Most people have a stable sense of who they are — a continuous identity that persists across contexts and relationships.

Bourdin appears to have had something very different: an identity that was fluid, constructed, and entirely dependent on context.

He was who the situation required him to be.

Part of it is the moral complexity.

Bourdin is not a simple villain.

His deception caused genuine harm to people who were already suffering.

But he is also a person whose history generates some understanding of why he did what he did — a person whose pathology emerged from circumstances of deprivation and neglect, who found in impersonation a response to a need that he had no legitimate means of meeting.

And part of it is the unresolved questions he raises about the case.