Psychological assessment of an artist and impostor.
A Rorschach record and a narrative poem are examined to determine how imagination expresses the psychological trauma of being exposed as an impostor. The subject had been trained as a medical corpsman and deceived people under the grandiose fantasy of being a doctor. The role of the impostor physician is seen as an imaginative identity that was designed with an adaptive purpose. A Jungian analysis of his suicide attempt and the Rorschach suggest that the impostor role was a masculine compensatory fantasy that served as a counterforce to negative maternal imagery, linked to death, that is present in his imagination.
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D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D003405:Creativity; D005201:Fantasy; D005607:Fraud; D006801:Humans; D007602:Jungian Theory; D008016:Life Change Events; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010553:Personality Development; D011037:Poetry as Topic; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D011613:Psychotherapy; D012392:Rorschach Test; D013313:Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic / Q000523:psychology*; D013406:Suicide, Attempted / Q000523:psychology