Impostor Phenomenon

Impostor phenomenon, more commonly known today as impostor syndrome, is the psychological experience of persistent self-doubt about one's own abilities and accomplishments despite clear evidence to the contrary, accompanied by an internalized fear of being exposed as an intellectual or professional fraud. The psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes introduced the term in a 1978 article examining high-achieving women, describing the experience as an internal sense of intellectual phoniness that persisted even among women with genuine and well-documented accomplishments; the concept reached a wider audience following Clance's 1985 book on the subject. Impostor phenomenon is not a recognized psychiatric disorder and does not appear in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition, or in the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases, Eleventh Revision, which means clinicians currently lack standardized data on how common it is, what conditions commonly accompany it, or which assessment and treatment approaches work best, even as the concept has become widely discussed outside academic psychology, particularly in connection with workplace achievement and professional success.