Complexes

In Lacan's early theoretical work, as surveyed in Evans's dictionary, Complexes names the culturally and socially determined structures that govern human psychology in place of biological instinct. The key theoretical move is a contrast: whereas animals are regulated by instinct — a rigid, pre-given, species-specific program — the human animal is constitutively lacking in any such fixed biological programming. This lack is captured in Lacan's concept of vital insufficiency (insuffisance vitale): the observable helplessness of the human neonate, its premature birth relative to other species, its inability to survive without prolonged care. Because humans lack the instinctual self-sufficiency that would close the gap between organism and environment, complexes step in as a compensatory formation. Complexes are not natural endowments but cultural and social constructions — they are the symbolic-imaginary scaffolding through which the subject organises its relation to others and to its world.

This positions complexes as structurally analogous to what will later become Lacan's theorization of the drive: both concepts articulate a rupture with biologism, insisting that human psychology cannot be accounted for by any naturalistic reference to instinct or organismic need. The concept of complexes is thus an early, pre-drive formulation of the same insight — that the human subject is defined by a structural inadequacy relative to nature, and that what fills that gap is always already cultural, symbolic, and mediated by the Other.

This concept appears in evans-dylan-an-introductory-dictionary-of-lacanian-psychoanalysis-taylor-francis as part of Evans's exposition of Lacan's early rejection of instinctivist and ethological accounts of human psychology. It cross-references four canonical concepts: Drive, Need, Nonrelation, and Vital Insufficiency. Complexes sits closest to the Drive and Need in the theoretical architecture. Like the drive (as defined in its canonical synthesis), complexes mark the point where biological instinct is superseded — the drive is explicitly "what remains when instinct is subordinated to language," and complexes occupy the same structural slot in Lacan's earlier vocabulary: they are what culture puts in the place left vacant by the failure of instinct. The parallel to Need is equally instructive: just as Need in its pure organismic form is "permanently opened" by the entry into the Symbolic, so too does instinct fail to close itself in the human case — and what fills that opening is precisely the complex, a cultural-symbolic structure rather than a natural one.

Complexes therefore functions as an early, pre-systematized precursor to the more rigorously formalized Lacanian concepts of the drive and the subject's constitutive lack. Where the Nonrelation names the structural gap at the level of sexuality and social existence, complexes names an analogous gap at the level of organic psychology: the human being has no instinctual "natural relation" to its environment, and the complex is the cultural supplement that makes existence navigable. This aligns with the broader Lacanian principle that the subject is always the subject of the signifier — that what might look like nature is always already mediated by the social and symbolic Other.

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian PsychoanalysisDylan Evans · 1996 (page unknown)

This inadequacy, evident in the helplessness of the human baby, is compensated for by means of COMPLEXES. The fact that human psychology is dominated by complexes (which are determined entirely by cultural and social factors) rather than by instincts

The quote is theoretically loaded because it stages a direct substitution — complexes taking the place of instincts — and anchors this substitution in the concrete, observable fact of the helpless human baby, linking it to the concept of vital insufficiency. The phrase "determined entirely by cultural and social factors" is decisive: it signals that what compensates for biological inadequacy is not a lesser or derived form of instinct but something categorically different, belonging to the register of the Other rather than of nature.