https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/the-dubious-rise-of-impostor-syndrome
imposter syndrome, the people who first coined the idea/phrase
[Jody-Ann] Burey, who was born in Jamaica, didn't feel like an imposter; she felt enraged by the systems that had been built to disenfranchise her. She also didn't experience any yearning to belong, to inhabit certain spaces of power. "White women want to access power, they want to sit at the table," she told me. "Black women say, this table is rotten, this table is hurting everyone."
Every time [Suzanne]Imes hears the phrase "imposter syndrome," she told me, it lodges in her gut. It's technically incorrect, and conceptually misleading. As Clance explained, the phenomenon is "an experience rather than a pathology," and their aim was always to normalize this experience rather than to pathologize it. Their concept was never meant to be a solution for inequality and prejudice in the workplace–a task for which it would necessarily prove insufficient.
The psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir, in her book "Animal Joy," explains imposter syndrome by drawing on D. W. Winnicott's concepts of "false self" and "true self." She sees the anxiety as stemming from "a False Self that is so fortified by layers of compliant behavior that is loses contact with the raw impulses and expressions that characterize the True Self." Attempts to prevent the discovery of one's "true self" end up compounding the belief that this self, were it ever discovered, would be rejected and dismissed.
