“I do not know whether I fear failure, or success,” writes a friend. I know him quite well and I am sure he fears both. Failure, because he has had a hard time lately and feels weak; to fail would be to suffer yet another blow. Success, because he would lose his identity as underdog, which he has refined to a high art. The skills and particularly the perceptions he has honed in his position as underdog are in fact quite valuable and what he may need to do is find a way to conserve access to his proletarian being even as he moves up to the next level.
I first heard of fear of success in graduate school, when a counselor told a friend his anxiety about finishing his Ph.D. and getting a job, both of which he felt concerned he might not be able to do, was actually about what he would lose by gaining them. He would have to move to another state, most probably, and away from family; it was also not clear his girlfriend would move with him. And he would have to stop being a rebellious graduate student and become a member of the establishment.
I do not relate easily to either fear of failure or fear of success, but I have sometimes succumbed to the latter in dark ways. For example my success, I was told at one point, caused envy in the family and was therefore bad for other peoples’ marriages. I heard this during the time Reeducation was also telling me (for spurious reasons, of course) I “should not” be so successful.
In my already weakened state I took the family information to heart and embarked upon a program of self-sabotage. It was rather harrowing since I was trying to fail just enough to satisfy, but not enough to scare or inconvenience anyone. I suffered a realistic fear of unemployment, although Reeducation kept telling me it was anxiety based in lack of faith (it was actually fear based in action or lack thereof, a very different thing).
Still my most essential fear in this regard is not of failure or success but of individuation, since this is historically what has seemed to me to trigger emotional violence from others. And individuation is what one needs in order to achieve success, on the one hand, and to survive failure, on the other. This is the central paradox of my life: individuation is necessary to survival on the one hand, but puts one at mortal risk on the other. For this reason I have not advanced as far on the path as I might have done.
Perhaps I shall tell my friend, who wonders, that he does not need to decide whether it is success or failure that he fears, or which of the two he wants. Perhaps I should tell him that taking the path is itself success. That he need not attain the ultimate goal, if he does not want the things arrival would bring, and that there is no such thing as failure if one is on the path.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
The path of individuation? Yes. That is always a path to success — according to the unseen and internal tracking mechanisms of the soul, which will, at varying stages in our lives, punish us for inauthenticity if we do not have the courage to follow through on what we know.
Yes. And this is what I am so angry about Reeducation about, because it took so long to figure out that this was what it was against. Somehow had it not been a professional I would have forgiven it, but I went saying: I need support for the final push to individuation! And it said:
1. You must not trust your perceptions.
2. You must not trust your judgment.
3. You must not value yourself.
4. You must believe in a fixity of being, and fix your being in your weakest point.
5. You must decenter yourself in your life – and not in a Zen way!
6. You must not act in your own best interests.
7. You must not put first things first – relinquish “control” and blow as the winds take you; be reactive but never proactive.
I am now breaking all of these rules.
P.S. “Inauthenticity” really is the word. I was vulnerable to Reeducation because in my distant past inauthenticity had been taught as a survival strategy.
Supposedly it is difficult to be authentic but in fact authenticity makes life so much *easier.*
Yes, of late I am finding that authenticity is easier too. Actually, I want to be frank with you and say something about your looking to professional help to get that final push toward authenticity. I made the same mistake, way back, and I now think (in me, anyways) it was related to an internalised quality of laziness which actually came from having had some privilege. At the time I was thinking, “well, I’ve done x and y in my life, and goodness gracious, but it was a hard slog. So now I just want to lean back on this hill and have some expert push me the last few metres up the hill. What could be wrong with that?
But actually, everything is. Because authenticity does not come from that, it has to come from personal struggle and from inside.
So, I’m not saying that for me it was morally wrong to seek external advice (after all, that is what we are taught to do — and we are also mis-taught that knowledge is directly linked to power, when the relationship between the two things is hardly so cerebral or so simple, either). But, in terms of the way that the world is actually set up, it was a mistake.
