44. Fear of Success and Fear of Envy: The Object Relations View

Fear of success is often related to an unconscious fear of envy. In this YouTube video, Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler speaks about how an internalized envious parent, or one’s own projected unconscious envy, can create an ongoing lifelong inhibition. Such psychological inhibition can hold people back from all forms of emergence in the world, limiting professional or vocational success, as well as limiting success in personal relatedness. Dr. Kavaler-Adler mentions an article of hers on this topic, “My Graduation is my Mother’s Funeral: Transformation from the Paranoid-Schizoid Position to the Depressive Position in Fear of Success, and the Role of the Internal Saboteur,” published in the International Forum of Psychoanalysis (2006); republished as a chapter in her book, Developmental Mourning, Erotic Transference, and Object Relations Psychoanalysis (IPBooks, 2022).