Fear Of Success
One of the ancient pressures mankind faces, and all animals face, is the pressure to succeed. Originally it was just the ability to feed oneself, protect loved ones, and to procreate. In modern times, this pressure is still omnipresent, even if technology has relieved many past labor activities that led to more wear and tear and shorter lifespans. But like Kurt Cobain’s Something In The Way modern life still has plenty of obstacles, and regardless of the age we live in, those obstacles are often people and the difficulty of finding a respected place in society. These obstacles start in childhood and then can build into a personality crossroads where some people thirst for challenges but many others loathe them.
Something In The Way – Nirvana: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YhR5UfaAzM
Going back to Freud’s day, in his Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work, he found patients who were inhibited by their very ability to function optimally even when success was found or one was approaching it. In Freud’s early understanding of somatic reactions to psychological influences, which was very general at the time, “people succumb to neurotic illness as a consequence of refusal. What is meant is the refusal to satisfy their libidinal [energetic craving] desires…” Because the world is full of obstacles to satisfaction, there are myriad ways to encounter frustration. To keep it clear, in psychoanalytic dictionaries, “Suppression usually refers to conscious, voluntary inhibition of activity in contrast to repression, which is unconscious, automatic, and instigated by anxiety not by an act of will.” Some of this suppression is necessary in order to live with others and to delay gratification, which is Freud’s Reality Principle. It’s a self-preservation mode that Freud later called the Super-ego. “…Conflict between an individual’s libidinal wishes and that part of his being that we call the I, which is the expression of his drive to self-preservation and which encompasses his ideal sense of his own being.”
The Pleasure Principle – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gurqv-the-pleasure-principle-sigmund-freud.html
This doesn’t mean that delayed gratification is unhealthy, but if the mind sees that the delay is going to be extended or permanent, or that the goals are near impossible, that’s when it can turn pathogenic. “Pathogenic conflict arises only if the libido seeks to throw itself into the pursuit of paths and goals long since overcome and [forbidden] by the I, thus also prohibited for all future time…” Your Ego actions have to bump into situations that activate the Super-ego and then images of Object-Relations related to authority figures and internal censure arises.
For a person who anticipates endless frustration, conflict, and obstacle, how craving turns pathogenic is when the Super-ego overprotects one so that anything related to success can in fact be infused with a long standing habit of fear. Accessible forms of success are also treated as inaccessible. Long periods of frustration for the libido leaves one with no skill for celebration, and success is warped by the anticipation of punishment. These “…individuals fall ill just at the time when a deep-seated, long-cherished wish is about to be fulfilled. It would then appear that they cannot bear their good fortune, for there is no doubt as to the causal connection between success and illness.” Again, this is a strong craving that’s connected to actual possibilities of success, not something that is too distant. It’s just that the belief is that it’s too distant and one should stay away from the goal because the success will be stolen away by others or one is not worthy of the success because of low self-esteem towards skills and potentials. “…It is not at all unusual for the I to tolerate a wish and consider it harmless as long as it exists only as a fantasy, unlikely to be fulfilled, whereas it will be fierce in its own defence as soon as the wish appears to be close to fulfillment and threatens to become a reality…It is normally inner intensification of craving-charge that turns a fantasy that has been disregarded and tolerated into a dreaded opponent.”
The Super-ego for Freud is a parental imitation lodged in one’s mind, and it’s later developed to be a complex group of authority figures in Object-Relations where rehearsals and predictions are made of what these people or similar people with authority will behave like: Projection. Objects show up as stress-images of actual people or composites in the mind. The Super-ego is the “…power of conscience that forbids the individual to enjoy the benefits of this long hoped-for turn for the better in the circumstances of his life.” There’s a sense that success involves a fight over scarcity and the original prohibition for Freud is the prohibition of access to the mother by the father. It’s almost like success is only truly free of this taint of defensiveness and guilt when authorities and gatekeepers applaud it. “Will they even allow me to have this?” “Psychoanalytic work teaches us that the forces of conscience that cause an individual to fall ill on the brink of success…are intimately bound up with the Oedipus complex, with our relationship to mother and father; indeed, this may be true of our consciousness of guilt altogether.”
The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html
Now success does have pathogenic qualities when the opposite extreme is entertained. Certainly religions remind people that all success is temporal and one can’t rely on endless success because of limitations with resources and the need to share rewards that require everyone to partake in some of the time to maintain a cohesive society. There are economic downturns, and personal health reasons for limitation. There are even strange scenarios of boredom where too much success can spoil one’s zest and freshness. Like with sports teams that win too often, the hunger to win naturally evaporates. That knowledge in religions allows people to share more easily because they know deep down that even if they are supremely greedy, no object, relationship, or power will satisfy the mind eternally. There will always be a “what’s next?” mentality that will marshal the individual on to the next endeavor. This is even when a person is aimless and they are compelled to find targets of desire in the near environment simply because they are accessible in the short-term. The examples we are talking about here instead are for those where success is so rare, treated as a source of conflict, and people feel the need to resort to self-sabotage to protect against threats to self-esteem. In slang it’s what the general public call a Loser, but in fact that category includes large sections of the population. The category can also adjust through time as fortunes of a society advance or decay. In psychoanalysis, many patients have been through enormous obstacles, often human obstacles in the past, that lead to old templates of reticence that over-protect and deny when a modicum of success is actually available.
