>To put it another way, when people understand the truth of what they want in the world, they are less likely to cause suffering for themselves or others.

How is this self awareness or understanding best cultivated?

what is authenticity to you? is it that "people understand the truth of what they want in the world, they are less likely to cause suffering for themselves or others."? is it ethical behavior? a deep commitment to truthfulness?

it seems that part of what you are pointing to is that the more honest we are in our relationship with ourselves, the more likely we are to be able to relate to the world without imposing our selfish needs on the other, which is an aspect of keeping our narcissism in check, so leads to more ethical behavior.

regarding optimism and psychoanalysis: Jung postulated that the psyche has a natural healing impulse that leads towards integration and wholeness through a path opened when attending to the symptom. its our fuckedupidnesses that lead us be aware of the areas in ourselves that need development, and if we attend to the symptom, it will show us the way. to do this requires some fortitude, and according to Bion, faith. I would agree with that, it takes alot of faith in the underlying rightness of the universe to move counter to collective norms with conscious intention.

Of course people can move counter to the social ethos without alot of self aware insight, and there is no test of good-mental-health required to be a social activist, but still, some sort of truth and faith in that truth must move one from deep inside..... which points again to the value of anaysis of ones own personality/character/psycic makeup, thereby increasing awareness of unconscious tendencies, which brings us closer to our integrity and the authentic as we move out and into the world ....

A few haphazard comments on a concept I dislike.

1. Authenticity is a measure of conformance to a standard, but which? --- or do you have something else altogether in mind?

2. I don't think there is a truth of what is going on in people's lives; I just think there are more and less sensitive and enabling ways of looking at things.

But if being more sensitive and more able doesn't ground out in The Truth About Oneself, and I don't think it does, then a notion of authenticity defined in terms of private truth isn't very interesting and is perhaps even oppressive.

Perhaps we could identify authenticity with sensitivity and skill, but this would seem to push the concept beyond its familiar use --- which at least to me suggests that it is perhaps not all that useful.

3. I think truthfulness is a nice thing to have, but I don't think it needs anything more complicated than a commitment to avoid misleading anyone to whatever extent one's sensitivity and skill permits.

4. Morality. It sounds to me like you are trying to set up a moral core in the individual which the individual can be true to or not and which he knows he is being true to when he feels authentic (whatever that means).

This is an attractive idea in the same way that grounding morality in God is an attractive idea, but I don't think it works out.

Notice how the other story goes: there is a moral code in the heavens which the individual can be true to or not and which he knows he is being true to when he feels himself in a state of grace (whatever that means).

I don't think either of these ways of getting morality work, because I think that at the end of the day the psychoanalysts can no more agree on The Truth of The Self than the priests can agree on the Truth of God. Everyone's best intuitions run in a thousand different directions.

Of course, each project claims that this is not so. If the believer is not sure that his visceral responses and innate impulses are quite in tune, he can check with his favourite book or his priest in much the same way that your authenticolyte might read his favourite philosopher or talk with his therapist.

And yet one suspects that this is just so much back-patting. Get enough of it going on and each person in the circle might come to feel that he's getting his affirmation from something more lofty than the fellow behind him. "Somewhere back there is the warm and loving hand of God (Inner Truth, Reason, or what have you)!" But I don't think that's so.

I suspect that the most likely product of a commitment to authenticity, as with its religious analogue, is creation of and conformity to a community and tradition the conventions of which come to normalise, ground, and certify our visceral responses and innate impulses.

Not that there's nothing more to our responses and impulses than convention; I don't think that at all. Just that you can't get anything so crude as a morality (philosophy, or religion) out of them without invocking the simplifying power of community and convention.

5. Authenticity, self-responsibility, respect for an idea of the true self, &c are quite useful from 15 on to intellectual maturity, whenver that hits, if it does, during which time they serve to win us some space from character, custom, and circumstance in which we can exercise ourselves at becoming more sensitive and skilful at negotiating the complexities of life than irreflective conformity permits.

Later on, I think adherence to an inflated notion of the self as a source of authority and a norm of character and conduct just gets in the way of sensitive and skilful negotiation of complexities. At some point reflection wants to draw the notion of the true self (the will of God, the nature of Reality, &c) fidelity to which justified and encouraged us in over-throwing convention and taking ourselves into our own hands itself into question, as a doubtful convention of our own intellectual practise --- as a shadow of conformity which rebellion sneaks in under.

