Control freak is acolloquialism that is usually employed to describe a person who feel a psychological need to be in charge of things and people around them. A control freak can becomedistressed when they feel things are going out of control.[1] The feel of the need to control is often attributed to the underlying fear of losing control over their lives.[2]
This expression was introduced around the 1960s and it is not a clinical one.[3]
Control freaks are often insecure andperfectionists.[4] Additionally, they may evenmanipulate or pressure others to change to avoid having to change themselves. They may have had an overbearing mother or father.[5] Furthermore, control freaks sometimes have similarities tocodependents, in the sense that the latter's fear of abandonment leads to attempts to control those they are dependent on.[6]
Steve Jobs — Steve Jobs was a perfectionist who favored the closed system of control over all aspects of a product from start to finish — what he termed the integrated over the fragmented approach.[7] AsSteve Wozniak, his long-term collaborator and occasional critic, put it: "Apple gets you into theirplaypen and keeps you there".[8]
Queen Victoria — A series of three documentary programs onBBC2 in the UK in January 2013 calledQueen Victoria's Children argued that Queen Victoria was a pathological control freak by the way she controlled the welfare of all her children.[9]