In Fear of Vocational Success, the author lists out some of the deeper unconscious motives usually not found in any career counseling and can hobble those results for career counselors who don’t have any therapeutic background. Providing exciting employment opportunities to listless, depressed, and inhibited clients inevitably leads to failure. Many Career Counsellors have no idea what is lurking in the depths of the unconscious of their clients. Lionel Ovesey encountered Freudian situations where patients felt “[unconscious implications of] retaliation and punishment by the father. Hence, it was the ever-present threat of castration that forced these patients to abandon their aspirations.” Castration is a psychoanalytical term for inhibition couched in sexual metaphor for low self-esteem reactions, shame, intimidation, narcissistic wounding, leading to repression. Criticism in the workplace often leads to desires for revenge and a need to vent frustration. There’s guilt in wanting to express aggression because the lack of skill to deal with negative emotions leads people to treat reactivity as either one extreme of lashing out violently with sadism or to attack oneself excessively in masochism.
Sexuality Pt 5: Sadism – Sigmund Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtssd-sexuality-pt-5-sadism-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
Sexuality Pt 4: Masochism – Sigmund Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtrq1-sexuality-pt-4-masochism-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
Narcissistic Supply – Freud and Beyond – WNAAD: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html
“The essential failure in adaptation in patients suffering from the fear of success is an inhibition of aggression…In those cases, however, where there is severe intimidation, either from the parental rival or from the sibling, or from both, the environment re-enforces the symbolic equation between aggression and violence. Under such circumstances, the unconscious desire to destroy the more powerful rivals generates enormous guilt and, at the same time, carries in its wake the certain threat of equally violent retaliation. The child begins to withhold aggression not only for reasons of conscience, but also to avoid destruction by his competitors, all of whom he sees as stronger than himself. In this way, an inhibition of aggression is gradually laid down. Once this happens, the misconception that all aggression must be violent is symbolically extended to encompass assertion of all kinds, non-hostile as well as hostile. The child emerges as an adult from these struggles with his ambitions intact, but with his capacity to take effective action seriously crippled…What happens to the personality of a child who grows up in an atmosphere of hostile competition with the anticipation of constant attack by superior forces? The inhibition of aggression laid down in this competitive context undermines self-confidence, deflates the self-esteem, and creates a chronic feeling of inadequacy. These people are fired by great ambition to surpass their rivals, but in the end they are blocked by a stringent conscience and the guilty fear of retaliation. They tend to be compulsive, emotionally rigid, self-referential, distrustful in their interpersonal relations, wary, suspicious, and emotionally detached. From this description it is clear that the personality of the patient with a success phobia revolves around a paranoid-depressive-obsessive axis in which the paranoid trend predominates and projection is the major mechanism of defense.”
There are also cultural influences that a culturally astute vocational therapist would find insightful to know. “The universal destructive fantasies in men consist of death, castration, and homosexual submission. They are derived from both Oedipal and sibling rivalries and their evolution is molded by cultural stereotypes. In our society, masculinity represents strength, dominance, superiority; femininity represents weakness, submissiveness, inferiority. The former is equated with success; the latter with failure. The nonassertive male, therefore, by the time he is an adult, reacts to a competitive defeat in any area of behavior—sexual, social, or vocational—by means of a symbolic equation: I am a failure = I am not a man = I am a woman = I am castrated = I am a homosexual. The defeat is thus placed in a dominance-submission context in which the weaker male is castrated by the stronger male and forced to submit to him homosexually as a woman. Any man, then, who fails in the masculine role, may symbolically conceive of himself as a homosexual and hence develop an anxiety about being homosexual. Such anxieties are frequently misnamed homosexual anxieties, but they are more accurately described as pseudohomosexual, since they are not motivated by a sexual motivation at all, but are ‘homosexual’ only in a symbolic sense. Pseudohomosexual anxieties are often encountered in the course of a success phobia, especially as a paranoid expectation of homosexual assault.”
Both for men and women, failure is always followed by an anticipation punishment and the anticipation is a kind of over-reaction where work criticism, or employment rejection, is connected with annihilation of the total personality and even the sexual components as symbols of assertiveness. Traditional sexual roles in women also bring a sense of guilt similar to the list above related to being overly ambitious, therefore unattractive to men, almost a pseudo-man. Some men view these women as if they are “butch,” “lesbian,” when they succeed in the workplace, like femininity is not useful in a masculine competitive world where people feel they have to prove themselves constantly to others in order to be viewed as successful and demonstrate through self-promotion in front of others to make it easier to ask for a pay rise, or to signal to employers that one should be promoted. Many women feel a sense of impostor syndrome when they are at the cusp of success, and ironically anticipate their own intimidation or psychological castration at those times of intense promotion, selection, and advancement.
“Women engaged in struggles for power with men are subject to the same cultural stereotypes as their male rivals and hence feel at a competitive disadvantage simply because they are women. They aspire to be men and often unconsciously conceive of themselves as ‘phallic’ women; that is, as possessors of a penis, the symbol of masculine prowess. In such women, the penalties for defeat by men consist of death, ‘castration of the illusory penis, and violent destruction per vaginum by the victorious male’s penis. The symbolic equation used by these women, therefore, is the following: I am a failure = I am not a man = I am a woman = I am castrated. Thus, the end-product of a competitive failure in a so called phallic woman is more often than not a castration anxiety. This anxiety may be combined with considerable sexual inhibition and even withdrawal from intercourse because the partner’s penis is erroneously perceived as a dangerous weapon.” It’s really the intimidation that conditions extreme reactions because of strong affect that overloads the brain. To connect with sexuality and Darwinism, the sexual component of love is connected in psychoanalysis with all forms of love, including all forms of positive creation. Repeated intimidation destroys those feelings which affect self-esteem, attractiveness, and potentially some opportunities to find a mate. It’s natural to feel a fear reaction with criticism, but it takes a certain amount of psychological development to tolerate rejection, to grow a thick skin, based on experience, and possibly successes in therapy. Without that development the intimidation can sink in and manifest psychopathology and avoidance. “His guilt is so great that he behaves in a group as though at any moment someone will discover that he is plotting a murder…In such cases, where any contact with people results in severe guilty fear and blushing, the patient may avoid group situations altogether and lead the life of a semi-recluse.”
