The Perfectionist
Do you recognize him in others or perhaps in yourself? Meet “Roy,” a masters student, whose perfectionism (as reported by his professor) led to his undoing (Roy):
His work became ever more dazzling and the delays in submission more protracted. When he came to see me a week before the deadline for his final dissertation, I spotted an angry rash across his forehead. In some alarm, I asked if he was well.
“It’s fine,” he snapped. “I just rub away at the skin when I’m stressed, that’s all.” I then noticed that his nails were bitten past the quick and his fingers had swollen red pads. I directed Roy to the student-counseling service ... Roy’s counselor helped him stretch [the deadline] until the following January.
Just before Christmas Roy came to see me, unkempt and staring glassily into the middle distance. There was no chance of getting his dissertation completed in time, he told me. By now I had learned the art of gentle remonstration. This was a Masters dissertation not his life’s work, I pointed out. It didn’t need to be perfect.
“Trust me,” he replied with a mirthless laugh, “it’s a world away from perfection. It’s not even in the same galaxy.” I surmised that he had written it, a fact which he confirmed. “I’ve also read it”, he added, “which gave me no option but to delete it.” Slack-jawed, I asked him if he had kept a copy.
He hadn’t. He’d wiped out more than 20,000 words. “I have way too much respect for you to have subjected you to them,” he told me. For the next 18 months, Roy was given multiple extensions. When the last one expired, Cohen asked if he could see a draft. "Not that I’m willing to inflict on you, I’m afraid," replied Roy, who was never heard from again.
The roots of perfectionism – rigid, high expectations by highly critical, shaming, or abusive parents; excessive praise and self-worth tied to achievement; low self-esteem or feelings of inadequacy leading to black-and-white thinking and feeling the need to control; cultural expectations (What Causes Perfectionism?) – are less the point of our discussion than to simply note the “affliction” as such is offered without judgment and probably appears to some degree in many of us, just as every other personality type we’ve become acquainted with in our past looks at the Enneagram (here, a Type 1).
Our time and attention are probably better spent on contemplating the need for balance by choosing sanity, the subject of our focus article (The Imperfectionist).
We might ask, though, what has been gained/lost in this single-minded pursuit of “the enemy of something good is something . . . . “ by various historical "Roys." By some accounts Michelangelo, after ten years of labor, took a sledge hammer to his Florentine Pieta, intending to destroy it when it exhibited a tiny flaw and thereby failed to live up to his expectations NYT: Michelangelo Heartbreak. Then, we might see the perfectionist drive in terms of masking, a way of compensating for certain other personal “imperfections” e.g. Pablo Picasso, Steve Jobs.
Then there is the case of perfectionism fragmenting and devolving into mere snobbism – a way to assert that one is not, what one is better than. That’s a particularly specialized type of perfectionist where a person who is otherwise completely unpretentious may do some reading or practicing in order to perfect a certain aspect of the Self, for example, a wine snob: he will swirl and sniff and sneer and smell the cork and send bottles back and thereby achieve a perfectionism of a very different sort i.e. the perfect horse’s ass.