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As we begin the year 2026, New Year’s resolutions abound, often centering on greater career success. For those grappling with this topic, you’ll find a relevant but little-known key concept in Maslow’s work: the Jonah Complex. His colleague, historian Frank Manuel at Brandeis University, formulated the initial notion, which Maslow found vital for understanding personal achievement—and its delay or absence. As he wrote late in life, “We have, all of us, an impulse to improve ourselves…toward self-actualization, or whatever term you like. Granted this, what holds us up? What blocks us?” The question is not only pertinent to New Year’s resolutions, but to all our goals, plans, and attempts at accomplishment.
Maslow saw the biblical Book of Jonah as providing an answer. It related how the prophet Jonah was tasked with a difficult divine mission to perform. Fearful of failure, he attempted to flee from it. While doing so, Jonah was thrown overboard from a storm-tossed ship and swallowed by a huge fish. Swathed unharmed in its belly, Jonah finally accepted his mission and was thereupon thrown up onto the shore so he could perform his appointed task.
In Maslow’s secularized view of this biblical tale, virtually all people experience a harsh ambivalence about fulfilling their life purpose based on their unique mental and physical traits. “We fear our highest possibilities, as well as our lowest ones,” he poetically wrote. “We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments…in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these very same possibilities.”
Maslow confided in his posthumously published Farther Reaches of Human Nature, “In my own notes, I had at first labeled this defense the ‘fear of one’s own greatness’ or the ‘evasion of one’s destiny’ or the ‘running away from one’s own best talents’…So often we run away from the responsibilities dictated (or rather suggested) by nature, by fate, even sometimes by accident, just as Jonah tried—in vain—to run away from his fate.” The mass media have often touted the phrase that some people have a “fear of success,” but Maslow clearly viewed the issue as something more complex and deeper.
As his biographer, I discovered that he readily saw the Jonah Complex within himself—and at the peak of his fame, often mused that he was still struggling to accept his mission to transform psychology into a world-saving science. Persistent anxiety dreams on this theme spurred his thinking. Through introspection, or what he liked to call “self-analysis,” the specific nature of the Jonah Complex began to emerge. How so?
Maslow traced the Jonah Complex to three main causes: first, to a “partly justified fear of being torn apart, of losing control,” akin to the fear of mental disintegration during a powerful peak-experience; second, to paranoia about being attacked by those jealous or envious of one’s achievements; and, perhaps most importantly, to the fear of “hubris (or) sinful pride…(of one’s seeming) grandiosity (and) arrogance.” The latter aspect might relate to what’s now widely known as the “Imposter Syndrome”—feeling like a fake or fraud in one’s chosen profession.
Presenting the example of someone seeking to become a great philosopher and rewrite Plato, but then who retreats from this enticing potentiality, Maslow wryly observed that, “What (that person) doesn’t realize is that Plato, introspecting, must have felt the same way… but went ahead anyway, overriding his doubts about himself.” More darkly, Maslow identified the price that we pay by surrendering to the Jonah Complex. In an unpublished essay, he asserted, “We are each called to a particular task (in life) for which our nature fits us. To run away from it, fear it, become half-hearted, or ambivalent about it (may produce) classic neurotic and even psychosomatic symptoms of all kinds…generating costly and crippling defenses.”
Overcoming the Jonah Complex
If even Maslow grappled with the Jonah Complex, what can the rest of us do? As a clinician, I’ve found a few solutions that prove helpful to many people. In some ways, Maslow seemed to have discovered these for himself, perhaps through observing colleagues, students, and others. First, he emphasized the importance of having “good faith” companions—those who may criticize our work, but do so with altruistic motives, and never with sarcasm or malice. Maslow’s wife, Bertha, admirably served this role for him, as did his colleagues like Frank Manuel. Second, he recognized the value of mentors in this domain, older or more experienced figures who can provide emotional and technical guidance. Finally, he stressed the necessity for what Maslow’s own mentor Alfred Adler liked to call simply courage--a willingness to take risks for personal growth and throw off one’s inner shackles.
