<
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/the-dubious-rise-of-impostor-syndrome>
"Long before Pauline Clance developed the idea of the impostor phenomenon—now,
to her frustration, more commonly referred to as impostor syndrome—she was
known by the nickname Tiny. Born in 1938 and raised in Baptist Valley, in
Appalachian Virginia, she was the youngest of six children, the daughter of a
sawmill operator who struggled to keep food on the table and gas in the tank of
his timber truck. Tiny was ambitious—her photograph appeared in the local
newspaper after she climbed onto a table to deliver her rebuttal during a
debate tournament—but she was always second-guessing herself. After nearly
every test she took (and usually aced), she would tell her mother, “I think I
failed it.” She was shocked when she beat the football-team captain for class
president. She was the first in her family to go to college—a high-school
counsellor warned her, “You’ll be doing well if you get C’s”—after which she
earned a Ph.D. in psychology, at the University of Kentucky. But, everywhere
she went, Clance felt the same nagging sense of self-doubt, the suspicion that
she’d somehow tricked everyone else into thinking she belonged.
In the early seventies, as an assistant professor at Oberlin College, Clance
kept hearing female students confessing experiences that reminded her of her
own: they were sure they’d failed exams, even if they always did well; they
were convinced that they’d been admitted because there had been an error on
their test scores or that they’d fooled authority figures into thinking they
were smarter than they actually were. Clance began comparing notes with one of
her colleagues, Suzanne Imes, about their shared feelings of fraudulence. Imes
had grown up in Abilene, Texas, with an older sister who early on had been
deemed “the smart one”; as a high schooler, Imes had confessed anxieties to her
mother that sounded exactly like the ones Clance had to hers. Imes particularly
remembered crying after a Latin test, telling her mother, “I know I failed”
(among other things, she’d forgotten the word for “farmer”). When it turned out
that she’d got an A, her mother said, “I never want to hear about this again.”
But her accomplishment didn’t make the feelings go away; it only made her stop
talking about them. Until she met Clance.
One evening, they threw a party for some of the Oberlin students, complete with
strobe lights and dancing. But the students looked disappointed and said, “We
thought we were going to be learning something.” They were hypervigilant, so
intent on staving off the possibility of failure that they couldn’t let loose
for even a night. So Clance and Imes turned the party into a class, setting up
a circle of chairs and encouraging the students to talk. After some of them
confessed that they felt like “impostors” among their brilliant classmates,
Clance and Imes started referring to the feelings they were observing as “the
impostor phenomenon.”"
Via Bill Daul.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