Similar to the typical prescriptions of behavioral psychologists, the environment has to be faced and tolerated again and again in order for reactivity to deescalate naturally. Essentially creating a thick skin. It’s realizing that no matter how strong a reaction is, it naturally decays on its own with time. “Psychotherapy for this syndrome in better integrated patients, who have the adaptive resources to achieve maximum therapeutic goals, is essentially that of any phobia. Sooner or later the patient must make efforts to enter into the phobic situation. He must do this again and again until he reconditions a new pattern of response free from anxiety. The therapist can facilitate this process of healthy repair by conveying to the patient insight into the unconscious ideation that accounts for his disorder. To fulfill this function, the therapist must have readily in his grasp the psychodynamic organization of these ideas, which in the success phobia can be extremely complex.”
Parental or authority figure templates can be explored in therapeutic environments and many patients can vent their frustrations safely, feel the cathartic release, maybe learn about their parent’s limitations, forgive, and then focus on realistic actions towards success. Revenge fantasies need a healthy outlet to burn off and transform into assertiveness and healthy action. A desire for violence is usually due to helplessness, but when there’s action, one is not really helpless anymore and the anger transforms into energy, because the action creates enjoyable progress, and the anger motivating the urge to retaliate has depleted. The reason for the guilt also vanishes. Patients with a lot of guilt betray a lot of defense mechanisms, and excuses that avoid the actions required for success. That’s when helplessness turns back into revenge fantasies and fears of over-reacting with narcissistic rage. Heinz Kohut said of narcissistic patients that “they do not subject themselves to the efforts, trial and error learning, and frustrations needed to learn, so they devalue achievement oriented goals.”
For Kohut, there are two types of frustrations, the kind that one can overcome and the kind that is traumatic. “…Optimal frustrations involve sufficient delay in satisfaction to induce tension-increase and disappointment in the attempt to obtain wish-fulfillment through fantasy; the real satisfaction occurs quickly enough, however, to prevent a despairing and disillusioned turning away from reality…” In a way, this is a great description of Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow in that challenges are needed for satisfaction and they can only be satisfying if there is a minimum delay of gratification but the delay can’t be infinite, or too long to matter. After a success there is a memory-learning that becomes a foundation for new goals to pursue, and new skills developed in weak areas can make big differences in psychological stability. Like an earworm, the brain is trying to figure out a song until it is so understood that it begins to fade into boredom until the next song taps into that part of the mind that wants to figure things out. Even trauma is this way when there’s so much venting and self exploration. The lessons are learned so well that they fade from a person’s regular emotional expression. “Psychological structure is laid down (a) via optimal frustration and (b) in consequence of optimal frustration, via transmuting internalization.” Like having a three legged chair, the fourth leg makes the biggest difference.
The key is choosing appropriate goals that aren’t too easy or too hard for the skill level. Conversely, forgetting has the value of creating challenges in areas that were once mastered. If a hobby was taken up in the past, mastered, and then abandoned to boredom, there’s a return of pleasure when enough time has passed and forgetting of the skill has seeped in. This can happen after returning from vacations and work gains a little bit of tension, but hopefully not too much forgetting and stress. For Kohut, this is how one maintains connection with reality. “The ability of the infantile psyche to learn to distinguish reality from hallucination (and thus to transform hallucinations into memories) is hampered if the infant is either excessively indulged, or if it is exposed to frustrations of traumatic intensity. Traumatic frustrations of infantile needs ensue when the waiting period exceeds the tolerance of the infantile psyche or when the gratifications offered by the environment are unpredictable, e.g., when feedings are dispensed inconsistently. In either case, the infantile psyche turns away from reality and retains self-soothing gratification through fantasy.”
The difficulty with traumatic experiences are how they keep people from personal development. Daydreaming, or hallucinations that counter reality, can take over and there’s no new development because the rewards in the fantasy world aren’t real, kind of like a primitive video game. It may feel good, but nothing concrete has happened in reality. “Traumatic experiences, like experiences of optimal frustration, lay down memory traces; but in the case of traumatic frustrations, the infantile drives and associated traumatic memories are walled off under the influence of primitive despair and anxiety. Since the psyche strives to prevent the recurrence of the former state of anxiety and despair, the repression is permanently retained, at the sacrifice of further differentiation of the repressed wishes. Traumatic frustration of drives thus produces a psychological enclave…Unconscious contents that are sealed off…are not exposed to the influence of new experiences and are therefore incapable of change (learning).”
One can languish in fantasy or move into things like addictions as a replacement for pleasure in development. Even if there is a forced attempt at development, there can be a sense of grind that removes the pleasure out of it sapping inspiration. The instant gratification of addiction competes with the rewards in the concrete world of work and relationships because their time delay is longer. Conversely, the addictions are short-term pleasures so they go into boredom and tolerance easier, and this is why many people can drop their addictions because they found work, hobbies or interests that have just the right amount of delay to manifest deeper satisfaction. Therapeutic success leads to a playful attitude of initiative and self-created responsibility. Melanie Klein talked about this as an integration of the depressive position where a sense of individual boundaries between self and other are developed. One can grieve the imperfections of others and for oneself, and the pathological sense of blame and victimhood can relax. People are imperfect, including parents, and now as an adult one can grieve, one can accept the mixture of good and bad in people, and one can then move on and look to one’s own playful Ego and rest the pining for satisfaction and acknowledgement solely from fantasized Object Relations in the mind.
