Fear of Imperfection

That term marks the boundary this entry is about. Perfectionism is described as a broad personality trait, multidimensional and multilayered, involving a concern with striving for flawlessness accompanied by critical self-evaluation and concern about others' evaluations. Some of that is ordinary. Anankastia names the part that is not.

What maladaptive perfectionism produces

The list is specific, and it is a list of conditions rather than of feelings:

• depression
• anxiety
• obsessive-compulsive disorder
• obsessive-compulsive personality disorder
• low self-esteem

Those adjustment problems are described as often leading to suicidal thoughts and tendencies, and as inviting further psychological, physical, social and achievement problems, in children, adolescents and adults alike.

The mechanism is the gap. Perfectionists strain compulsively and unceasingly toward unattainable goals, measure their self-worth by productivity and accomplishment to the point of being distracted from other areas of life, and pressure themselves toward goals that inevitably produce disappointment. They are harsh critics of themselves, of their work, and of their failure to meet their own expectations.

The target is set where it cannot be reached, so the disappointment is guaranteed by the arrangement, not by any particular outcome.

What perfectionary paralysis prevents

The term for the specific failure mode is perfectionary paralysis: the aspect of perfectionism in which the standard prevents the work.

It is the same structure as self-handicapping in fear of failure, arriving from the opposite direction. Self-handicapping protects self-esteem by ensuring the effort was not real. Perfectionary paralysis protects it by ensuring the work is never finished enough to be judged.

When perfectionism started rising

Perfectionist tendencies have been rising among recent generations of young people in higher education since the late 1980s.

That is a specific claim with a starting point, and it is worth separating from the general sense that people are more anxious than they used to be. Something changed in the late 1980s in the population being measured, and the measurement has continued upward since.

What the initial framing got wrong

Some psychologists initially thought perfectionism had many positive and negative aspects, and the concept is now best treated as multidimensional and multilayered rather than as a single trait with a good side and a bad one.

That correction matters for anyone reading the word in ordinary usage, where perfectionism is regularly offered as a strength. The clinical literature separates it into dimensions, and the dimension that answers to anankastia is the one associated with the conditions listed above.

Where it connects

Perfectionism recurs across this catalogue as a correlate rather than as an object of fear. Fear of failure is described as closely linked to it. Impostorism correlates strongly with rigid and self-critical perfectionism and not at all with the narcissistic kind. Orthorexia correlates with perfectionism and narcissism and not with self-esteem. Fear of happiness lists it fourth among its predictors.

Four separate literatures reaching for the same trait suggests it is doing structural work rather than accompanying these conditions incidentally.

The Greek is ateles, incomplete or imperfect, so atelophobia is literally a fear of the incomplete rather than of the flawed, which is closer to perfectionary paralysis than to the general trait. Neither reference names a coiner or a date for the phobia term.