A number of psychologists and philosophers have used the term "Jonah complex" to denote varying personality types, usually based only on one or two of the events reported in the biblical book. Biblical scholars have also analyzed and evaluated Jonah’s personality without employing, or creating, this kind of diagnostic label. Of these, many would probably agree with Ben Zvi that the characterization of the biblical Jonah is “multivocal” and “multilayered.” However, this paper suggests that the book of Jonah may not furnish us with sufficient data to support any adequate psychological profile of the prophet, whether complex or simple. At the same time, the book's plot, imagery, quoted speeches, and intertextual allusions make this text uniquely capable of evoking readers' fundamental fears and fantasies about themselves, their situation in Yahweh's world, and the fact of their inevitable death. In particular, the basic opposition between enclosure and exposure plays an important role not only within the book of Jonah, but also in the individual and collective life-worlds of the book's readers. By emphasizing the series of enclosures in which Jonah is contained—and the threats presented by immersion in the unbounded sea and exposure on dry land—the narrator tempts us to interpret Jonah’s personality and motivations in terms of our own fears of annihilation, exposure and engulfment, as well as our desire to be safely embedded. Appealing to the branch of social psychology known as attribution theory, I will argue that commentators have tended to wrongly explain Jonah's behavior in terms of robust, and usually negative, character traits, rather than viewing his words and actions in terms of his situation and the rhetorical structure of the book as a whole. In so doing, by judging Jonah we end up judging ourselves.