The Pain of Perfectionism | The New Yorker
When Gordon Flett, a psychology professor who has spent his career studying perfectionism, was bringing up his two daughters, he was determined to help them understand that they didn’t need to be perfect. As they grew older, they would tease him whenever he was critical: “Aren’t you supposed to be teaching us it’s O.K. not to be perfect?” Despite his efforts, Flett noticed that his elder daughter, Hayley, showed some telltale signs: highly meticulous, she was routinely deemed perfectionist by teachers who graded the tests she’d stay up half the night studying for. When Hayley was ten, she took a test he’d developed with his longtime collaborator, Paul Hewitt—a questionnaire designed to identify perfectionism in children. Tallying her score, Flett was surprised to see that she didn’t seem to be a perfectionist at all—so surprised that he wondered if there was something wrong with the test. Seven years later, though, Hayley took an adult version, and her perfectionism was beyond dispute. Flett was mystified until she explained that, as a child, she’d internalized the message that she shouldn’t aspire to perfection. So, like any true perfectionist, she’d aced the test.
At first blush, it can be hard to take perfectionism seriously as a source of suffering. The lament “I’m a perfectionist” carries a strong whiff of humblebrag—the kind of thing savvy job applicants say when asked their greatest flaw. Reading a book by Flett and Hewitt on the subway, I started feeling self-conscious about the cover, with the word “perfectionism” displayed in huge type, as if I were trying to broadcast that, no matter how good I am, I still need to be better. To claim the mantle of perfectionism can become a game of one-upmanship. A British writer I know recently told me about reading an Anne Tyler novel with a perfectionist character and thinking, Wow, is that all it takes to be a perfectionist in Baltimore?
To Flett and Hewitt, the idea of perfectionism as a form of admirable striving is a dangerous misconception, one they have devoted three books and hundreds of peer-reviewed papers to overturning. “I can’t stand it when people talk about perfectionism as something positive,” Flett told me, as we sat at his kitchen table in Mississauga, a Toronto suburb where he has spent most of his life. “They don’t realize the deep human toll.” Hewitt, a clinical psychologist, has seen with his therapy patients how perfectionism can be “personally terrorizing for people, a debilitating state.” It’s driven not by aspiration but by fear, and by the conviction that perfection is the only “way of being secure and safe in the world.”
Flett told me about being asked on a radio show to discuss perfectionism in a segment that the producers explained would be something “nice and light” for listeners driving home at the start of a long holiday weekend. Flett warned them that they’d chosen the wrong subject, that the bulk of his work explored perfectionism’s links to depression, eating disorders, and suicide. Sure enough, when listeners were invited to call in, the first person on the line was a desperate-sounding man who described the ways his wife’s perfectionism was pushing their marriage toward collapse. Then came two sons calling about an alcoholic father who drank to douse the stress of his perfectionism. Flett remembers feeling vindicated as the number of calls briefly overwhelmed the switchboard.
When Flett and Hewitt started publishing on perfectionism together, in the early nineteen-nineties, not many researchers were working on the subject. These days, perfectionism is everywhere. We live in an era of proliferating cosmetic treatments, Ozempic, and photo-editing apps that have transformed our sense of what perfection looks like. Films like “Black Swan” and “Phantom Thread” interrogate the downsides of perfectionism while bestowing on it a fatal glamour. A shelf in Flett’s house is filled with autobiographies by celebrities who have battled perfectionism—athletes such as Andre Agassi and Ben Hogan, and musicians including Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Lang Lang, and the late Brian Wilson. Meanwhile, perfectionism has become a hot topic among psychologists, with five to ten new studies on the subject appearing each week. The Harvard Business Review publishes a steady stream of pieces with titles like “How to Manage Your Perfectionism.” (Some sound notes of caution—“Don’t Let Perfection Be the Enemy of Productivity”—but none want to throw the baby out with the bathwater—“The Upside of Perfectionism? Creativity”).
