ready for the next silence. Alternatively, an ordinary explanation might gradually become something we can remember and trust during a later wait. New information has arrived in both cases. Its place in future experience may be very different.
Psychic weight also deserves its own attention. A passing remark can reorganise an entire day. Counting how often a thought occurs would miss something essential if we ignored how strongly it directs attention and action.
The body belongs inside this account. Our imagined evening unfolds through breathing, muscular tension, the urge to move, the difficulty of sitting still. A useful model would need to connect these changing conditions with memory and the relationship itself, across different timescales. A single brain rhythm could not, on its own, identify the meaning of this complex.
Can an experience remain open long enough to acquire another meaning? Fear may initially leave room for only one conclusion. With sufficient support, we may become able to stay in contact with the feeling while allowing the other person, and the situation, to surprise us.
Let’s now imagine the same person some time later, waiting for another reply. The first tightening still comes. They recognise the urge to check the phone. For a while, the old explanation feels persuasive.
Then something else becomes possible. They remember that this person sometimes reads messages between appointments. They notice that they are particularly tired today. They can acknowledge wanting reassurance without immediately accusing, apologising, or disappearing. They might eventually ask a direct question about the silence.
There is no guarantee that the answer will be comforting. Relationships can be unreliable; people do leave. Greater psychological freedom includes being able to recognise that reality and respond to it. It would be a poor form of therapy that taught someone to explain away every injury as their own complex.
Within the model proposed here, a deeper change would appear as a shift in the probabilities of these responses across comparable situations. We would need repeated observations to distinguish that shift from a single good evening. Does fear more often allow reflection? Can uncertainty remain uncertainty for a little longer? Does a new experience influence what happens next time?
Jungian work adds a further dimension to these questions. A recurring image or dream can give a form to something that has previously been lived through without much room for reflection. In an imagined example, someone dreams of waiting outside a locked house. Exploring their associations might bring loneliness into relation with anger, longing, or a wish for a home of their own. The image need not have one fixed interpretation. Its value may lie in the relationships it makes possible within experience.
This is how I would approach individuation here: as a developing relationship with the forces that organise us. The complex can continue to carry a history and a vulnerability. We may still recognise its arrival. Yet it can gradually take a different place in a life that has other concerns and possibilities.
The phone is still silent. There is no certainty about when it will light up. But the person waiting can return to the conversation at the table, or remember the tea they made. The unanswered message remains part of the evening. Other things have become possible again.
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Dragana Favre, Psychiatrist & Jungian Psychotherapist
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert. Her unique approach combines Jungian psychotherapy, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), and dream interpretation, guiding patients towards self-discovery and healing. Beyond her profession, Dr. Favre is passionate about science fiction, nature, and cosmology. Her ex-Yugoslav roots in the small town of Kikinda offer a rich backdrop to her life's journey. She is dedicated to helping people find their true selves, much like an alchemist turning lead into gold.
References:
Jung, C. G. A review of the complex theory. In The collected works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 8, The structure and dynamics of the psyche. Essay originally published in 1934 and revised in 1948.
Hoffman, D. D., Prakash, C., & Prentner, R. (2023). Fusions of consciousness. Entropy, 25(1), 129.
Hoffman, D., Prakash, C., & Chattopadhyay, S. (2025). Traces of consciousness. Preprint, version dated September 5, 2025.
Trace Institute. Research programme. Accessed October 15, 2026.
