| The concept of Impostor Syndrome has become ubiquitous. Critics, and even the idea’s originators, question its value.  Illustration by Sophi Miyoko Gullbrants Impostor syndrome was never meant to be a “syndrome.” Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, the researchers who first formulated the idea in the nineteen-seventies, based on their study of outwardly successful women plagued by self-doubt, used the phrase “impostor phenomenon”—identifying an experience rather than a pathology. As Leslie Jamison explores in a fascinating reported story from this week’s issue, this is just one of the misconceptions, generalizations, and evolutions that have accumulated around the idea in the past half century, as impostor syndrome has achieved mass cultural saturation in the social-media age, and generated backlash in the form of spirited and rigorous critiques. Jamison speaks to the original researchers, modern critics, and examines her own experiences to raise vital questions. If a concept is broadened so widely as to encompass nearly all feelings of insecurity, what use does it retain? And, even as it becomes ubiquitous, whose experiences is it eliding or misdiagnosing altogether? Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
No comments:
Post a Comment