At this point, I feel authenticity (righteousness, representational fidelity, &c) ceases to be of central interest in the work we do on ourselves and the world.

7. That said, if you want a notion of authenticity, I think it makes most sense as the front end for a sort of vitalism. Here's what I have in mind.

When a young person chooses in the face of social pressure to do otherwise what seems most green and growing to him, it is useful to speak of authenticity. He is listening to his organic sense of where his health and well-being lie and not ripping himself off by buying into someone else's programme.

Here "authenticity" means listening to the dictates of one's own organism, in the most comprehensive sense; it means taking the path which the sum of one's biology, experience, imagination, relations, reasoning, &c reveals as most life-giving.

8. The problem with this account is that the organism is not to be trusted!

At 15, the conflict between inner compass and outward conformance is often clear enough. Later on, organic impulses no longer seem like the sort of things that are easily separated from the ecologies of influence in which one lives, nor always the most sensible sources of guidance through the tangle.

*Shrug*. If my own experience is anything to go by ... well, my own deepest impulses now often direct me to subordinate my impulses generally to dialogue with others, to experimentation, and to shared commitment --- to community and its compromises. Do you see what I'm saying?

Suppose authenticity means being true to my own organic sense of where healthfulness and well-being lie for me. Okay. But then what is there to make of authenticity when my organic sense of my own health tells me to listen to rumblings of the wider ecology? when that self starts to experience itself as a node of dense interconnectivity in a wider cybernetic system whose own visceral responses and innate impulses its well-being is inextricably tied up with?

At this point, authenticity begins to seem not all that useful. The hard ground of the self has fallen out from under it, as a nourishing but time-limited fiction, and, in the softer ground of the network story, authenticity ceases to look like a sensible measure of well-being. As morality starts to creep out to edge of the branches of the self it discovers a whole arboreal ecology ....

9. Perhaps you can push me on to another story in which authenticity regains its central role in evaluating well-being. In the meantime, though, my guess is that, if we want to promote morality, we can do this best by forgetting about concepts which might legislate and evaluate it --- "The psychologists will reveal our true selves to us and then we must all get in line! Yay!" --- and just facilitate sensitivity, awareness, knowledge about oneself and the world as one's own experience and imagination permit.

The idea is quite simple. When we are more sensitive, we're better able to judge, to feel, and to act with discrimination. We have a more fine-grained relationship to life, and so are more able to work out our needs and desires and relationships &c &c in ways that don't involve tripping ourselves or others up too much --- and more able to see the benefits of not doing so.

What more do you want that authenticity gets you? --- because the costs of giving it any sort of defensible content seem rather high, and I suspect its names are "alienation" and "oppression".

i keep thinking it would be helpful if we all had the some definition of this construct "authenticity".....and how exactly are we using it? in regards to the therapeutic relationship Rogerian style? in research evaluation? what????

As somewhat of a cynic myself, I tend to gravitate towards an understanding of "authenticity" (i.e., trust-worthiness, reliability, believability, verifiability, etc.) comes from as something that arises directly from our own felt-sense of mortality. There is something that is unmistakable about REAL dangers or threats, REAL suffering and pain, and REAL concerns for well-being and safety. This is, to some unfortunate degree, somewhat of a rarity in this, our post-modern, aperspectival, multi-dimensional philosophical collage of DIY cut-and-paste "realitIES." However, when one has the direct confrontation with one's own (or someone intimately close to one's self's) intimate experience with mortality, there can be little question about what is real and true, and therefore what it means to be authentic. It can then be illustrated as something as simple as a facial expression, or hand-gesture, or artwork. It so viscerally embodied by the sick and dying that, if one were to drop into one's being in the presence of suffering, authenticity naturally arises from that pure awareness. It is not possible to occupy such a space without it. And yet, while we still live in a world in which pure being / pure consciousness is not something that is inherited, but cultivated, and not venerated, but exploited, then the natural progression will develop out of the western mind's tendency towards 'thinking' and therefore distracting oneself from what is actual here-and-now, with us in every moment.

Or so I "think" -- co-founder, Authentic Unifying Media(TM) www.authentic-unifying.com/

I've had a quote pasted to my studio wall for so many years I'm not sure where it came from; it's simple but I believe applies strongly to the idea of authenticity.

"What I want to make clear is that creative living involves, in every detail of its experience, a philosophical dilemma - because, in fact, in our sanity we only create what we find."

So, what do we create in our insanity? Avoidance, unrealistic ideals, projection of inaccuracies?