Also — my father is king at believing (and teaching) that inauthenticity is a survival strategy. The thing is that he was hoisted by his own petard in every sense but the most literal one.
His advice when we emigrated from Zimbabwe to Australia was “when you get there, and Australians ask you what you think of the place, tell them that you think it’s great, because that’s what people want to hear.”
Actually, I don’t know to what degree that interfered with any authentic response to the place. Probably not a lot — but the message was there: People will like you better if you behave inauthentically. Eventually the poison became somewhat internalised — but not so much that I didn’t finally see what was happening and then violently resist it. But even to this day, there is a lot of self-doubt about acting in the broader public sphere in an authentic fashion (privately and interpersonally, I am ok with).
My parents, as I said, were hoisted by their own petards. Klippoths now, but not before. Or maybe a bit before, but I didn’t sense it.
“my father is king at believing (and teaching) that inauthenticity is a survival strategy”
Mine too!
***
Professional help, yes, bad move. Although until this very moment I have always considered that I did absolutely need the useful part of the information I got from seeking such help. Now I wonder: without this information, might I still have freed myself of what I needed to free myself of? It is possible.
What was the useful part of the information concerning seeking help?
What I learned is that most people are blinded by uniform levels of militant ignorance. Marechera saw this too, as he sought in his writing to:
“short-circuit, like in electricity, people’s traditions and morals. Because only then can they start having original thoughts of their own,” and that he “would like people to stop thinking in an institutionalised way” in order that they might “see those impossibilities within themselves, emotionally and intellectually – that’s why most of what I have written is always seen as being disruptive or destructive. For me, that slow brain death…can only be cured by this kind of literary shock treatment”. ( p262)
Marechera is avant-garde!
What I learned, or what was beamed back in the first two or so sessions based on what I said:
1. I was enmeshed in a family system.
2. I feared *extreme* violence.
3. Despite appearances, my family of origin was strongly marked by alcoholism, abuse, and neglect.
What I then could have been told (it wouldn’t have taken long back then):
1. The reactions to life I sometimes struggled with, and wanted to shed some light on, were reactions to this background.
2. Be aware of this, get information on how verbal and emotional abuse and manipulation work, learn how to recognize it and not get caught in it; take own needs seriously.
3. Key: act in own best interests, it’s not wrong; have more confidence, it’s not poor judgment.
4. Drop the idea of having to sacrifice first choices, having to please so as to remain relatively safe.
P.S. I had always intended to seek professional help for these things but what motivated it specifically was that:
1. I had at the time a stable life, income, etc., could afford to experiment a bit, I felt;
2. I had just finally stood up to my mother and it felt great! I was freed! So I thought: I am finally ready to begin work on this issue.
In fact I think I had just made a great step towards curing it without even defining it … had therapy not been so much in fashion at the time, this might have just been a milestone event and I’d have carried on. But instead I fell into a deep dark hole!
(I convinced myself that if I didn’t go through this dark wood I’d be superficially fine but internally troubled forever. I don’t think that was actually true … it was just the standard line on these things.)
Yep — I had the same feelings. Why not experiment a bit? After all, that is what we intellectual types have the RIGHT to do! Only, what I couldn’t see then was that somehow being able to think — having confidence in my ability to think, even though it was perhaps a fledgling confidence — already marked me as a member of the cultural elite. Most people (hard for us to believe I know) are writhing at much lower levels of desperation and confusion and DO.NEED. THERAPY. (But avoid it and/or cannot afford it — as a fact.)
Also, you were probably in the wrong cultural context (not in NY) in order to get the real elitist treatment you probably expected.
Therapy freed me to work but did not improve my personal life. And it was downright bad for my husband.
My parents are gone, and they no longer have any hold on me at any level. I am now at the age of individuation, which is old age. In my opinion it is not possible to reach such a level of individuation until old age.
You’ll know what I mean when you get there.
In the meantime, be good to yourselves. You deserve that.
