2

Imposture, the imposition of pretense, is based on the power of deception to the extent that the impostor is invented by social desire. It is not by chance that the unconscious of the impostor was the object of curiosity for the first analysts, from Abraham to Deutsch. What is presented here, based upon paradigmatic cases from this neglected literature, is an analysis of the psychic conjecture of the impostor and its aptitude for enacting deceptions intended for collective consumption. The impostor knows how to manipulate for their own ends the pretenses that support discourse itself. One understands therefore how masculine bragging, where imposture is raised up to the art of masquerade, outclasses its female counterpart. In Freud, there is a heroic form of imposture that is also structural: the impostor pretends that he alone has murdered the father, depriving then, in the guise of a traitor ( faux-frère), the band of brothers of the Death of the Father. Beyond this imaginary operation, the impostor questions the symbolic itself and its prestige. As the analysis of The Treatise of the Three Impostors demonstrates, psychoanalysis situates itself outside of the ideology of “all impostors,” closer to the dialectic of truth and pretense.