For Kohut, free association can be used to bring out incredibly shameful and unpleasant experiences that have been walled off from full experience so that grieving and catharsis can release defenses and a learning mentality can arise. Acting out identities based on poor behaviors means repeating those behaviors. Certainly a good therapist can put themselves in another person’s shoes and see that traumatic events would have altered their own life if they lived through those events themselves. Sensing that a therapist is trustworthy can allow for more undistorted material to be released and experienced. Like in the ‘Wolfman’s’ possible situation of a pathogenic secret, that derailed his therapy, it’s really a secret identity that is frozen and needs to melt to allow for the capacity for learning. The transference of good feelings towards the therapist, being treated now like a good parent, can’t be misused. There is a danger of going into disapproval and censorship again with countertransference. This can happen even if nothing judgmental was said. Tone and body language alone can send the signal of the therapist’s disgust with the patient. Repression reinforces those identities and inhibitions like filling up an archeological dig, and learning is delayed further.
People have to tolerate the tension between their real self for being imperfect compared to their ideal self without having to go into massive defenses and pathological shame when there’s criticism. This can easily be seen in work ambition. When we are growing up we are trying to gain some form of adult independence, and to be able to have experiences of frustration that develop skills we can rely on later means we can get a sense of self-esteem from our own resourcefulness, and hopefully find that in our work. Part of the pull of self-sabotage comes from Object Relations where there’s repression from caregivers and we can imitate that in our pathological conscience and fail ourselves to avoid criticism we anticipate. There’s also a dependency where we can desire to be rescued when we fail to believe in ourselves. Outside of technical consulting, there is individual trial and error involved in job searches and business ideas that requires some tolerance for delay in gratification. The therapist acts as an approving parent in the therapeutic environment, but she doesn’t provide the answers and solutions, only the emotional support so that one can find resourcefulness in oneself. Failures in therapy usually go into loops of dependency and inhibition.
An end goal for psychoanalysis is this freeing oneself from past psychological objects and to reintroduce one back into social life more independently. Erik Erikson said that the goal of Freud “in the curt way of his old days, is reported to have said: ‘Lieben und arbeiten’ (to love and to work).” This is the sign of good health. Before the work world can begin to feel smoother, the relief from therapy has to provide enough well-being and pleasurable concentration. There may need to be enough venting and catharsis from past traumas so that when the emotion is released and drained, and sees that what’s done is done and can’t be changed or a lesson is learned, consciousness is less interrupted. The mind then looks to itself for new actions, and new actions lead to progress, which feels elevating. Even just a sense of being after catharsis is a basic form of happiness. A lot of meditation practices aim at this ability to just enjoy being, which is a great foundation for work. In The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?, the authors find that a certain amount of happiness, and availableness to happiness, is required in order to support actual success. “The results reveal that happiness is associated with and precedes numerous successful outcomes, as well as behaviors paralleling success. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that positive affect—the hallmark of well-being—may be the cause of many of the desirable characteristics, resources, and successes correlated with happiness…Work performance may be more strongly predicted by well-being than by job satisfaction.”
Furthermore, past successes also provide memory templates for future success, so happiness is a momentum that supports more action, like Kohut’s laying down of foundations. Those actions eventually lead to more success which in a loop leads to memories with an expectation of happiness. “Happiness, rooted in personality and in past successes, leads to approach behaviors that often lead to further success. At the same time, happy people are able to react with negative emotions when it is appropriate to do so.” That feedback loop, and more importantly the habit of happiness, or a baseline of happiness, creates the necessary resilience needed to deal with inevitable slumps and obstacles. The difference here is that negative obstacles aren’t followed by self-sabotage, but instead there is now a habit of healthy approach behaviors to create a new thread of momentum.
What makes psychoanalysis more difficult is expanding Freud’s fear of success template beyond parents frustrating children. Friendships, authority figures in society, and prescribed social roles also play a factor because of transference. In Converging evidence that fear of success is multidimensional, the authors here list more fears of success beyond parental guilt and shaming. They include:
- Fear of social ostracism.
- Fear of a loss of affiliation or social identity.
- Fear of negative peer reactions and their sabotage attempts.
- Fear of the demands required for success.
- Fear of losing an intimate partner because of time commitments required for success.
- Fear of accepting compliments.
Ultimately, these fears lead to lowered ambition and being drawn towards non-challenging tasks. Now there are values to non-challenging tasks beyond being too inhibited, and many jobs are perfectly suited for people who don’t have a career in mind or a business idea. Not everything has to be high-powered, but fear of success in these examples prevents people from finding challenges that are appropriate to their actual skills so that boredom takes over and one is locked out of Flow psychology. Otto Fenichel also mentioned forms of hard working that are pathological where people over-compensate in work and use burnout and tiredness as a badge of honor, instead of being self-confident that one is working for a purpose and one is deserving of reward. This is like the person who works as a defense against endless criticism from others, and who avoids guilt for enjoying rewards, regardless of progress towards the overall organizational goal, which was the main purpose of work all along. Work, success, and reward. If success is attacked, people have to feign a sense of being a wounded soldier while their success builds. This is to gain success on the sly so that envy from others is drained because they sense your work frustration and see that you deserve more reward for the pain that you display. If there is pain in the work but for some reason the pain is invisible to co-workers, they may feel the reward is unjustified. One gets hit with blame and guilt for no reason. “Fenichel considered work a substitute for instinctual needs, and a defense against them, in modern culture. Therefore, imminent achievement activates untoward feelings, but hard work without achievement is intra-psychically acceptable.”
