Fearing the Mask May Slip

By Janice Castro

The psychotherapist quietly takes notes as her patient pours out his troubles, wondering why the poor fellow thinks that she can possibly be of any help. A trial lawyer with a winning record lives in constant fear that he will make a terrible mistake because he is not familiar with some obscure point of law. A talented computer programmer dreads the day when his boss will give him the Big One to do. The Big One is an assignment that encompasses all of the intricate programming tasks that he has never learned and will reveal him, once and for all, as the mediocre hack that he knows he really is.

All of these people are professionals who secretly believe that they have been overestimated, and that at any moment the truth about them will out. According to two new books, their private feelings of fraudulence are shared by an estimated 70% of all successful individuals. In The Impostor Phenomenon (Peachtree Publishers, Ltd.; $14.95), Dr. Pauline Rose Clance, a professor of psychology at Georgia State University who first identified the syndrome, explains that many such impostors are perfectionists who can never meet their own standards.

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.

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.

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."

In 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.

IP, a neurosis that affects only those who have achieved success, is a peculiar blend of insecurities. Its victims privately denigrate their professional abilities and think that their success is the result of superficial qualities like good looks or charm. Some are workaholics who believe that they have made it only because they work harder than others. 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."

These feelings are not restricted to the workplace. Impostors include working mothers who 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.

Many impostors develop these fears after early successes. When Eleanor, a nuclear engineer cited by Clance, became one of the first women to obtain a top position in her field, she refused to accept her accomplishments. "I'm not very bright at all," she says. "I don't really belong here."

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 had driven him to nervous exhaustion, adversely affecting his marriage and his friendships.

Occasionally, IP victims devise make-shift methods for coping with their problems. One high-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

With reporting by Reported by Leslie Cauley/Atlanta, Marcia Gauger/New York