Catch-22

Coined outright by American novelist Joseph Heller as the title of his 1961 satirical war novel. In the book, a fictional military regulation allows a pilot to be excused from dangerous combat missions on grounds of insanity, but only if he requests the exemption himself, and wanting to avoid deadly missions is, by definition, proof of a perfectly sane mind. The invented rule, and the phrase describing it, escaped the novel entirely and became everyday shorthand for any such self-defeating bind.