Part of the difficulty with this subject is that many traumas, and negative attitudes towards work and success are based on how nefarious people in power can actually be. Not all fear of social consequences are without reason. People don’t get this when they go into the workforce for the first time, that the powerful have trouble following contracts and cling to employees like they are property and inanimate objects to manipulate like tools, which makes people feel powerless and repressed. In the book On the Pleasures of Owning Persons, which is about the period of time of slave ownership, some elements still apply nonetheless. It lists these pleasures, which are: “being served, believing that one’s family is superior, the thrill of investing in property that produces wealth and that will likely increase every fifteen to twenty years, the satisfaction of owning the talents, effort, and minds of people dedicated to your betterment, being treated like a lord, and feeling admired—even loved—by enslaved persons.” Human nature can happen anywhere with any power differentials. If you are out of power, you will feel more oppressed and repressed no matter your background. Found in the book is what’s typical with politics, and how oppressors create their own myths, use tactics of burden and victimhood to justify their exploitation. Slave owners “shunned simple truths—of universal human sympathy, for example—by splitting, by constantly reminding themselves of their permanent superiority, of the ‘burdens of ownership,’ and of their Christian mission, just as the white authors of apartheid did in South Africa a century later.”
Western Enlightenment values, in their purest non-hypocrisy, which is against slavery, were introduced not that long ago in human history, and because those values are not genetic, they have to be relearned by every new generation, and slavery can manifest in non-stereotypical ways. This can be easily seen if you are a Caucasian who believes he’s an oppressor and then go and try to make a living in another country where you are now the minority. You will feel the difference right away. In fact, you don’t have to be an immigrant. You can just feel this when you are out of power in general. Bigotry has more to do with power and leverage in the end. The race or ethnicity targeted in bigotry is a lazy transference based on a limited bubble of experience for the individual. This is why perpetration and victimhood is slippery and can’t be confined to tropes and echoism. Predators can also camouflage themselves as victims to further confuse people in the workplace, and they have endless false narratives that pop out from psychological defenses when they are criticized. This is why any person who wants out of the fear of success has to embrace authenticity and abandon shame based identities of victimhood.
Narcissistic Supply – Freud and Beyond – WNAAD: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html
The Noble Eightfold Path: Right Livelihood: https://rumble.com/v1grhrh-the-noble-eightfold-path-right-livelihood.html
Authenticity At Work, Shame, and Politics
With power and corruption being a normal force that manifests more or less in every organization, there’s a constant repression against ambition and authenticity in workers because people want to avoid unpleasant truthful criticism. Truth is a threat to corrupt politics, false narratives, and leads to political scapegoating. Telling the truth in a workplace threatens those who made mistakes and are covering them up. Some who make big mistakes need big movements to double-down because of the need to save face. Admitting mistakes courts rejection and a loss of income that pays for all the things we are addicted to. There’s often blowback that many truth tellers aren’t prepared for. With that pressure, workers often continue a strategy of laying low and being a “yes-person” with obsequious interactions with the powerful. These are serious problems that can wipe out any honesty with oneself and co-workers which demolishes supports for legitimate success in an organization. Success without legitimacy can be wiped out by policing functions when society’s laws are broken. Big mistakes and big coverups are hard to get away with. Lies also threaten an organization because they can’t maintain customers and sales if everything is based on lies and material errors are ignored. At some point a good worker will say “here’s the truth!” So many situations are existential when one takes on self-responsibility. Some employers want a truth teller because they know about power bubbles and they want to maintain a connection with reality so that the business can continue to thrive and respond to real cues from the economy. For an individual to say “I have some truth I need to tell you,” it takes a lot of courage. It’s much easier to be in a hive mind and tell people what they want to hear to maintain safety. Yet that assertiveness for the truth is often what distinguishes what is a good or bad business. If someone values reality, which is authentic, and then communicates that authentic perception to others, there is a balance in the psyche between the Id-Super-Ego, and Ego, because evidence creates a feeling of confidence and infuses authenticity and confidence in the organization or institution.
Authenticity at a basic level is a choice to courageously say “I see the truth this way…” and then others can respond, hopefully with some evidential response instead of a false narrative. All that is left is individual choice based on the Ego that chooses between the conscience (Super-ego) and personal cravings (Id). Relinquishing that choice ironically is also a choice, but one that drops the responsibility of the Super-ego to guide important activities with conscience. This leads to inhibition and guilt feelings for regular people who feel morally compromised, but in the case of psychopathic leaders, they repeatedly choose the Ego and lop off the Super-ego, or literally they have no brain structures for a Super-ego, and then they can gratify the Id with no nagging conscience. There may be a political price to pay for telling the truth, but the reward is a feeling of integration and a reduction of guilt. In Free will in total institutions, authors found that, “free will and existence represent the same concept: I choose – therefore I am. When free will is denied there is emptiness and nothingness, and only when choices are made there is agency (‘I’). The ‘I’ exists only when one confronts a social crossroad and must make a choice – even when the situation leaves him with a very poor choice between ‘bad’ and ‘worse’ options. In light of the above ‘I had no choice’ statement related to selection is the best example for contradiction in terms, as the existence of agency (‘I’) postulates the case of choice, and the subsequent statement of ‘had no choice’ is the ultimate denial of responsibility over one’s lived experience. This is simultaneously a pessimistic and an optimistic outlook: People cannot avoid the responsibility for their experience and behavior in a particular context, but this responsibility is also their redemption.” In a way, by supporting psychopathic leaders who just want to gratify their Id at all costs, or if they have a narcissistic pathological Super-ego that is grandiose and out of touch, one is taking on their symptoms by being an accessory. That’s how the hive-mind can pass on pathology to regular people through the force of things like pay cheque leverage. The difference is that truly psychopathic people won’t feel this guilt, but their underlings will. At some point, whistleblowers will realize this and start focusing on their alignment, because they are hoping for a future pay cheque somewhere else, and they need authenticity in their work history to make that change. Once people are independent of the leverage used against them, it becomes much easier to rebel against psychopathic leaders and let go of their “doggie treats.” This is an important lesson especially for young workers who have little savings, no power, and no leverage. They may be willing to do anything for a pay cheque. Societies that accept corruption as a normal cost of business become hell-scapes of ontological misery.