Flett believes that young people, especially Gen Z-ers, are facing an “epidemic of perfectionism.” In a survey he conducted among Canadian high-school students, he found that fifty-four per cent identified with the statement “I need to be perfect.” (A 2024 Gallup poll corroborated this general trend, finding that more than one in three U.S. teen-agers feel pressure to be perfect.) Flett suspects that the crisis is largely fuelled by social media: people are tortured by the gap between their actual and their “perfected” lives, not to mention the perfected versions of other people that circulate online. “The need to seem perfect is much bigger now than when we started this research,” he said.
A recent novel by the Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico, “Perfection,” dramatizes the way that digital life compels us to make our lives into perfected artifacts. Anna and Tom, millennial expats in Berlin, rent out their home as an Airbnb whose surfaces present a tableau of perfection: Scandinavian armchairs, Japanese teapots, sunlight filtering through the emerald leaves of a perforated monstera plant. And yet, as the novel tracks the effort required to sustain their perfect apartment and the life style it represents, we sense the hollowness of their pursuit, which drives toward an ever-receding target. Achieving perfection is the most efficient way to discover how little it offers.
According to Hewitt, this is one thing that distinguishes true perfectionism from a mere pursuit of excellence: reaching the goal never helps, whether it’s a top grade, a target weight, or a professional milestone. Achievement, he says, “doesn’t touch that fundamental sense of being unacceptable.” Perfectionism perpetuates an endless state of striving. It’s an affliction of futility, an addiction to finding masochistic refuge in the familiar hell of feeling insufficient. It might not feel good, but it feels like home.
Flett and Hewitt met in the fall of 1987, when they began teaching in the psychology department at York University, in Toronto. They were both thirty, both at the beginning of their careers, both hired to provisional positions and unsure of their footing. (During his job interview, Flett spotted his C.V. on the floor of the undergraduate director’s office, with footprints on it.) On walks together from the squat brick psychology building to their classrooms, on the other side of campus, they soon bonded. Flett was a local boy with a working-class background and a hunger to prove himself; Hewitt, before he came to psychology, had spent years training as a classical musician, first as a guitarist, then as an operatic tenor.
Hewitt had already published papers on perfectionism, his interest having been sparked as an undergraduate, when he encountered the concept in a magazine in a dentist’s waiting room. The term immediately illuminated a phenomenon he’d often seen in the world of music. Telling me about a time when a piano teacher slapped him on the hand for making an error, he said, “There’s a real anger when you don’t do it right.” Flett, who’d written his doctoral dissertation on depression, had read a paper of Hewitt’s about the links between depression and perfectionism and told him how much he admired it. Not long afterward, Hewitt invited him to collaborate on developing a model of perfectionism. As Flett recalls it, Hewitt asked, “Do you know anything about personality-scale construction?,” and he replied, “I hope so—I’m teaching a graduate course on it.”
After a year at York, Hewitt left for a position at a psychiatric hospital in eastern Ontario. Flett would take the train to visit so that they could keep working, and they ultimately produced a model outlining three major types of perfectionism: self-oriented perfectionism (requiring perfection of oneself), other-oriented perfectionism (railing against the imperfections of others), and socially prescribed perfectionism (believing that others require one to be perfect).
When they submitted their model to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, it was rejected, but Hewitt called the editor—“a little audacious on my part,” he admits—and found that he’d been on the fence. He said that if they could back up their model with a clinical study he would accept the paper. The patients at Hewitt’s hospital afforded a vast pool of research subjects, and the fact that they were psychiatric patients rather than college students (as is the case for many studies) helped demonstrate the stakes involved. The revised model was published in 1991, bolstered by a study showing a connection between perfectionism and more serious forms of mental illness. Now known as the Comprehensive Model of Perfectionistic Behavior, it has become the dominant framework in the field.
