Jonah Complex
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Jonah Complex
According to Abraham Maslow, the Jonah Complex[1] is the fear of one’s own greatness—the neurotic tendency to evade, downplay, or run away from one’s full potential and unique calling due to anxiety, fear of social rejection, or feelings of unworthiness.[2]
Concept Map
Abraham Maslow Terms
B-Cognition, B-Realm, B-Values, Big Problem, D-Cognition, D-Realm, Deficiency Diseases, Eupsychia, Eupsychian Education, Eupsychian Psychology, Eupsychian Theory, Eupsychian Therapy, Good Person, Good Science, Good Society, Good Specimen, Hierarchy of Basic Needs, Hierarchy of Cognitive Needs, Human Diminution, Humanistic Psychology, Inner Signals, Intrinsic Consciousness, Jonah Complex, Normalcy, Normative Biology, Peak Experience, Plateau Experience, Real Self, Self-Actualization, Transcending Self-Actualizers, Transhumanistic
Syncretic Terms
Related LP Terms
Jonah Complex > 5Ds of Toxic Existence, Defense Mode, Deficit Mode, Ego Mode
Non LP Related Terms
Jonah Complex > Human Diminution
Notes
Maslow attributes the term to historian Frank Manuel, named after the biblical prophet Jonah, who fled his divine mission only to discover it was inescapable.[3] He identified it as a primary reason many people fail to self-actualize.[4]
"As we take our stand on psychoanalytic knowledge and transcend Freud, we inevitably make the discovery of what I’ve called the “healthy unconscious.” To state it very simply, not only do we repress our dangerous, distasteful, or threatening impulses, we often repress our best and noblest impulses." [5]
Key characteristics include:
- Repression of nobility: People don’t just repress dangerous impulses, but also their “best and noblest impulses” out of fear.[6]
- Masking as modesty: Gifted individuals camouflage their talents with a “thin veneer of apparent modesty and humility.”[7]
- Social fear: The superior individual learns to hide their capacities to avoid counterattack, hostility, or accusations of boasting.[8]
- Neurotic compromise: Growth still occurs but in a “crooked, tortuous, or joyless way”—like limping rather than running.[9]
- Evading destiny: It is not just avoiding growth, but specifically evading “the task for which her peculiarly idiosyncratic constitution fits her, the task for which she was born.”[10]
Maslow saw this as “evading one’s biological fate or destiny” and considered it a form of neurosis that generates anxiety, inhibition, and psychosomatic symptoms.[11]
The Source of Fear
According to Maslow,[12] the fear underlying the Jonah Complex stems from several interrelated sources:
- Fear of social punishment and counterattack – The superior individual learns that expressing true capacities can trigger hostility, resentment, or aggression from others who feel threatened or diminished.[13]
- Taboo on nobility and tenderness – Society (especially for adolescent males) stigmatizes altruism, compassion, and saintlike qualities as weak, feminine, or “soft,” creating shame around one’s highest impulses.[14]
- Fear of hubris and “sinful pride” – Strong, naturally dominant people internalize warnings against megalomania and become conflicted about how to use leadership capacities without appearing arrogant.[15]
- Impoverished self-concept – Those who lack self-respect cannot conceive of themselves as worthy of greatness and unconsciously sabotage their potential to maintain a familiar, albeit diminished, identity.[16]
- Fear of responsibility – Accepting one’s calling means embracing the burdens, isolation, and accountability of leadership—a weight many find terrifying.[17]
- Camouflage as survival strategy – The superior person learns to mask talents with false modesty, but this protective disguise hardens into a self-imposed prison, making authentic self-expression feel dangerous and leads to neurosis.[18]
Maslow frames these causes as creating a “mixture of fear” that contaminates the healthy growth impulse, diverting it into “crooked, tortuous, or joyless” channels.[19]
Notes on Personality
The Jonah Complex veers into the realm of personality. The complex is a personality trait. On this trait, Maslow has these words to say:
In this sense, we each are called to a particular task for which our nature fits us. To run away from it, fear it, become half-hearted, or ambivalent about it are all "neurotic" reactions in the classic sense. They can be considered illnesses, in the sense of breeding anxiety and inhibitions, producing classic neurotic and even psychosomatic symptoms of all kinds, and generating costly and crippling defenses.
