Fear of Success

Why the word came from a prophet

Maslow is credited with the term, but the name was suggested to him by his friend Professor Frank E. Manuel. It refers to the prophet Jonah, who was told to prophesy the destruction of Nineveh and went the other way. Maslow's own line puts the point plainly: people run away from the responsibilities dictated, or rather suggested, by nature, by fate, even sometimes by accident, just as Jonah tried in vain to run away from his.

The definition Maslow works with is a fear of being one's best self, of one's own greatness, an evasion of destiny and an avoidance of exercising a talent. He notes the symmetry that makes the idea coherent: a fear of achieving a personal worst can motivate growth, and a fear of achieving a personal best can obstruct it. The same mechanism, pointed at the other end of the scale.

What the Jonah complex is said to prevent

The complex is defined against self-actualization, which is the whole architecture Maslow built. Once the basic needs of belonging, affection, respect and self-esteem are gratified, a person is described as moving onto a path of growth motivation, driven by being needs rather than deficiency needs. Maslow gave that state its own term, metamotivation, and described the people in it as devoted to a task outside themselves, a vocation or a duty, a calling that can be read as a destiny.

A fear of success is therefore a fear of a duty, not of an outcome. The causes listed for it are all costs rather than dangers:

• the responsibility and work that recognising one's own talents brings with it
• the risk that an extraordinary life would be too far out of the ordinary to be acceptable to others
• looking arrogant or self-centred
• difficulty in picturing oneself as a prominent or authoritative figure

The last of those is where the term touches impostor syndrome, which the reference literature lists as its nearest neighbour. The difference is the direction of the doubt. One cannot believe the achievement is deserved; the other will not go near the achievement in the first place.

When success is punished by other people

The second item on that list is not a distortion, which is what separates this entry from most of the catalogue. Tall poppy syndrome, a phrase that came out of Australia and New Zealand in the 1980s, names the ostracism of people with conspicuous public success, and the act of criticising them is called cutting down the tall poppy.

The image is old. Livy tells of Tarquin the Proud, asked by a messenger what his son should do now that he was all-powerful in Gabii, walking into his garden and sweeping a stick across the tallest poppies. The son understood, and killed the most eminent men in the city. Aristotle and Herodotus tell the same story with fields of grain instead.

Every culture with the phenomenon seems to have its own phrasing for it. In Japan the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. In the Netherlands nobody is to put their head above ground level. Scandinavia has the Law of Jante, from Aksel Sandemose's satirical novel of 1933, whose rules include the instruction not to think one is anything special. That 1933 code is the clearest statement of the thing the Jonah complex is afraid of, written from the other side. Studies conducted through the 2020s report a measurable drag on entrepreneurship and risk-taking in New Zealand.

Why the phobia lists name failure instead

Nothing in the Greek vocabulary corresponds to any of this. The word lists carry two terms in the area and both point at the opposite fear: atychiphobia, from a root meaning unfortunate, and kakorrhaphiophobia, built on a Greek word for a contrivance of evil. Wiktionary defines the first as the fear of failure and the second as the abnormal fear of failure or defeat, marks both as rare, and lists each as a synonym of the other.

So the position is as follows. The fear of failure has two Greek names and no literature. The fear of success has no Greek name, one literature, and that literature is Maslow's humanistic psychology rather than clinical psychiatry. No diagnostic manual carries either. What the Jonah complex has in place of a diagnosis is a list of the occasions that set it off, which reads like a life rather than a symptom list: career changes, new stages, moving house, interviews, auditions, and new commitments such as marriage.

The catalogue's nearest fear with the same structure is cherophobia, where a good outcome is treated as something that has not been earned and will be charged for later.