© The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2011

Volume LXXX, Number 4

THE IMPOSTOR REVISITED

By John Steiner

Keywords: Phyllis Greenacre, Helene Deutsch, impostor, Freud,

identity, identification, mourning, internalization, projection,
Kleinian theory, introjection, narcissism, as-if personality.

Phyllis Greenacre (1958a) begins her classic paper, “The Impostor,” by

reminding us that “an impostor is not only a liar, but a very special type
of liar who imposes on others fabrications of his attainments, position, or
worldly possessions” (p. 1025, italics in original1). Yet she also recognizes
a wide range of conditions that bear a resemblance to impostors, and she
observes that the analyst often “gets glimpses of such traits, only partly
realized or appearing brightly in an incident or two, without emerging
into overt fraudulence in the lives of a number of patients” (p. 1026).
Helene Deutsch, in “The Impostor: Contribution to Ego Psychology
of a Type of Psychopath” (1955), is even more explicit about the ubiq-
uity of variants of this condition, and clearly sees the impostor on a con-
tinuum that includes the as-if personality of her earlier descriptions. She
writes:
The world is crowded with “as-if” personalities, and even more so
with impostors and pretenders. Ever since I became interested
in the impostor, he pursues me everywhere. I find him among
my friends and acquaintances, as well as in myself. [p. 1022]

The authors agree that we are all impostors to varying degrees, and
even suggest that talented individuals, especially artists, may be particu-
larly susceptible to suggestions of fraudulence.
1
Editor’s Note: In this article, page numbers from Greenacre 1958a and Deutsch
1955 refer to the numbering of the republications in this issue, not to that of the original
Quarterly publications of those years.

John Steiner is a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

1061
1062 JOHN STEINER

Along the same continuum are patients who hide their true self
within a false self (Winnicott 1960), and those who defensively adopt a
character armour (Reich 1933). These two papers are therefore important
in our understanding not only of these interesting patients, but also of
the impostor element in all our patients as well as in ourselves. Further-
more, they are a step toward the understanding of how it is that a sense
of personal identity develops. The papers are of special interest to me
because of my work with patients who hide in a psychic retreat, pro-
tected by a narcissistic organization (Steiner 1993, 2011).
I am impressed by the special expertise that both authors bring to
play on the problem of the impostor. Deutsch is able to make links with
her earlier classic work on patients with an as-if personality (1942), her
studies of female sexuality (e.g., 1925), and her papers on folie à deux
collusions and the family romance (1938). Greenacre makes connec-
tions to her work on psychopathic personalities (1952) and on the bio-
logical origins of a sense of identity (1958b). She also wrote about the
family romance of the artist (1958c) and the relation of the impostor
to the artist (1958c). Both authors clearly look beyond the specific and
unusual features of their patients and recognize the universality of the
problem.
Greenacre feels that she cannot present psychoanalytic material be-
cause of problems with confidentiality, and these patients clearly present
special difficulties over and above those with which we all struggle. In-
stead, she discusses famous impostors described in biographies and
makes pertinent observations based on what is clearly a considerable
clinical experience. Deutsch, too, brings a huge amount of experience
to her article, making many general observations as well as describing a
patient in detail.

