Imposter ‘imposter’ syndrome

[mind-mapping the evolution of an idea]

This week I read an article in the New Yorker about the origin and evolution of that now ubiquitous pop-psychology phrase, ‘imposter syndrome’. I’ve always found this idea helpful in articulating my experience as a young academic, but also somewhat anaemic in offering up any suggestion as to why I would feel that way in the first place.

The idea has its origin in the mid-seventies, with two young, white, high achieving psychologists, Clance and Imes. These two women observed that their own feelings of inadequacy in a high-achieving environment was widely shared among woman of a similar social situation. Their initial idea was to call this experience, the ‘the imposter phenomenon’. Important here is that the emphasis was on an experience of feeling like an imposter, it was not a pathology and thus not a syndrome. Being an imposter was socially located in the experience of the subject, not a psychological aberration.

Their paper, based on a sample of 50 women, was eventually published in a psychotherapy journal in 1978. They found that these women experienced a feeling of “‘intellectual phoniness,” living in perpetual fear that “some significant person will discover that they are indeed intellectual impostors’”, writes Leslie Jamison, the author of the New Yorker piece.

As part of the therapeutic intervention against this internal disparaging dialogue Clance asked clients “to keep a notebook recording how they deflected compliments”. Jamison writes that this reminded her “of a woman who tweeted about reckoning with impostor feelings by creating a file on her computer called ‘evidence I’m not an idiot’”.

I need a folder like this on my computer. My husband turned forty at the end of last year, and it made me stop and reflect on our life, particularly mine (because navel-gazing is my professional pastime), and what I have achieved in my 38 years of life. Of course, I ended this reverie drawing the conclusion that while I have achieved nothing in my 38 years on earth, I have (fingers-crossed) at least another 30 productive years left during which I plan to change the world, write award-winning work, raise gifted and kind children, exercise daily, read widely and drink less. I jest. But not entirely.

When I shared my thoughts with Warwick he said, “your problem is not that you have achieved nothing, it is that you have selective and immediate amnesia on completion of a project”. This is not untrue. The last few years I have repeatedly found myself saying, “I would love to write a book”. But I have written a book (“You have written a book,” says Warwick), it just no longer counts for me because it is not the kind of book I want to write now.

My academic genealogy, or what I like to call ‘my life as a Disciplinary Bastard’*, always left me feeling like a fraud because every degree I did was in a different subject area. Instead of feeling like a polymath, I felt like an imposter, because I immediately dismissed all prior experience as invalid. Why?

*a full discussion of this will be had another day, please do check back should you still be interested in the minutiae of my life.

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Fast-forward 40-odd years, and the term ‘imposter phenomenon’, which so helpfully and accurately described the feeling of self-doubting high achievers has been hijacked and repackaged. ‘Imposter syndrome’ has come to be a sociologically isolated, yet paradoxically, catchall phrase for insecurity. But as with most things in late-capitalism, it has become individualized. The ‘I’ has become responsible for all things. If there is a problem the only person who can fix it is ‘you’.  

But here the sociological plot thickens. Discussing the imposter-syndrome-phenomenon (or should I say the imposter ‘imposter’ syndrome) at a dinner party, Jamison recounts that, on concluding her precis of her imposter status, a “dinner companion, another white female academic, replied curtly, ‘That’s such a white-lady thing to say’”.

The idea of being an ‘imposter’ is predicated on two things: 1. The necessity of an insider [and an outsider] 2. The person feeling like an imposter is assumed to be capable. On both counts White People are the paradigmatic example. Whiteness, falsely (as in, it is not based on any actual fact of innate ability) confers insiderness and capability. So it is completely unsurprising to me that, in the main, it is white women who express these acute feelings of phoniness, because the tenets on which assumed ability is based are themselves phony. Assumptions about ability based on race, class, gender, nationality, ethnicity (pick your category) are ideological inventions, and it is no wonder that both the winners and losers of these ideologies experience psychic anguish.

“My seatmate and I turned to the only woman of color at the table, a Black professor, so that she could, presumably, tell us what to think about the whiteness of impostor syndrome, though perhaps there were things she wanted to do (like finish eating dinner) more than she wanted to mediate a spat between two white ladies about whether we were saying white-lady things or not. She graciously explained that she didn’t particularly identify with the experience. She hadn’t often felt like an impostor, because she had more frequently found herself in situations where her competence or intelligence had been underestimated than in ones where it was taken for granted”, recounts Jamison.

Let’s park the issue of the Black professor being asked to speak for All Black People for a moment and look at the phrase ‘taken for granted’. You can only feel like an imposter to yourself if you are in a situation where your excellence, intelligence, and hardworking nature is taken for granted. In this sense, when historically discriminated against groups experience self-doubt and are told, ‘oh you are just suffering from imposter syndrome’, this is a misdiagnosis of the problem.

One of Jamison’s interviewees, Adaira Landry, a now Harvard medical faculty member, spoke of worrying about her outsiderness as a student when she compared herself to other students who came from families of doctors. She noted that “what her classmate characterized as a crisis of self-doubt was simply an observation of an external truth—the concrete impact of connections and privilege”.

