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A common assumption holds that failure frightens people more than success does. The psychoanalytic view disagrees: success stirs the feeling of having taken something from other people, and the worry that they will hate or envy you for being too big.
Guilty children are very afraid of their own power. They can grow anxious, sometimes to the point of panic attacks, when they win, when they have a lot, or when they are about to do something big.
Ashamed children tend to fear the opposite, smallness. Both fears can live in the same person at once. A person can get panic attacks before public speaking, a fear of being too big, while worrying constantly about staying relevant, a fear of being too small.
Where did the fear of success idea start?
Psychologist Matina Horner developed it in her research at the University of Michigan in the 1960s. She asked students to finish a story that began with a woman named Anne at the top of her medical school class. About 65 percent of women wrote stories in which Anne met a bad outcome, compared with about 10 percent of men who wrote the same story about a man named John. Later studies often failed to reproduce the gender gap. Horner became president of Radcliffe College in 1972.
Why did Freud say success can wreck people?
In a 1916 essay titled Those Wrecked by Success, Freud described patients who fell ill just when a long-wished-for goal was reached. He traced it to inner conflict, in which a wish could be tolerated as a fantasy but not as a reality. He pointed to literary figures including Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare's play and Rebecca West in Ibsen's Rosmersholm. The essay appears in his collection Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work.
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