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Behind the façade, imposture reveals something more troubling: an identity built around the expectations of others. Caught between conscious deception and a deeper sense of disconnection, it reflects a quiet, often painful search for legitimacy—and for a place in the world.
“The real impostor doesn’t just lie to others—he creates himself. And sometimes, he even believes it.” — Jean-Bertrand Pontalis.
The figure of the impostor is disorienting, and at times even fascinating. They invent a life, borrow an identity, adopt qualities they do not possess and assume a role never truly theirs. Yet, behind the polished mask lies something deeper: imposture not merely as a performance, but as a way of being. It is not simply about deceiving others, it is about being shaped, from an early age, by the expectations of another, until the boundary between what is real and what is false begins to blur. The impostor is not merely pretending. He is the product of a betrayal.
In its traditional sense, the impostor is a usurper. He borrows from others—their mannerisms, talents, even their name—and weaves a fragile, paper-thin destiny. However, this act of invention is not always cynical. As psychoanalyst Jean-Bertrand Pontalis points out, the impostor often falls victim to his own creation. He is no longer simply playing a role, he becomes it. Pontalis defines him as follows, “The impostor is someone who assumes an identity, invents a story—sometimes to the point of believing it—passes himself off as someone else, and makes it work.”
Several psychoanalysts have examined this phenomenon: a disturbance in the subject’s sense of truth, a puzzle where identity appears blurred or grandiose, but always inauthentic.
Hélène Deutsch, a follower of Freud, dedicated part of her work to what she termed “as if” personalities—a concept closely related to D. Winnicott’s notion of the false self. She described individuals who seem to live, love and act, yet are never fully present. They imitate existence more than they genuinely experience it. They speak as others speak, laugh as others laugh, love as one wishes to be loved. They are neither lacking in intelligence nor charm, they are often brilliant. Yet their sense of self feels fragile, empty and dependent on the gaze of others.
In her most striking case study, Deutsch described a patient who consistently lied about her origins, her relationships and her background. She had invented a famous musician father, studies at Oxford and a failed marriage. This was not simply a craving for narcissistic admiration, it was a way to create a reality for herself. Here, lying becomes ontological, “I lie, therefore I am.” It is less a calculated deception than a mode of existence. The self, fragile and fractured, survives only by patching itself together with threads of fiction.
Phyllis Greenacre, another key figure in American psychoanalysis, focused on artistic creation and the blurred line between genuine talent and imposture. In her writings on “creative impostors,” she examined cases of writers and painters who built their reputations on false biographies, sometimes even falsifying their works. But like others before her, she sought to understand the motives behind these acts. One of her most famous cases involved a writer who fabricated a miserable childhood despite having grown up in a protected, middle-class family. This lie was not intended to deceive the public, rather, it served to legitimize a rebellious stance, create a heroic origin and justify the emotional intensity of his novels. Greenacre concluded that “biographical imposture is often an effort to repair a humiliated self—or to make a life bearable despite limited choices.”
Imposture bears a clear connection to megalomania. The impostor embraces a glorified version of himself—not merely out of a sense of grandeur, but because he cannot endure his own insignificance. This imagined greatness is not a form of narcissistic delusion, but rather a defense against the void.
Imposture is an internalized structure. Where the impostor acts, imposture has already been endured. Where the impostor performs, imposture is being enacted. It often originates in a pathological family context, where the individual is burdened with fulfilling a parent’s ideal—often that of the mother. The authentic self has no room to develop. Imposture begins when one becomes the Other’s dream. As psychoanalyst Michel Fain writes, “A woman with a phallic narcissistic structure—a narcissistic structure characterized by an exaggerated assertion of power—will do more than most to turn her baby into an object that completes her, thereby crushing the budding subject, who is henceforth destined to be nothing more than a false self.”
Psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel explored at length the illusion of omnipotence and the difficulty some individuals face in coming to terms with the limits of the self. In The Ego Ideal, she describes how a person can remain trapped within a tyrannical ideal inherited from their parents, striving to merge with it—even at the cost of losing themselves. In this context, imposture becomes a form of pseudo-identity shaped by the image projected by the Other—often the mother.
In such cases, the ideal takes on the weight of a command: be perfect or be nothing. Failure becomes a betrayal of the original bond; success, by contrast, offers no sense of inner truth. It alienates rather than satisfies. The individual inhabits a sense of imposture, confined to a role that was never genuinely theirs. Chasseguet-Smirgel discusses the case of a brilliant patient—a respected and accomplished physician—who struggled with severe depression. Her life had been shaped by the constant pressure to fulfill the expectations of a demanding father and an emotionally unavailable mother. Her success, entirely performative, had made her the ideal daughter—but never a subject in her own right. She had been denied the space to fail, to imagine or to discover her own desire.
Among psychoanalytic contributions, Andrée Bauduin provides the most clinically developed distinction between the impostor and imposture. In her studies on the children of narcissistic mothers with a phallic structure, she shows how the mother, absorbed by her own sense of lack, turns the child into an object of repair—a glorious extension of herself. The child has no space of their own; they are drawn into the gravitational pull of maternal megalomania.
Bauduin cites a striking clinical case: a man who, for most of his life, had been “playing at being a writer.” He had published a few texts, moved in literary circles, but never felt legitimate in the role. Only later, in analysis, did he come to recognize the source of this impulse: a mother who, frustrated by her own forsaken academic ambitions, had raised him with the belief that he “had to succeed for her.” He wasn’t writing, he was fulfilling a promise. Bauduin reads Promise at Dawn by Romain Gary as the story of just such an internalized imposture. The mother envisions an extraordinary future for her son, “You will be Abraham Lincoln, D’Annunzio, ambassador of France.” And the son, loyal to that gentle madness, becomes a writer, a resistance fighter, a diplomat—but at what cost? As Gary writes, “I did not belong to myself. I had to keep my promise, return home covered in glory after a hundred victorious battles, write War and Peace, become ambassador of France—in short, allow my mother’s talent to find its expression through me.” His life, shaped by this original falsification, was never truly his own. He was the child of the promise.
At first glance, the impostor and imposture may seem opposed: one deceives, while the other has been deceived. Yet they converge on a fundamental truth—the absence of subjective ownership. The impostor lies because he lacks a stable inner foundation. Imposture, by contrast, is a fate imposed from without. In both cases, the individual is estranged from their true self.
The megalomania accompanying these trajectories is not merely narcissistic inflation; rather, it operates as a defense mechanism against psychological disintegration. The individual constructs a “false self,” an artificial structure essential for maintaining psychic integrity. Winnicott conceptualizes this as the false self, Greenacre describes it as a fantasy-based identity and Bauduin refers to it as the subject’s repression. In each case, the underlying process is an attempt to reestablish a semblance of coherence, even if it is fundamentally illusory.
In clinical contexts, these individuals fluctuate between emptiness and flamboyance. They captivate and impress, yet conceal profound doubts about their legitimacy. Perpetually performing, they live in constant fear of exposure. When they succeed, it is invariably on behalf of another.
The tragedy of impostors is often overlooked. Behind their mask lies, all too often, a wounded child—a fragmented self, an identity usurped from the very beginning. Every imposture carries a promise violently imposed on the psyche—a parental dream, a voice that overwhelmed childhood.
Psychoanalytic therapy can, at times, liberate individuals from these destinies. It enables them to reclaim what was experienced as false, to embrace failure, uncertainty and their authentic desires. It provides a path away from the stage where they once performed for someone else.
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