After publication, Flett wondered if trying to have perfectionism officially recognized as a personality disorder in the DSM might get it taken more seriously. Hewitt objected that doing so would lead to its being approached reductively, as a discrete problem to be got rid of rather than a personality style produced by a complex set of forces. (By analogy, he points out that we no longer have such diagnoses as fever or chest pain; instead, doctors diagnose the conditions that produce these symptoms.) One obvious benefit of Flett and Hewitt’s approach has been to give people a vocabulary and a framework for understanding an important thread running through a variety of conditions. A clinical psychologist once told Flett that she’d often felt baffled by her anorexic patients: What could account for someone starving herself and thinking, It’s still not enough? Perfectionism gave her a way to understand this relentlessly self-destructive drive.
Flett and Hewitt have also found perfectionism to be a powerful predictor of suicide, even after adjusting for other variables, such as extremity of depression. (As Flett and Hewitt write, perfectionists “may construe an unsuccessful suicide attempt as the ultimate failure.”) In the case of Alina Templeton-Perks, a thirty-three-year-old British woman who suffered from crippling self-doubt and took her own life in 2008, perfectionism was even listed among the official causes of death. Jonathan Drummond-Webb, a pediatric cardiac surgeon in Arkansas who killed himself in 2004, appears to have been an other-oriented perfectionist. A star in his field, he left a five-page suicide note cataloguing the faults of those around him and declaring, “The world is not ready for me.”
Three years ago, Flett received an e-mail from a woman named Carol Fishman Cohen, sharing the story of her son Michael, who had died by suicide in 2018, at the age of twenty-eight. Michael was her firstborn son, the eldest of four, a baby who almost never cried and who became a generous, adventurous man. After three and a half years working at startups in China—while there, he’d made a list of thirty places he wanted to visit and checked off every single one—Michael fell into a major depressive episode that revolved around a feeling of falling behind. He started looking for a job but would get discouraged—thinking he needed to have every qualification listed in a posting—and end up not applying, convinced that he was unemployable. He hid the depths of his depression, and his suicide stunned everyone close to him. By the time his mother reached out to Flett, she felt she understood something more about what had happened to Michael. She told Flett, “Our son died of perfectionism.”
Sigmund Freud’s essay “The Ego and the Id,” from 1923, introduced the concept of the superego, an inner voice whose demands for perfection the ego labors endlessly to fulfill. In the century since Freud introduced this model, psychoanalysts have articulated, in a variety of ways, the subjective experience of perfectionism and the forces driving it. Alfred Adler—a onetime participant in Freud’s famous Wednesday-night gatherings, who later parted ways with him—is most known today for his notion of the “inferiority complex,” the idea that human nature is shaped by the desire to overcome personal deficiencies. (Adler, among the first psychologists to see birth order as a crucial shaping force, had an inferiority complex about his older brother—who was, incidentally, named Sigmund.)
In 1960, D. W. Winnicott put forward the theory that most people will develop a False Self that hides and protects a more essential self by complying with the expectations of others. In the seventies and eighties, Hilde Bruch drew upon her work with anorexic patients in framing perfectionism as a response to a deep-seated sense of inadequacy. “All her efforts, her striving for perfection and excessive thinness, are directed toward hiding the fatal flaw of her fundamental inadequacy,” she wrote of the typical patient.
The critic and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has written that the superego, with its relentless demand for perfection, is a “boring and vicious soliloquist with an audience of one.” If so, why do we keep listening? Phillips suggests that it’s because the soliloquist promises to “know us in a way that no one else, including ourselves, can ever do.” Any avid self-deprecator immediately understands this logic: if we believe that the worst version of ourselves is the true one, we’re protected from being ambushed by our own inadequacy. Better to overestimate our flaws than to fail to see them in the first place. But this strategy is fundamentally isolating, leading us to create a brittle carapace of a “perfect” self that doesn’t need anything from anyone. Perfectionism estranges us from everyone else, Phillips argues, and traps us in endless conflict with ourselves: “We continually, if unconsciously, mutilate and deform our own character. So unrelenting is this internal violence that we have no idea what we’d be like without it.”
