Icarus complex Icarus complex The Icarus complex is a term in psychoanalysis and personality theory first used by Henry A. Murray to describe a particular type of over-ambitious character. Psychosynthesis has applied it to those in whom spiritual ambition exceeds their personality limits, leading to a backlash. Icarus was a Greek mythological figure who tried to escape imprisonment in Crete with his father Daedalus, using wings Daedalus crafted out of feathers and wax. Daedalus warned Icarus not too fly too close to the sun or too low to the sea. Overwhelmed with the excitement of flying, Icarus flew much too high, and
The North Wind and the Sun wrapped his cloak tighter to keep warm, but when the Sun shone, the traveler was overcome with heat and soon took his cloak off. The fable was well known in Ancient Greece; Athenaeus records that Hieronymus of Rhodes, in his "Historical Notes", quoted an epigram of Sophocles against Euripides that parodied the story of Helios and Boreas. It related how Sophocles had his cloak stolen by a boy to whom he had made love. Euripides joked that he had had that boy too, and it did not cost him anything. Sophocles' reply satirises the adulteries of Euripides: "It was the