Between a laugh and a sleepy yawn, Nan jumped from the bus at the corner of Oakley Street.
CHAPTER V
SEAWEED
1
"Complexes," read Mrs. Hilary, "are of all sorts and sizes." And there was a picture of four of them in a row, looking like netted cherry trees whose nets have got entangled with each other. So that was what they were like. Mrs. Hilary had previously thought of them as being more of the nature of noxious insects, or fibrous growths with infinite ramifications. Slim young trees. Not so bad, then, after all.
"A complex is characterised, and its elements are bound together by a specific emotional tone, experienced as feeling when the complex is aroused. Apart from the mental processes and corresponding actions depending on purely rational mental systems, it is through complexes that the typical mental process (the specific response) works, the particular complex representing the particular set of mental elements involved in the process which begins with perception and cognition and ends with the corresponding conation."
Mrs. Hilary read it three times, and the third time she understood it, if possible, less than the first. Complexes seemed very difficult things, and she had never been clever. Any of her children, or even her grandchildren, would understand it all in a moment. If you have such things—and everyone has, she had learnt—you ought to be able to understand them. Yet why? You didn't understand your bodily internal growths; you left them to your doctor. There were doctors who explained your complexes to you.... What a revolting idea! It would surely make them worse, not better. (Mrs. Hilary still vaguely regarded these growths as something of the nature of cancer.)
Sometimes she imagined herself a patient, interviewing one of these odd doctors. A man doctor, not a woman; she didn't trust woman doctors of any kind; she had always been thankful that Neville had given it up and married instead.
"Insomnia," she would say, in these imaginary interviews, because that was so easy to start off with.