Some people who apparently desire success so arrange their conduct as to be thwarted in their ostensible goals. Such self-engineered defeat is a device whereby the ego protects the environment, and thus also itself, from the impact of instinctual drives. Thus if behavior has the connotations of destructive activity, success in that behavior must be blocked and failure ensues. The subject evokes failure to save others as well as himself from the fantasied consequences of his achievement when this is colored by oral aggressive or anal sadistic drives or drives to seek omnipotence. In our contemporary culture this mechanism is increasingly employed by individuals who are too immature to tolerate comfortably a permissive environment.