Word: impostor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...with screams and a face of panic. Does he love her still? Of course, he says; he hates the disease, but he loves his wife. Or--and this seems hard--does he only love what he remembers of Emily? Is the frail doll in the bed an impostor? But no; this is Emily too, the same old Emily hidden somewhere under the decaying cells and in the folds of the painkillers. It is Emily and she is suffering and he swore he would always look after...
Clance isolated the impostor phenomenon in 1978, after discovering that others harbored the same insecurities that she had had as a graduate student at the University of Kentucky 16 years earlier. Says Clance, who was near the top of her class: "I was always afraid that I would blow it with the next exam." At first, Clance thought that she had uncovered a problem peculiar to women. But shortly after she began to write about it in technical journals, she began to hear from successful men burdened with the same misgivings...
...some ways the impostor phenomenon resembles the better-known fear-of-success syndrome but differs in its underlying causes. For instance, while many people fear success because they believe that friends or relatives will think less of them, impostors tend to fear it because they do not believe they have earned it. Impostors also fear failure because they believe it is inevitable...
...Most have difficulty accepting compliments. What distinguishes IP victims from other shy or insecure people is an enormous drive to achieve worldly position coupled with an inability to enjoy acclaim. Most strivers experience anxiety when faced with a difficult challenge, but usually feel better after meeting it. Not the impostor. Says Clance: "The person who thinks he is an impostor feels worse: he believes he is only perpetrating a fraud...
Sometimes the incarnations compete. In the early film versions, Ian Fleming's James Bond became Sean Connery. Then Bond turned into Roger Moore. Convinced that Bond was Connery, some moviegoers dismissed Moore as an impostor. Charlton Heston, conversely, performed a miracle of dramatic consolidation in the 1950s and '60s. He became Moses, Ben-Hur, Michelangelo, Andrew Jackson and John the Baptist: everyone this side of God. Heston possessed such brooding gravitas that he could plausibly pass for an abstraction, the decalogue with a strong chin...