The Fear Of Success – Freud’s Point Of View

We often talk about the fear of success. Undoubtedly, many people out there are convinced they are not worth succeeding either because they are not good enough or because they will have too much responsibility to take care of after they take a high position in their job or society. Apart from these cases, there is another reason people will not allow themselves to make it, and this has its roots deep in the family structure. Today, I will concentrate on the deep matters that make people act in the strangest ways and force them to have contradictory behaviour.

Sexual desire at the centre of relationships
A theory by Freud many years ago has come to shed light on this strange reaction many people used to have. At the time, Freud was mainly focused on people’s relationships with their parents, brothers, and sisters. The sexual desire that, according to him, exists in every family member for each other and especially in kids, is responsible for all kinds of psychological issues. To be precise, it is not the desire itself that generates strange situations but the fact that we are not allowed to make it come true.

Why incest is a taboo
Sexual relationships between family members are not allowed since always. In the old times, people noticed that when people of the same family copulate, the babies that will be the product of this intercourse have extremely high chances of having health issues. The reason lies in selecting the genes that cannot exclude the problematic genes from the procedure, a process I will not discuss in this article. In any case, the outcome is the same; no good can get out of the intercourse of close relatives. Therefore, the tribes set a new rule to ensure their survival. No sex between members of the same family is ever allowed. It is one of the strictest rules society has formulated because it is strictly related to the whole team’s chances to survive. Up to now, this rule is carried in our society even though today we have plenty of methods of contraception, and sexual intercourse will not have to end up with a pregnancy. However, if the members fall in love and want to have babies, they would still not be allowed to move on to this step. In other words, while sex could be allowed, reproduction is not. Society has decided that it is still useful to embrace that golden rule even though it creates other psychological problems linked with limbic issues.

The relationships between family members
The truth is that whilst there is no obvious connection between those two, the famous psychiatrist had a different opinion. Parents are the symbol of success in a young child’s eyes. Everything they do is correct because they have the adult experience to guide their steps. Children admire them, and this is perfectly normal. However, even though children love their parents and they think highly of them, they are not allowed to express their love physically but only up to a certain point. To overcome this obstacle, they will eventually be afraid of them, otherwise, why wouldn’t they be allowed to touch them in certain places and so on? The relationship between the parents and their kids will eventually become complicated and will not be easy. All other relationships in society are far less complex compared to this.

How the fear of success appears
One of the results of this strange interaction is that the child will soon realize that the parent is not only better but that this is also the way this is supposed to be. If the child becomes more successful than the parent this means that the whole model will fall apart and there will not be any logical consequence in what has been happening in the previous years. The person will feel guilty if they manage to do better than their ancestors. It will be as if they betray them, and they want to remain to be the good kids their parents always advised them to be. If they act differently, this will be unforgivable because the hierarchy between human family members is very different than in other species that live in packs like lions. The fear of success has its basis in our social structure, and it is absolutely normal that every one of us has some remains of it in our lives.

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