Dr. Peter Breggin laid out the current battle between Globalism and Nationalism where all of this is playing out, and you can see leverage being manipulated like a chessboard to attempt a checkmate. “Since the League of Nations to the United Nations to the Globalists to the Great Reset, the con is that it’s for the good of humanity, but the truth is that it’s a way of draining money, wealth and power upward into the global class, which is also the elites, the billionaires, the big corporations. So if you look at any one puzzling problem it fits in that explanation. Nothing is haphazard. Why do they want an open border? If they can flood the country with people who don’t understand the Constitution of The United States or understand The Bill of Rights, that will weaken our sovereignty, and if we can flood the country with cheaper labor to make us look more like the Chinese labor market or the Vietnamese labor market, that all weakens our integrity and our sovereignty. Then you look at inflation, inflation is the classic way that the wealthy grow richer and we grow poorer, and that happens directly through the banks. The banks create inflation by pouring money into other banks into the wealthy people, then they get the money and the money grows cheap, and then it gets paid for with taxes and inflation. So again it’s the money shifting up…The World Health Organization has become a spearhead of draining wealth upward and power upward. They have been working closely with the CDC.”
Of course as everyone saw, small business, which makes up a big part of the middle class, they lost wealth during these lockdowns and even lost their entire businesses while larger corporations could gobble them up. I would clarify on inflation in that the banks provide money in the form of loans to banks and loans go to the wealthy in the majority, because they have the best credit scores and get the new money first. When that money gets spent and it moves in the economy, they get the benefit of the current prices. When shelves become empty then the poor come later to pay the higher price, which means a regressive tax from the poor to the wealthy. There are also pandemic welfare programs that pay people to stay home and that federal money is borrowed, or printed in this case, because foreign investors are scarce and finding the U.S. risky, so when they don’t work, then there’s less productivity, meaning less products, so the prices go up even further, but these people are expected to vote for the ruling class because they are dependent on their largesse. The dependency continues also because low wages and inflation erode savings and independence as a defense against future predation and slavery. “We now have a global predator class that masquerades as Marxism, the Chinese, or bringing progressivism into the corporate world and that is just another form of predation.”
Breggin was on the War Room with Steve Bannon and Steve earlier in the year vented out a lot of frustration towards the globalists who’ve piled crisis upon crisis in the last 2 years and egged on a war with Russia and Ukraine with repeated signals of weakness. “The working class people in this country have had a belly full of being told what to do, of being discounted, of having their sons and daughters die on foreign battlefields and their tax money to pay for it, while we bury ourselves in 30 trillion dollars of debt…to make you wealthy. You’re getting wealthy. They’re getting poor… Now you’ve done it to the people in Ukraine. You are the worst scum in the history of the Earth! You sit there with your fireplaces and your books and all your degrees from Harvard and Yale and Oxford and Cambridge and all you’ve done is helped to destroy this world.” This is the warning that when people with endless false narratives gain power, and thread one distraction after another, manipulate attention, Wag The Dog, and pull on leverage arms of the public, and nobody has counter-leverage to do anything about it, all one can do is rant while taking it on the chin. It’s a bit like Greek Gods playing with the humans and laughing at the puny people who can’t do anything but grovel or complain. This goes from world politics down to the regular person’s day to day life and sends a signal that if you gain power you’re stuck in these political games where truth is malleable, and unless you are a political junkie, know all the right moves, etc., it’s hard to know which side to pick. Then when you have Cluster B personality disorders becoming trusted experts, it’s even harder to decide if you can’t recognize them. It’s easier to default on asking who feeds you, or follow the money.
Also on the War Room, the International Editor Ben Harnwell explained his experience of realizing you’re on the wrong side and how it’s easy to be clouded by self-interest and lose the plot. Your self-interest can be contractual with the public you serve, but it can go into denial as well. “It took me quite a bit of time. Sometimes I’m a little slow on the uptake. It took me a few years. Working in the Tory party I was one of the 20% who were principally pro-European. It was going to the European Parliament itself that I realized that the whole thing was a racket. Perhaps it took me about 6 months when I was there for the scales to fall, and it was an awakening.”
