Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Imposter Syndrome, and Some ThingsYou Don’t Want to Know

54 key questions define the characteristics of the “imposter phenomenon”.

Imposter syndrome, ambivalent darling of our culture, captures diverse investigations into how we understand ourselves, each other, and our relationships, grounded in unrelenting doubt.

Postmodern heroes struggle with this malady, from superheroes to antiheroes. Good and evil blur, sometimes becoming a matter of perspective. Moral choices — once so crisp and clear, full of idealism — yield to gray half-truths and perpetual lesser-of-two-evil choices. Moral injuries haunt us increasingly; the consequence of our actions thrown back at us. The alternative? Live in a bubble[1]. When we sense our own feelings of being an imposter, we are commonly both drawn in and repulsed.

Sigmund Freud (1916) described “Those Wrecked by Success”, WWI-era harbinger of imposter syndrome:

So much the more surprising, and indeed bewildering, must it appear when as a doctor one makes the discovery that people occasionally fall ill precisely when a deeply-rooted and long-cherished wish…