Word: harvey
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Writing about the same fears in If I'm So Successful, Why Do I Feel Like a Fake? (St. Martin's Press; $14.95), Joan C. Harvey, a Philadelphia clinical psychologist, claims that the more these sufferers succeed the more terrified of failure they become. From boardroom to operating room, she says, many people who are seen as star performers in their fields agonize that they may be unmasked...
Subsequent studies showed that IP was common to both sexes. Harvey, who first read Clance's work in 1978 and discovered a description of the fears that haunted her, went a step further and calibrated the syndrome. She devised the Harvey IP scale, a series of 14 self-evaluating statements now used by psychologists to measure a subject's feelings of fraudulence. Examples: "In general, people tend to believe I am more competent than I really am." And, "At times I have felt I am in my present position through some kind of mistake...
...feel inadequate at home as well as on the job, attractive executives who secretly believe that under those fashionable clothes they are still as fat as they were at 13, and innumerable men and women who fear that their friends would desert them if only they knew. In Harvey's book, Virgil, 67, a self-made millionaire in Beverly Hills, remembers his humble beginnings when he walks into his exclusive club and wonders when the others will realize that he does not belong there...
Readers of these books may wonder why anyone should care about the chief executives and movie stars who get sweaty palms every time they undertake a new task. The answer, according to Clance and Harvey, is that IP fears can trigger illness and debilitating emotional trauma in sufferers, and cause additional problems for others who depend upon them. Consider, for example, the hyped-up physician who told Clance about his long battle to keep his fears under control. "It was wearing me out pretending to be a doctor," he confided. He eventually realized that his unfounded obsession with imminent failure...
...priced middle-age executive believes deep down that he is a child masquerading as an adult. His solution: after an arduous day of pretending to be a grownup, he rushes home to eat Popsicles and play video games. It works for him, but for most IP sufferers Clance and Harvey would prescribe more standard measures: therapy, self-help groups and understanding friends. Clance also suggests that her patients remember a useful observation of W. Somerset Maugham's: "Only a mediocre person is always at his best." --By Janice Castro. Reported by Leslie Cauley/Atlanta and Marcia Gauger/New York