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I once came across a name of a personality disorder or phobia that would translate to english as "Unfortunate fear", or similar.

The condition would lead the sufferer to procrastinate or worse, self sabotage to avoid beginning or succeeding at a task to confirm his/her preconceived outcome.

After many a query I have yet to come across the name of the condition again. Is there a word fitting this description?

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Phobia.Wiki offers

atychiphobia

(from Greek atyches meaning "unfortunate"), or kakorrhaphiophobia (from Greek kako, "bad") is the fear of failure or defeat

Collins however does not consider this to be definitely in the lexis at the moment:

atychiphobia [New Word Suggestion]

noun the abnormal and persistent fear of failure, to the degree that it has negative effects on the pattern of one's life.

Wiktionary of course endorses it, with the caveat 'rare'. More encouragingly, both Segen's Medical Dictionary. © 2012 Farlex, Inc. and McGraw-Hill Concise Dictionary of Modern Medicine. © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. license it.

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  • Thank you. I'm curious why plenty of variations on the theme unfortunate phobia didn't bring this up in google. Sadly the wikipedia page on the topic has been purged, it seemed quite informative.
    – Levon
    Commented Sep 23, 2017 at 13:55

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