Decisive Moment
A few weeks ago, my mother informed me that there seemed to be a picture of Dad in The New Yorker, among a selection of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s lost New Jersey photographs (“Why New Jersey?,” February 13th & 20th). I quickly confirmed that a dark-haired man with his pants jacked up to his navel was indeed my father, Michael Klein, who worked at Squibb (and then Bristol Myers Squibb) for thirty years as a financial analyst. My father is now eighty-one, living in a memory-care facility near Princeton, in the latter stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Days before my mother alerted me about the photograph, he fell, hit his head, and was moved to hospice care. The timing of the photograph’s appearance is not only an eerie coincidence; it also makes the image an obituary of sorts, showing my father in his early prime, at the age of thirty-three.
My father, who had no artistic ambitions whatsoever, made no attempt to create anything that would outlive him: he played tennis, liked to read, travelled when he could, and generally lived a quiet and peaceful life. So, right as he begins to make his transition to the spirit world, it’s heartening and enlivening—joyful, even—to discover that he was immortalized by Cartier-Bresson long ago.
Lee Klein
Rose Valley, Pa.
The Real Deal
Every semester, I hear many of my Ph.D. students—brilliant and determined people from mainly working-class backgrounds—describe their struggles with what they call impostor syndrome in ways that follow the script laid out in Leslie Jamison’s article on the issue (“Not Fooling Anyone,” February 13th & 20th). Jamison’s mapping of the concept mirrors what the sociologist C. Wright Mills called a crisis of the “sociological imagination.” Mills understood that, if we want to be free of the discontents that plague contemporary life, we must view our personal battles as arising out of society’s cultural and political structures. Unfortunately, treating issues like impostor syndrome as psychological problems effectively pathologizes people, primarily women, who are living and working within systems that have been designed to make them feel like they don’t belong and don’t deserve to be there.
As Jamison argues, such treatment rewrites experience as an individual shortcoming. For students who seek to liberate themselves from the burden of impostor syndrome, it might help to follow Mills’s advice and externalize society’s deficiencies.
Eric J. Weiner
Professor of Education
Montclair State University
Montclair, N.J.
In Jamison’s reconsideration of the impostor phenomenon, many of the examples she cites, including her own experiences, come from academia. Higher education fosters insecurity and inadequacy, especially for debt-burdened postgraduates striving to gain secure, tenure-track positions in a Ph.D.-glutted job market. Colleges and universities encourage unspoken comparisons and competitions between students, and perpetuate a pseudo class hierarchy (degrees, professorial ranks, institutional rankings, etc.) that’s tied to nebulous intellectual achievements. What’s more, academia’s gatekeeping peer-review system allows readers to anonymously offer snarky, destructive criticism, deepening a sense of inadequacy in those for whom “publish or perish” has become a mantra. Jamison argues that the impostor phenomenon is ultimately about “gaps” in “versions of the self,” but the higher-education system exploits and widens those gaps.
Brian Gibson
Annapolis Royal, N.S.
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