It doesn’t matter what systems are created, or replaced, or a new -ism is created, certain personality types will make organizations into a racket no matter what it is, and in the words of the great sage Dr. Ian Malcom from Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way.” Here Ben Harnwell prefers to call them “Sociopathic Overlords,” because of the damage that can occur from predation mixed with incompetence. Whether people are conscious of this or not when it happens, if you work less and somehow get more pay, this is already a predatory setup. “These people, the U.N., the WHO, and the European Union, they exist because they intervene constantly in our lives, and they have a mandate to do this, an illegitimate mandate. So they’re always there, getting involved, interfering with their pointless regulations. The more that these supra-national bodies do, the more they get paid, the better pensions they get, it’s dependent on this rules-based international order. It’s not as if these people produce anything useful as we would define this in the terms of free market capitalism. They don’t provide a service that people actually want, but they have jobs for life. In the European Commission they pay 10% income tax. When I went to work in the European Parliament I had all those pro-European ideals. ‘The EU kept the peace for 50 years.’ It’s when I went there, I realized that no one was motivated by these ideals, they were just basically in it for themselves. They wanted to go out on the best pension possible. They turn up in the office. They mill around and go to the bars and then they go home at 3:30pm. Then they get months off and they get years off if they want to go and study. The whole thing is a racket…”
“We have a system that benefits a certain type of hack. It’s not like the normal political system where in politics it tends to be the most alpha person that gets ahead, who commands respect, and perhaps a little bit of fear, amongst the colleagues. That’s not what you get in these international bureaucracies. It has a culture all of its own. It’s people who can game the system for their own careers. These people when they talk, they talk with authority. They have no idea what they are talking about, no real sense of intuition and connection between cause and effect, but when they talk, they talk with a certain synthetic form of gravitas, and coupled with a compliant mainstream media around the world, their words are carried as if this is the truth brought down from the mountain by Moses himself, [but] they know how to talk to the other bureaucracies around the world. This is why they hated Donald Trump…He represented a threat to them. It was Donald Trump who was talking about defunding the United Nations and the World Health Organization. This is hitting these people where it hurts. These people go you know ‘I’ve got my little sinecure that will see through until I retire, and then I’ll get my kids a place. Will be fine in Switzerland or Brussels.’ These people are all the same. They have no national belonging. Their citizenship is in of this order. ‘We’re going to be fine. There might be a deep recession in my own home country where I was born, but I’m fine. I have guaranteed income. I have guaranteed pension. I have guaranteed health security for me and my family. I have guaranteed 6 weeks off a year and all the rest of it. I can work 4 hours a day. I’m guaranteed because no country is going to pull out of this system.'” Or so they thought until Brexit, and the current Nationalist movements popping up around the world. Even if nationalism does make a long-term comeback, there’s still going to be national sinecures, but the public will be dealing with 3 layers of government (municipal, regional, and national), instead of adding a fourth one. There are also monopolies in capitalism that crop up from time to time and they always meddle in politics to protect their graft.
Dr. Peter Breggin on Globalist Elites – Bannon’s War Room: https://rumble.com/v162w9f-dr.-peter-breggin-on-globalist-elites.html
Steve Bannon Rant “You’re Scum Of The Earth!: https://rumble.com/vwy0r5-wow-steve-bannons-rant-to-the-global-elites.-youre-scum-of-the-earth..-a-re.html
Weapons Sent From The West To Ukraine Are Being Found On Black Market – The War Room – Ben Harnwell: https://rumble.com/v1chtmv-ben-harnwell-weapons-sent-from-the-west-to-ukraine-are-being-found-on-black.html
Putin Has Put The ‘Rule-Based World Order’ Legitimacy In Jeopardy – The War Room – Ben Harnwell: https://rumble.com/v1chqdb-ben-harnwell-putin-has-put-the-rule-based-world-order-legitimacy-in-jeopard.html
The People That Govern Us Are Incompetent – The War Room – Ben Harnwell: https://rumble.com/v1chszt-ben-harnwell-the-people-that-govern-us-are-incompetent.html
Authenticity means responsibility and responsibility means action based on authentic evidence. You may pick wrong sides from time to time, but eventually if you look at evidence it can guide you back to more authentic foundations, but it requires choice and sometimes painful sacrifice. Any legitimate success requires a number of action steps in order to pivot to the right spot. These actions include working with others and choosing organizations based on how the authority figures carry themselves. It means being honest with criticism and being okay with having to leave organizations that have a vision that one doesn’t support. One is courageous enough to sacrifice short-term gain and is at home with action towards something more long-term. In Jacob Golomb’s In Search of Authenticity, “the thinkers we have looked at preferred action, or Heideggerian ‘care’, to reflection (which, Kierkegaard claims, ‘freezes action’) and knowledge (which ‘kills action’ according to Nietzsche).” Through trial and error, the effort to figure out one’s place and success in the world, it is often the errors we make that helps us understand ourselves and through imperfect action, there is more progress. “Nietzsche and Kierkegaard argue that one knows what one is only after realizing what one is not. Hence, it is essential for the individual to encounter and experiment with the various life-styles, patterns and belief-systems that arise in human society, history and ethics.” There is also a trap with knowledge because unless that knowledge becomes a habit in our actions, it simply becomes a sterile collection hobby. Applied knowledge also creates mistakes that provides new knowledge that is missing from an abstract philosophical text that we read, or an overly general self-help book. This is part of the reason why there are so many books. Each book tries to fill out what was missing in other books.
The difficulty with the fear of success is that trial and error, especially the error part of it, can build an identity of shame from childhood into adulthood. This leads to pathogenic secrets, lying, and defense mechanisms to over-compensate, such as in narcissistic disorders. Through psychoanalysis, free association and transference therapy, these defenses can be teased out and a more authentic self that responds to stimuli, without these well-practiced defenses, can finally surface, if the pathology is not too severe. Usually for patients within a normal potential to heal the self, and to be able to exercise it and develop it, there has to be an acceptance of imperfect standards, acceptance of rejection from others, and a trust that one can learn from mistakes, including very big mistakes. Identities become pathological when they deny truth because it’s too painful to learn from. Those who can grieve a mistake can believe in their own learning and the old identity doesn’t have to be adhered to. The grieving is a signal that one knows emotionally and painfully that something was a mistake or a loss. That’s proof of learning, unless a person is faking it of course.
