Basic needs and complexes: similarities between feeling-toned complexes, emotional schema and affective states

Basic needs and complexes: similarities between feeling-toned complexes, emotional schema and affective states

Meier, I. (2019, 2019-11). Basic needs and complexes: similarities between feeling-toned complexes, emotional schema and affective states. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 64(5), 761-779

The aim of this paper is to examine feeling-toned complexes from a developmental psychological perspective. From this perspective feeling-toned complexes emerge when basic needs are not met. A very similar theory is put forward by Jeffery Young in his Schema Therapy (Young, Klosko, & Weishaar 2005). His basic needs concept, developed on the basis of empirical research, covers four basic needs which are: attachment, autonomy, and self-worth, as well as play and spontaneity. My proposition is to deal with this conceptual view from a Jungian perspective insofar as we can integrate the four basic needs, however adding a fifth: the basic need for meaning in the theory of feeling-toned complexes. Emotional schemas and feeling-toned complexes are then comparable patterns. The strengths and weaknesses of Analytic Psychology compared to Jeffrey Young's schema therapy are further discussed. The foundation of the feeling-toned complexes on unmet basic needs lends itself to including a further reference, namely Jaak Panksepp’s neuroscientific findings. Panksepp formulates seven basic affective systems which I discuss first, then I focus on what could be gained from the basic needs concept and finally I turn to the feeling-complex in an attempt to integrate neuroscientific findings into complex theory.

affective systems, basic needs, emotional schema, feeling-toned complex,
motivation, neuroscience, schema therapy

Switzerland

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