The portrait of Bourdin that emerges from The Imposter and from various journalists who have interviewed him is not of a monster or of a simple sociopath.

It is of a deeply damaged person who developed a specific pathological coping mechanism for an early life of poverty, instability, and emotional neglect, and who never found a way to stop using it even when its costs became enormous.

His accounts of his childhood — of feeling unwanted and unseen — have the ring of genuine pain even when filtered through his general unreliability.

The pattern of his impersonations — the consistent choice of vulnerable teenager rather than wealthy adult, the consistent targeting of social service systems rather than financial institutions — suggests someone whose compulsion was about obtaining care and attention rather than material goods.