The Challenges for Us Psychologized Moderns

Abstract

In a reparative history Dana Simmons boldly faces self feelings of imposture and guilt and engages them to consider how science studies can move beyond critical appraisals to undertake the greater, more important task of reassembling the self and studies of the self. For readers who are aware of their psychologized self-conceptions, her history promises opportunities for re-appraisal and re-assemblage.  This commentary appreciates Simmons’ illumination of the race, class, and gender constituents of the psychologies of achievement which, among their products, have yielded the very idea of Impostor Syndrome.  Further development of the kind of reparative histories advocated by Simmons demands attention to the enormity of our psychologized modernity and the complexities of reflexive psychology.