Not sure that what was true for you — “it is not possible to reach such a level of individuation until old age” — is true for everybody. Some people can achieve individuation at a relatively young age. Some never will, no matter how old they get.
“Most people (hard for us to believe I know) are writhing at much lower levels of desperation and confusion and DO. NEED. THERAPY. […]
Also, you were probably in the wrong cultural context (not in NY) in order to get the real elitist treatment you probably expected.”
YES. And my therapist figured it out – said I was against self-help books and wanted actual psychology because I was an “intellectual snob” … if I dropped that and realized I began writhing at much lower levels of desperation and confusion then I might be able to solve the problems I had!
(And so I actually tried – the more fool me! ;-))
if I dropped that and realized I began writhing at much lower levels of desperation and confusion then I might be able to solve the problems I had!
Yes. Or you could have just become “born again”.
That was what they wanted.
P.S. Odd that I should have written about this yesterday – inspired by a comment from a friend about his own life – because someone accused me of ‘fear of success’ just today! The evidence: I had sought therapy during a period in which I was having success, and I had let it derail me.
And it is a fact that since that first really abusive relationship, I have had others which have held me back. But the name of this problem is not knowing how to avoid and escape abusive relationships – *not* seeking these so as to avoid success.
The cause and effect thing is the other way around but what interests me is that people are very desirous of a) telling others they have pop psych type problems like “fear of success” [a putative and I would say almost manufactured individual neurosis] and b) avoiding discussion of serious problems like abuse [a widespread social and societal issue whose discussion also raises questions of inequality – political questions].
Well I think the “fear of…” equations are often worked backwards. This form of illogic is based upon Idealist presuppositions that we always get out of life what we secretly “want”. (Therefore a woman that is raped was asking for it.) But of course empirical reality doesn’t work that way. There are many starving in Africa who secretly as well as not so secretly DO NOT want to starve. And there are many women in abusive relationships who do not want to be. And there are many workers earning less than they are worth, who would prefer that this were not the case. So, in reality we do not get what we deserve as a matter of course — although occasionally we do.
“Well I think the ‘fear of…’ equations are often worked backwards. This form of illogic is based upon Idealist presuppositions that we always get out of life what we secretly ‘want’.”
OK, so they *are* a form of illogic … and the presupposition that we always get out of life what we secretly ‘want’ is an Idealist presupposition … very interesting.
yeah. This idealist presupposition is used as a strong political tool of the right. Because, for instance, if you are railroaded into choosing the best out of a set of really bad options available to you in the material world, then those of the right will always say that you chose the option you did because you lacked character or because you were unintelligent — or even self-hating. And a lot of people will believe this about themselves, too.
…And the Idealists presupposition works best as an ideology when people are not taught with any thoroughness how the world actually works, and where power is centred. They believe themselves to be more powerful than they are, and then when they are systematically disempowered, they then come to believe that it is because they made bad choices.
..And the Idealists are quick to affirm that this is the case — “Yes, you made terrible choices! What was wrong with you!!”
Yes. And/but (I have no real education in philosophy) – it is Idealist in that it is not materially based?
yeah.
One way to think of it is that Idealism says that mind creates matter whereas materialism says that matter shapes mind. (But this is to state it very crudely, and there are all sorts of variations and subtleties of positions.)
Ah yes – in Idealism mind creates matter! But of course. And yes – this is *such* a tool of the Right. And it is *so* prevalent in U.S. popular consciousness right now.
Yeah, I have been studying this Idealism for a long time, now. It is one of the main reasons why I feel it is so important to stand as a candidate for the Secular Party. We are the necessary remedy to this point of view.
What a good idea … a political party to counter this you-create-your-own-reality “wisdom.”
***
On the current culture and its illiteracy: someone claimed to me that _Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus_ was based on ancient teachings. As though it were the Rig Veda or something.
I hope we can get rid of the current culture and its illiteracy. And not just its illiteracy but its disrespect for those who are different, who have expertise in areas that are not common to popular consciousness and so on.