"Who is he, the one for whom they take me?" Nautil.us columnist Bruce Watson examines the impostor syndrome from different points of view, which occurs much more often than one might think, and understands how all kinds of crooks and "great combinators" attract and fascinate us, as it is related to the plurality of our "I", why from time to time it seems to us that we are also pretending to do something, where this feeling comes from and how all this is explained by philosophy, psychology and neuroscience.
One cool autumn day in 1952, 16 wounded soldiers were brought aboard the Canadian destroyer Cayuga, which patrols the Yellow Sea off the coast of Incheon, South Korea. The soldiers wounded during the Korean War were in serious condition. Several people would not have survived without surgery. Fortunately, the ship's doctor turned out to be a trauma surgeon. Dressed in a medical gown, a plump middle-aged man ordered the nurses to prepare the patients. He then went into his cabin, opened up a surgery textbook to quickly read a course on a topic in which he said he was a specialist. Twenty minutes later, Ferdinand Demara, who had not graduated from high school, entered the operating room, aka Jefferson Baird Thorne, Martin Godgart, Dr. Robert Linton French, Anthony Ingolia, Ben W. Jones, and today Dr. Joseph Cyr.
Taking a deep breath, the false surgeon penetrated the naked flesh. In his head one thought was spinning: "The smaller the incision you make, the better, the less you have to sew up later." Finding a broken rib, Demara removed it and took out a bullet stuck next to his heart. He was afraid that the soldier's wound would bleed, so he smeared the wound with Gel-foam, a special coagulating reagent, and almost instantly the blood thickened and stopped. Demara replaced the rib, stitched up the patient, and injected him with a huge dose of penicillin. The people around were delighted.
Working all day, Demara operated on all 16 wounded. All 16 survived. Soon, rumors of Demard's heroic deeds leaked to the press. The real Dr. Joseph Seer, whom Demara posed as, learned about "his" exploits in Korea, where he had never been, from the newspapers. The military authorities interrogated Demard and fired him quietly to avoid embarrassment.
The Great Impostor: The burly, outgoing Ferdinand Demara worked as a surgeon, monk, lawyer and teacher.
But the information still leaked to the press. After an article about Demara was published in Life magazine, the pseudosurgeon received hundreds of fan letters. “My husband and I both feel that you are a person sent down from above,” one woman wrote. And from a logging camp in British Columbia, Demara received an offer to work as a doctor. Soon after Demara was published a book and film "The Great Impostor", in which he was played by actor Tony Curtis. Demara himself played the role of a doctor in this film and even began to think about going to study in medical school. But I decided that it was too difficult. He said:
Artists, crooks, and impostors of sorts occupy a special place in history, embodying the seductive charm of deception that simultaneously amazes and captivates us. While most of us do our best to stay within social norms, fraudsters overcome these barriers, easily marching towards new challenges. Being in the spotlight, they ridicule professional norms, the importance they attach. Psychologists believe that deep down, we like crooks because we feel like we are pretending too. Their stories reveal a kaleidoscope of their own selves, and by their example they show how, taking a risk, you can experience sensations that are not available to others.
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About serial and household impostors
Psychology professor Matthew Hornsey began studying impostors after he was tricked by a colleague at the University of Queensland in Australia. Elena Demidenko, who spoke about Ukrainian roots, wrote a novel about her childhood in Ukraine. The novel received an award. But it soon became clear that Elena Demidenko was an Australian Helen Darville, who had no connections with Ukraine. Her whole story was invented. Since then, deceived and betrayed, Hornsey began to study impostors and the question of why people admire them. Hornsey notes:
The impostors are playing with our trust, laughing at the importance we place on uniforms, titles, and Doctor-embossed business cards. We envy status and admire those who seek and use the shortest paths for their own purposes. We don't want our personal doctor to turn out to be a fraud, but we admire the exploits of Frank Abagnale in Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, wandering the world as a consummate artist, reincarnating, acting, disappearing with talent - and he does it all before coming of age.
But the psychology of cheating includes ambiguous elements. On the one hand, there are serial impostors like Demara and Abagnale. On the other - everyday impostors - we are with you.
A general feeling of "pretense" begins with self-doubt. Sitting in a boardroom, in a classroom, in a high-level meeting, you are gripped by a strong fear that you are not in your place here. It doesn't matter what degree or track record you have. You are not as smart as others. You are an impostor. Such insecurity has become quite endemic and has been defined as impostor syndrome. The concept was coined in 1978 by psychologist Paulina Klance, who used it mainly in relation to successful women, but gender-blind studies have shown that men also tend to feel pretending, and that up to 70 percent of professionals suffer from impostor syndrome.
Psychologists see the reason for this phenomenon in bipolar parenting styles. Constant criticism in childhood can be regarded as parental contempt, which later is not compensated for by any achievement or success in life. In contrast, the “perfect child” who is praised for the simplest drawing or design may also grow up to wonder if he deserves this success. Regardless of parenting style, the "impostor" finds that every achievement, every compliment, only heightens the fear that he will someday be exposed.