Yet, from another perspective, it is possible to see these very same mechanisms as instances of our drive toward health, self-actualization, and full humanness. The difference between the diminished individual, wistfully yearning toward full humanness but never quite daring to make it, versus the unleashed individual, growing well toward her destiny, is simply the difference between fear and courage.[20]
Maslow’s roots in Abrahamic religious traditions show clearly here in his notion that we are all “called.”[21] It may be better to use Rogers’ Tendency Towards Self-Actualization to describe the drive rather than a “calling,” and to suggest that this tendency may be easily thwarted.
Also, his statement that this is “simply the difference between fear and courage,” while technically true, masks the entire toxic show behind a gaslighting veneer of “it’s your fault; you’re too scared.” It’s an odd statement given that elsewhere Maslow is clear about how important he felt the environment is. He understood that conditions, relationships, and experience all factor into needs satisfaction, health, and development, including personality development.
If we ask, “Why are some people scared and some people brave?” the answer will derive largely from the environments they live in and the damage they have sustained through familial, social, and employment relations.
If someone comes from a well-to-do background—if they are supported by family and community, if they are loved—they will often find it easier to “be brave,” i.e., honour “the tendency” in adverse and unsupportive conditions.
On the other hand, if an individual grows up in impoverished conditions, enduring social-class stigma and gender stigma, with minimal job prospects, many unmet needs, and desperation just to survive, they will find it difficult to honour the tendency because doing so may come at too high a cost (their livelihood, their social networks, etc.).
Sociology provides many studies on the impact of environmental conditions on personality. There we learn that social class, gender, ethnicity, skin colour, and even where one is born powerfully determine not only an individual’s life path and health, but also their personality.
Maslow was onto this when he observed that Indigenous people tended to have higher self-esteem than the typical Western white person. Later, he was quite clear about it. In Chapter 31 of his unpublished papers, Maslow points out that personality traits like “(a) deeply embedded suspicion and mistrust of others; (b) feelings of conflict and frustration; (c) general pessimism, particularly with respect to the capabilities of other human beings; (d) general anxiety; (e) strong impulses for hostility; (f) various disturbances of self-esteem that are too complex to be summarized here; and, perhaps most important, (g) various disturbances concerning the expression of power” are created by “love starvation” and unsafe, insecure environments characterized by poverty, unemployment, and harsh competition—conditions that would thwart the satisfaction of any and all of the Seven Essential Needs. He attributes these characteristics to communists, but they apply equally to capitalists and many social groupings as well.[22]
Note that Maslow felt there were two types of “communist personality”: the one above, and another whose “group comprises people who are essentially secure in their basic character structure even if they have sometimes shown superficial symptoms of insecurity. Their primary characteristic is that they really love other human beings, both individually and in the mass; secondly, they have a perception of other human beings as essentially good, lovable, and trustworthy. This latter outlook is what I call general optimism.”[23]
According to Maslow, this group—which comprised between 5% and 10% of communists—had very different motivations. They were motivated not by deficiencies and defences, but by love: “Out of the deeply embedded social interest of such individuals—that is, their love for humanity at large and for their neighbors in particular—they will inevitably try to improve humanity’s lot. For instance, instead of merely speaking platitudes, such persons will actually be kind, sympathetic, helpful, and altruistic to their neighbors, family members, or subordinates in the workplace. The essential thing about such persons is that they are deeply hurt by injustice, cruelty, unfairness, exploitation, and unhappiness even when they are not directly involved.”[24]
In our modern age, the impact of environment on personality is well established. [insert Peace Table table article]
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Footnotes
- ↑ Abraham H. Maslow, “The Jonah Complex,” in Future Visions: The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow, ed. Edward Hoffman (Sage Publications, 1996), https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/future-visions/book8426.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 50.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 48.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 50.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Ibid., pp. 48–51.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 50.
- ↑ Ibid., pp. 50–51.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Abraham H. Maslow, “The Communist Personality,” in Future Visions: The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow, ed. Edward Hoffman (Sage Publications, 1996), https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/future-visions/book8426, p. 168.
- ↑ Maslow, Abraham H. “The Communist Personality.” In Future Visions: The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow, edited by Edward Hoffman. Sage Publications, 1996. p. 170.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 170. Italics in original.