FACTORS IN THE CREATION

OF THE IMPOSTOR
Both Deutsch and Greenacre recognize the importance of pathological
narcissism, and they are very aware that the impostor depends on his
audience. Indeed, sometimes they are led to admire the skill with which
the impostor enlists the observer to join him in his deception. Some-
 THE IMPOSTOR REVISITED 1063
times the observer has his own agenda for colluding with the impostor—
as, for example, in the story of the emperor’s new clothes, where the
admiring audience saw through the narcissism, but for reasons of their
own went along with it and flattered the emperor.
The authors agree that a false self or an as-if personality is not suf-
ficient to define the impostor; additional features are required. Deutsch
and Greenacre suggest that a particular excitement, often arising from
an oedipal triumph, fuels the deception. The excitement and narcissistic
gratification that arise from the capacity to dupe an audience function
as a defense against the infant’s sense of smallness and helplessness. This
helplessness is transformed into a narcissistic superiority through iden-
tification with powerful objects, and the success of the identification is
supported by the encouragement of an accomplice. Both authors see
this as representing an oedipal triumph in which, with the support of the
mother, the father is defeated.
Another issue prominent in both accounts is the failure of the su-
perego to create a climate in which reality can be faced. Deutsch speaks
of her patient’s bloated ego ideal, and both authors recognize that part
of the impostor’s achievement is to foster a belief that he has achieved
his ego ideal. There is then no conflict between his actual self and what
his ideal self might be.
Self-doubt, as Greenacre suggests, may be particularly a feature of
creative artists who present a work of art for the judgment of others.
Enormous internal strength may then be required in order to retain
a judgment of worth, if the work is not supported by the admiration
of others. The case of the artist represents a paradox since the artist’s
creative work—at the same time that it creates a propensity toward be-
coming an impostor—requires real contact with reality, which often de-
mands honesty and strength. I will discuss this issue in the case of Leon-
ardo da Vinci later in this paper.
Looking at these two papers more than fifty years after they were
written and from a transatlantic, Kleinian perspective, I am impressed by
the depth and subtlety of these experienced and sensitive clinicians. In
a schematic way, I will describe our current approach to identifications,
both introjective and projective identifications, and discuss how these
may lead to disorders of personal identity. I will describe the importance
1064 JOHN STEINER

to Kleinian analysts of the idea of an internal world and discuss how in-
ternal objects are constantly being projected onto figures in the external
world and then re-introjected, sometimes modified by the experience.
A critical issue in the genesis of an impostor arises when an indi-
vidual’s objects are unable to contain and understand what is projected
into them, and instead are drawn into enactments of various kinds. If
the patient can recognize his analyst’s limitations, it helps him to think
about his own. For both, it is often the relinquishment of omnipotence
that is most resisted, and when it can be let go of, it must be painfully
mourned.
Finally, I will outline the importance of tolerating and mourning
losses. I will suggest that it is through the process of mourning that pre-
viously disowned elements of the self can be regained, so that both self
and objects can be seen more objectively.

NARCISSISTIC IDENTIFICATIONS
The more one studies these classic papers, the more one is impressed
with the importance of narcissism in impostors, who carry out their de-
ceptions sometimes for material gain, it is true, but chiefly to elicit admi-
ration and achieve aggrandizement. Narcissistic identifications at their
most primitive involve a sense of being the object in which no separate-
ness between self or object is experienced. This is nicely put by Freud
in a posthumously discovered snippet, “Having and Being in Children”
(1938):

Children like expressing an object relation by an identification:

“I am the object.” “Having” is the later of the two; after the loss
of the object it relapses into “being.” Example: the breast. “The
breast is a part of me, I am the breast.” Only later “I have it,”
that is, “I am not it.” [p. 299]

Greenacre understood this and described how “the intense maternal

attachment to which the future impostor is subject, as if he were a part of
the mother, undermines his sense of a separate self and the development
of his own identity” (1958a, p. 1034). Later, Rosenfeld (1971) observed
how a narcissistic identification defends against any experience of sep-
 THE IMPOSTOR REVISITED 1065
arateness and difference between self and object. It is the experience of
separateness that allows the object to be observed as a whole, enabling
both good and bad elements to be recognized. Bad elements lead to
frustration and good ones provoke envy, so that obliterating separateness
is an efficient way of avoiding both.
Freud (1917) noted that the loss of the object is denied through the
creation of an identification. The patient complains that he is ill, worth-
less, guilty, etc., and Freud recognized that these descriptions apply to
the lost object. In the melancholic state, the patient has incorporated a
damaged, dying, or dead object and has identified with it. Klein (1935,
1940), in her papers on depression, stated that alongside this depressed,
persecuting object, represented by the maternal breast, an idealized
object is also internalized. This may enable a manic, omnipotent phan-
tasy to arise, involving the possession of an ideal object and leading to
a blissful state, such as that in the Garden of Eden. In a similar way, the
father and his penis are internalized in both persecutory and idealized
aspects. Deutsch and Greenacre describe the impostor’s frequent identi-
fication with a father who is omnipotently able to elicit endless admira-
tion.
Alongside such introjective identifications, projective processes are
simultaneously active, complicating the nature of identifications and ob-
ject relations. In her papers on projective identification, Klein (1946,
1955) described how both good and bad parts of the self may be split
off and attributed to objects. When combined with narcissistic identi-
fications, this leads to a narcissistic object relationship similar to that
described by Freud in his Leonardo paper. Discussing Leonardo’s rela-
tionship with his pupils, Freud (1910) wrote:

The child’s love for his mother cannot continue to develop

consciously any further; it succumbs to repression. The boy re-
presses his love for his mother: he puts himself in her place,
identifies himself with her, and takes his own person as a model
in whose likeness he chooses the new objects of his love. In this
way he has become a homosexual. What he has in fact done is
to slip back to auto-erotism: for the boys whom he now loves as
he grows up are after all only substitutive figures and revivals of
himself in childhood—boys whom he loves in the way in which
1066 JOHN STEINER

his mother loved him when he was a child. He finds the objects
of his love along the path of narcissism. [p. 100]

Here an infantile part of the self is disowned, projected, and identi-

fied with the pupil, while the self is narcissistically identified with the
mother. One could say that Leonardo adopts a false personality and in
the process disowns infantile elements in himself. In this sense, he is an
impostor claiming to offer maternal care while failing to acknowledge
his own longing for precisely such care.
In fact, Freud (1910) observed that the pupil containing the pro-
jected self may become a sexual object:

It has always been emphasized that [Leonardo] . . . took only

strikingly handsome boys and youths as pupils. He treated them
with kindness and consideration, looked after them, and when
they were ill nursed them himself, just as a mother nurses her
children and just as his own mother might have tended him. As
he had chosen them for their beauty and not for their talent,
none of them . . . became a painter of importance. [p. 102]

It is interesting that a completely different self emerged in Leon-

ardo’s artistic and scientific work, in which his capacity to observe reality
was supremely present. In his art, Leonardo seemed to find a creative
identity, but when he tried to look after his apprentice’s clothes, he
falsely represented himself as an ideal mother.
It seems that we can all be both true and false in different situations
as our needs come to be expressed or fail to be expressed. If analysis
helps us to know ourselves, then it often confronts us with the unhappy
realization that we are to varying degrees impostors, becoming caught
up in projective identifications that defend us against reality.
When projection is used excessively, important elements of the self
are lost. This may lead to a weakening of the ego, and sometimes the
patient will describe an emptiness and an inability to know what he be-
lieves. He may also be led to fill the internal vacuum left through exces-
sive projections by internalizing and identifying with powerful objects,
both good and bad. The resulting identity may serve some of the pur-
poses of successful living, but is often felt to be fraudulent—sometimes
by the patient and often by others.
 THE IMPOSTOR REVISITED 1067
To make the total situation even more complex, we must recognize
that, in addition to being the active agent deploying identifications for
defensive and aggressive purposes, the patient is also the passive recip-
ient of projections from the objects with whom he is in a relationship
(Williams 1997). It is almost inevitable in our profession that we project
disabled infantile sides of ourselves into our patients and narcissistically
identify with omnipotent objects in an attempt to cure ourselves.

THE INTERNAL WORLD

It is through these complex introjections and projections that an internal
world is built up that contains the self and objects in various states and in
various types of relationships with each other. These internal objects are
distorted through having elements of the self projected into them, and
the self is to various degrees depleted by projection and augmented by
narcissistic identifications.
We still understand very little of how a sense of personal identity
develops. But the idea of a true self uncontaminated by identifications
is a schematic model, and in practice it is a fiction that can never be at-
tained. All we can do is recognize some of the processes involved, and
when we move away from distorting identifications, we become a bit
more ourselves and pretend less to be someone else. Nevertheless, it is
important to try to understand how such identifications may be recog-
nized and reversed.
It is implicit in this discussion that a true self can be postulated to
exist but is tricky to define, since it tends to involve abstract and ideal-
ized concepts, such as being true to oneself, honest, and genuine—all
of which are rather difficult to measure and easily lend themselves to
invidious comparisons. It is perhaps easier to consider the dishonesty
and falseness of the impostor as a condition that we all find ourselves
slipping into, and to ask how such a propensity can be understood. An
advantage of thinking in these more negative definitions is that we can
consider that we move toward a truer identity as we relinquish identifi-
cations. This in turn can be linked to the idea that the aim of psycho-
analysis can involve helping the patient recover parts of himself formerly
lost through projective identification (Steiner 1996).
1068 JOHN STEINER