Frank Abagnale, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can, in the television quiz To Tell the Truth (1977)
Fear of deception attracts us to those who are not ashamed or afraid to commit the most incredible hoaxes. "Society loves impostors," writes British journalist Sarah Burton in her book Impostors: Six Kinds of Liars. We are madly in love with "openly or secretly breaking taboos." From childhood we are taught to tell the truth. Burton writes:
Psychologists identify several motives for serial fraud, each of which appeals to our confused group selves. Some impostors, Hornsey says, are "consummate adventurers" that everyone would like to be in. Others seek a sense of community that they lack, being shy or different from others. Low self-esteem is the third motive. Feeling like a failure, an experienced impostor easily gains everyone's respect by pretending to be someone better than himself. Demara didn't need a psychologist to tell him why he was pretending to be a doctor.
Psychologist Helene Deutsch found that impostors often faced severe blows from fate. Growing up in prosperous families, they lost their status due to divorce, bankruptcy or betrayal. Feeling deceived, the impostor does not manage to climb the ladder of success. Instead, it returns a status by simply assigning it. So it was with Frank Abagnale, who walks out of the courtroom, where his divorced parents fought for custody, and begins to live his fantasies. Tall, handsome and looking at 26, and not his tender age of 16, Abagnale played for several years the role of an airline pilot, security guard, doctor, lawyer … “The alter ego of a person,” he wrote in his memoirs, “is nothing more than his favorite image yourself."
We can all pretend, but few of us have the intelligence or social skills to do it masterly. Without attending a single class, Abagnale studied legal textbooks and passed the exam in Louisiana. Demara could read a text on psychology in a day, and start teaching it the next. Professional impostors can quickly defuse tensions with a joke, and they read people with ease. “In any organization, there are always many untapped opportunities that can be used without harm to others,” said Demara, who also posed as a prison warden, professor, monk, deputy sheriff.
Who is he, the person for whom they take me?
If we talk about ourselves, our impostor has long been hiding inside. The word "persona" comes from the Etruscan phersu, which means "mask". Before becoming the Latin word persona, the term was used for roles with masks in Greek dramas. Shakespeare came up with the idea that "the whole world is theater" and we are actors whose roles change over time and circumstances. We know our monologues and we know our roles. So why pretend? The impostor in us, psychologists say, is nourished by the created image of ourselves. Every morning, looking in the mirror, we are disappointed in the person who is looking at us. We are just a shadow of who we thought we could become. How to get through another day? Step into the role, become a "social chameleon".
The term "social chameleon," says Mark Snyder, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, describes those whose inner selves are different from their public persona.
The actor in us, psychologists say, is nourished by the created image of himself. Every morning we, faced with a mirror, are disappointed in the person in the reflection.
Social chameleons, says Snyder, usually have a strong "self-control", they evaluate each new situation, think over how to fit into it, how to please others. "Tough self-control" is found in many professions from different fields, including law, acting and politics. But anyone with a high level of self-control, Snyder says, would agree with the statement:
Philosopher Daniel K. Dennett compares each of us to fictional characters. He notes:
Dennett believes that the origins of such a narrator in us lie in the anatomy of the brain, citing research by the neurologist Michael Gazzaniga about parts of the brain, each of which has a different perception.
The regions of the brain "must use creative ways to create behavioral unity," Dennett writes. Hence, “we are all virtuoso storytellers who behave differently … and we always put on the best 'mask' we can. We try to combine all our knowledge into one good story."
Woody Allen turned the theme into a farce and featured it in Zelig, a 1983 mock-documentary about a chameleon man who changed his appearance depending on the social environment. Leonard Zelig shocked doctors by turning into a psychiatrist with glasses, a black jazz musician, a Red Indian, even a New York Yankee in a suit. Under hypnosis, Zelig explained why he was adjusting to Wednesday:
Why does being yourself cause a sense of insecurity? Perhaps because the "I" itself is fiction. This is the conclusion of the German philosopher Thomas Metzinger, director of the Department of Neuroethics and the Working Group "Reason" at the University of Mainz.
Our minds, Metzinger says, contain only a deceptive image of ourselves, a "phenomenal self" that sees the world through a window, but does not see the window itself. Mistaken in self-identification of our actual self, we fight for the unity of ourselves, but often must be content with the fact that we are one person on Tuesday, a slightly different version of that person the next day, and who knows who we will be on the weekend.
Metzinger says that our unstable identity is built on the main principle:
In other words, the "I" is determined by our understanding of the inevitability of mortality. This distinguishes us from nothing. So it's no surprise that we revel in roles. And now we have the perfect environment for that. MIT psychologist Sherri Turkle, author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, calls social media "identity technology."
And they often become online chameleons to get it all.
Meanwhile, for the professional impostor, stage lights are shining brighter than ever. As the famous New Yorker cartoon of a dog at a computer notes, "No one knows you are a dog." Using fake names, adding a PhD to author status in a self-published book, or simply blogging without experience and in-depth knowledge of the topic under discussion - digital impostors are rapidly spreading on the Web. You don't believe all those beautiful Facebook photos, do you?
Each of us today is a scattered cubist image that does not have a real self-portrait. Unsurprisingly, we are so attracted to those who seem so whole, self-sufficient, confident in who they are. These cunning artists show us masterfully executed self-portraits as if they were the work of Rembrandt. Ferdinand Demara. Frank Abagnale. Leonard Zelig. What about you? Who are you trying to fool?