“Landry”, writes Jamison, “has had countless conversations with students who feel they are struggling with impostor syndrome, and she usually senses a palpable relief when she suggests that they are feeling like this not because there is something wrong with them but because they are ‘enveloped in a system that fails to support them’”. 

In February 2021, one of the most widely shared articles in the history of the Harvard Business Review was written by two women who also found the label of imposter syndrome to be a misnomer. Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey in their article, “Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome,” argue that “the label implies that women are suffering from a crisis of self-confidence and fails to recognize the real obstacles facing professional women, especially women of colour—essentially, that it reframes systemic inequality as an individual pathology”.

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So if we agree that imposter syndrome fails to capture the experience of inequality and systemic exclusion, does it mean we throw it out altogether? No. I don’t think it is necessary to do so, because the original intention of describing the imposter phenomenon was accurate, for the sample at hand – white high achieving women genuinely did feel like imposters. I would argue though, that the account is lacking in its explanation of why white women would feel insecure, when the predestined assumption about them is competence. I argue that the ‘why’ of the imposter phenomenon is because the assumption of competence is predicated on us viewing the abilities of others through ideological lenses of exclusion. And at the core of our beings we know this to be untrue.

In Hegel’s Master Slave Dialectic (which for some reason is the Ultimate Explainer of Everything for me), the master and slave are definitionally and existentially bound up with each other. I am a master because you are a slave. And because the statement itself has no concrete content, I must populate it ideologically. So, white people are intelligent, and that is why I am your master (one of the founding myths of racism). But when you walk into a situation where everyone assumes you are ‘master’, but you know deep in your heart that actually you are not, you might just be clever and hardworking (now those are qualities of individuals), not categorically different to anyone else; then I think there is some existential impulse at work when one experiences that as insecurity. It is the primordial knowledge that we are all equal. It is the feeling of worth being conferred on your person as a function of belonging to a category of persons, which is always, necessarily, wrong. Just like asking the Black professor to speak for All Black People was wrong.

When Jamison asked Clance and Imes about Tulshyan and Burey’s critiques, “they agreed with many of them, conceding that their original sample and parameters were limited. Although their model had actually acknowledged (rather than obscured) the role that external factors played in creating impostor feelings, it focussed on things such as family dynamics and gender socialization rather than on systemic racism and other legacies of inequality. But they also pointed out that the popularization of their idea as a ‘syndrome’ had distorted it. Every time Imes hears the phrase ‘impostor syndrome,’ she told me [Jamison], it lodges in her gut. It’s technically incorrect, and conceptually misleading”.

What I find most interesting is how this idea has travelled from an almost ethnographic description of experience (which is the definition of phenomenology – our experience of being-in-the-world), to one that was hijacked by multiple ideologies, repackaged by capitalism and fed to the masses.

Jamison points out that “Clance’s own therapeutic practice was anything but oblivious of the external structural forces highlighted by Tulshyan and Burey. When mothers came to Clance describing their impostor feelings around parenting, her advice was not ‘Work on your feelings.’ It was ‘Get more child care’”.

The solution was to be found in changing our perception of material reality, not changing the person.

As the idea of an imposter phenomenon has mutated into an ‘imposter syndrome’, “the diagnosis has become a cultural force fortifying the very phenomenon it was supposed to cure.” And isn’t this exactly Foucault’s point about the force of discourse? The words we use to describe our experiences take on a life of their own and bring about material changes. Our language and ideas “systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault, 1972).

Jamison wonders whether we are “simply experiencing a kind of humility inflation? Perhaps the widespread practice of confessing self-doubt has begun to encourage—to demand, even—repeated confessions of the very experience that the original concept was trying to dissolve.” I think the Foucauldian answer is yes, that is exactly what we are doing, we are talking ourselves into an anxious corner. We speak insecurity because those are the words that we know. We need new words.

“Capitalism needs us all to feel like impostors, because feeling like an impostor ensures we’ll strive for endless progress: work harder, make more money, try to be better than our former selves and the people around us.”

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As a self-confessed sufferer of imposter ‘syndrome’ (so, I feel like I’m the problem when really the problem is located elsewhere*), reading this article and unpacking my thoughts in this way, has presented me with a challenge. To speak about myself differently, truthfully. To ‘rebrand’ (God love us we can’t escape the capitalist metaphors) myself for myself, and in how I speak about myself to others. So that we recognise the essential truth of our innate value and dignity, and do not default to the worldly required caricature of insecurity. I am going to find new words to describe myself.

         *case in point. We bought one of those Vetsak beanbags that are supposed to be obscenely comfortable, but I didn’t find it comfortable to sit on, and it continues to provoke me whenever I look at it. I’m like, ‘what am I doing wrong that I don’t find it comfortable, maybe I should arrange it differently?’, then Warwick finds me punching it in all directions and rightly worries about my mental wellbeing when a Vetsak augurs such existential angst.

Please go and read Jamison’s entire article if you have time. It is fascinating and much better than this confused (and probably theoretically problematic) mind-map-diary entry. Or no, to make good on my promise to myself. Isn’t it nice that I am able to read an article like this, and find a thread that I am able to finger and pull and knot, and even if it looks like clumsy mess, the fact that my mind feels calm after emptying itself onto a page is a gift I can give to myself? I am so glad of that.

If you’ve read all this way, thank you and bon weekend!