Pathogenic secrets can be worked out for oneself in contemplation, a self-therapy, which includes examination of defense mechanisms cocooning these secrets. With a real time mindfulness and deconstruction of pathogenic identities as they arise from free association work with journals for example, or working in a safe therapeutic environment where a therapist can reparent and assure a weak sense of self of its ability to learn, a patient can accept that they are a human, they have to move on, and that they deserve a modicum of success and pleasure to be able to function and survive in society. In extreme examples, a person may have to work this out in a prison, or in more regular examples, a person can’t get back that lost relationship, or a job is long gone. A learning orientation allows one to look at behavior and habits as malleable through contemplation of rewards and consequences so that stressful identities can melt. This may include past examples of learning that have already happened and are taken for granted. The belief in one’s ability to learn creates a resilience to criticism and concrete proof of development strengthens resilience further. In Authenticity in the Psychoanalytic Encounter authors define authenticity as “based on some acceptance of external reality and some acceptance of oneself as one really is.” Authenticity is accepting one’s realistic needs and moving towards realistic goals.
One of the easiest ways to see how identity can be malleable is to follow some of the meditation reviews I’ve done. Treat identity as a stress sensation, meaning to treat identity like a stress-wave instead of a stress-particle, and wait for impulses to arise and pass away on their own. It may take some powerful withdrawal symptoms to go through when dealing with addictions, or poor habits, but the impulse is impermanent, and therefore can’t last forever, so relief happens on its own if you wait long enough. Conditioning is basically when tension waves peak and motivate an action. Then we label those motivation waves and actions a particular identity, which can dangerously use the power of belief to repeat undesirable behaviors. If there’s consistent abstinence, when the impulse returns for the next wave, the wave peaks get weaker and weaker by inaction and behavioral extinction. Waiting is essentially doing absolutely nothing and letting impulses arise and pass away with the sole purpose to see rest in the downward wave. People enjoy recreation because they can stop a repetitive activity, but replacing one kind of doing with another is still exertion. Here the movement of the attention span can relax completely. Thoughts can then be like a river that rises in the spring and then calms down on its own. Each ripple can be different manifestations of personality. Then later on other activities can be conditioned because they are more helpful habits and because they are socially acceptable while still being personally gratifying. This is the regular challenge and potential hypocrisy that all animals go through who are alive and have a nervous system. Conditioning is powerful, and overrides new changes when they just begin. It has to be respected to prevent excess pride and embarrassment related to predictable hypocrisy. Authenticity has to include choice, and choice allows for learning, which melts rigid identities, or sensation-identities, if you want to be more phenomenological, that if ignored, regularly send a signal of solidity and tension that communicates that no learning is possible and one should just repeat. Identity is an impermanent sensation, trigger or complex you can feel in the body. In meditation, one sees identities as being multiple identities conditioned by a variety of activities, almost like each activity has it’s own flavor or sensation or identity. The overall personality is built up of multiple conditioned identities, including anything biological. The goal is to weaken some identities and strengthen others and then see how far you can go biologically and authentically.
Case Studies: The ‘Wolfman’ Pt. 3: https://rumble.com/v1gvcxr-group-psychology-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-33.html
Identity and 5 ways to make authentic change: https://rumble.com/v1gvjcr-identity-and-5-ways-to-make-authentic-change.html
Thought and Meditation – Rob Burbea: https://rumble.com/v1gqufd-thought-and-meditation-rob-burbea.html
The Noble Eightfold Path: Right Mindfulness: https://rumble.com/v1grixl-the-noble-eightfold-path-right-mindfulness.html
The ‘Wolfman’ and Other Cases – Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780142437452/
Fried-Buchalter, S. Fear of success, fear of failure, and the imposter phenomenon among male and female marketing managers. Sex Roles 37, 847–859 (1997).
OVESEY L. Fear of Vocational Success: A Phobic Extension of the Paranoid Reaction. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1962;7(2):82–92.
Susan Kavaler-Adler (2006) “My graduation is my mother’s funeral”: Transformation from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position in fear of success, and the role of the internal saboteur, International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 15:02, 117-130
Hyland, M.E., Dann, P.L. Converging evidence that fear of success is multidimensional. Current Psychology 7,199–206 (1988).
Rabstejnek, Carl. (2015). FEAR OF SUCCESS: A Phenomenon with Assorted Explanations (Including Psychoanalytic, Feminist, and Other Theories).
Davidov J, Eisikovits Z. Free will in total institutions: The case of choice inside Nazi death camps. Conscious Cogn. 2015 Jul;34:87-97.
Childhood and Society – Erik Erikson: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393310689/
On the Pleasures of Owning Persons: The Hidden Face of American Slavery by Professor Volney Gay: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780996548199/
In Search of Authenticity: Existentialism from Kierkegaard to Camus by Jacob Golomb: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780415119474/
The Psychoanalysis of Career Choice, Job Performance, and Satisfaction: How to Flourish in the Workplace by Paul Marcus: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781138211650/
Freud on Sublimation: Reconsiderations by Volney Patrick Gay: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780791411841/
Management innovation roadmap by Vittorio D’Amato: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9788823844711/
The Analysis of The Self – Heinz Kohut: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780226450124/
How Does Analysis Cure? – Heinz Kohut: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780226006000/
The Search For The Self – Heinz Kohut: Volume 1: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780367328702/ Volume 2: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781855758742/ Volume 3: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780367328733/ Volume 4: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780429907890/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/