The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 27, 1958, No. 3: Phyllis Greenacre. 'The Impostor.'

The intense maternal attachment to which the future impostor is subjected, as if he were a part of the mother, undermines his sense of a separate self and the development of his own identity. By placing the child in a position of definite superiority to the father—either through the mother's attitude alone, or by fate through the death or desertion of the father—there is set a potentially serious imbalance of the oedipal relationship, the child being able to assume an uncontested supersession of its father. This inevitable intensification of infantile narcissism favours a reliance on omnipotent fantasy in other aspects of self-evaluation to the exclusion of reality testing.

As this child is closer to his mother than to his father, it may be that he identifies with the maternal phallus, thus increasing the whole quality of illusion with which the impostor paradoxically struggles for self-realization.

Greenacre further suggests that vision, and the reflection of oneself from and by others, play a crucial part in early problems of identity. The sexual organization of impostors tends to be polymorphous-perverse, and there is almost no object-relationship.