Schematically, we can consider movements toward a true self and

away from an impostor to involve the rediscovery of a self no longer
distorted by projective and introjective identifications. Parts of the self
attributed to objects have to be regained and recognized as belonging
to the self, and narcissistically possessed objects have to be relinquished
and recognized as belonging outside the self. Although always incom-
plete, movements toward this kind of recovery of the self can be ob-
served clinically and are closely related to the process of mourning.
The problem is how to understand what might enable a patient to
relinquish a narcissistic relationship and to replace it with a dependent
one involving a separation between self and objects. While much re-
mains poorly understood, this process has common elements with those
observed in mourning following a bereavement, which have been exten-
sively studied since Freud’s (1917) original exploration of them. Freud
notes that, following a bereavement, the subject’s first reaction is to deny
the loss through an intensification of identification with the object. If
the patient can proceed no further, mourning has failed, and the object
remains concretely incorporated and identified with. The critical issue
that determines whether the patient can proceed to the second stage
of mourning is his capacity to face the reality of the loss. In this second
stage, according to Freud, “reality-testing has shown that the loved object
no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be with-
drawn from its attachments to that object” (1917, p. 244). He continues:

Each single one of the memories and situations of expectancy

which demonstrate the libido’s attachment to the lost object is
met by the verdict of reality that the object no longer exists; and
the ego, confronted as it were with the question whether it shall
share this fate is persuaded by the sum of the narcissistic satis-
factions it derives from being alive to sever its attachment to the
object that has been abolished. [p. 245]

Today, as we recognize the central role of projective identification

in the creation of pathological object relations, we can restate Freud’s
formulation in terms of detachments of parts of the self from the object,
rather than in terms of detachment of libido. It then becomes clear that,
as reality is applied to each of the memories of the lost object, what has
 THE IMPOSTOR REVISITED 1069
to be faced is the painful recognition of what belongs to the object and
what belongs to the self. It is through the detailed work of mourning
that these differentiations are made. In the process, the lost object is
seen more realistically, and the previously disowned parts of the self are
gradually acknowledged as belonging to the self.
Some of these lost parts of the self are valuable and have been dis-
owned for complex reasons—for example, out of fear of being envied.
Others, such as aggression or rebelliousness, may have been seen as un-
desirable, but when regained are felt to strengthen the self. In any event,
an enormous gain derives from a sense of wholeness and integration. If
separateness between self and object can be achieved, it has immense
consequences and enables further development toward individual
growth and responsibility and a sense of identity. Indeed, all aspects of
mental life are affected, including thinking and symbol formation (Bion
1962; Segal 1957).
Moreover, what applies to the mourning connected with an actual
bereavement is in its essentials also true for all experiences of separate-
ness, which at a primitive level is felt as a loss. In analysis, it is often
actual separations—such as those occurring over weekends and holi-
days—that enable these processes to be studied, but the same reactions
occur whenever the analyst is experienced as independent and separate,
forcing the patient to face the reality of relinquishing possessive control
over him. If this can be achieved, a quantum of mourning can take place
and a quantum of self is returned to the ego. If the ego is strengthened,
a benign cycle can then be established and a more flexible and revers-
ible form of projective identification deployed.
Problems of identity are central to the impostor. Deutsch’s patient,
after a good deal of analytic work, was able to articulate his failure to
find an identity by asking his analyst, “Who am I? Can you tell me that?”
(1955, p. 1017, italics in original). He seems to have realized his failure
to internalize a self with a clear identity. In the course of his childhood,
he appears to have held onto objects through identification with them,
and he could not tolerate losses or mourn them. It is also possible that
his objects were unable to function as adequate containers for his anxi-
eties, and in their attempt to relieve him, they colluded to encourage his
omnipotence.
1070 JOHN STEINER

These two papers raise such fundamental questions, especially about

identity and identification, that their richness remains fresh today and
allows us to productively explore these areas anew.

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