What Even Is Authenticity?
The ideal of authenticity is everywhere. But what are we actually referring to when we say “authenticity”? Is it honesty? Consistency? Alignment between inner and outer worlds? And how do we differentiate authenticity from performance when all human behavior is, at least at some level, relational?
Authenticity as Existential Responsibility
In existential philosophy, authenticity is not about self-expression: it’s about self-confrontation. Søren Kierkegaard saw the authentic life as one lived in full recognition of our freedom, our limitations, and our existential anxiety. To live authentically, for him, was to become a “self” through inwardness and subjective truth. It was less about being seen, and more about becoming.
Martin Heidegger, too, argued that authenticity involves a confrontation with death. To be authentic is to recognize our finitude and take responsibility for our being. Most of us, he argued, flee from this responsibility by falling into das Man, or the anonymous “they-self” that tells us how to act, what to desire, and who to be.
In other words: authenticity isn’t comfortable. It doesn’t flatter us. It demands that we stop outsourcing our values to culture, family, or ideology and begin making choices from a place of deep, often painful self-awareness.
The False Self and the Adaptive Self
Psychoanalysis gives us a parallel vocabulary. D.W. Winnicott’s concept of the false self describes the part of the psyche that emerges in response to environmental demands. As infants, we begin to mold ourselves through emotion, behavior, and identity to maintain a connection with caregivers. This is often a necessary survival strategy. But when the false self becomes too dominant, it obscures our sense of what we actually feel or want.
Authenticity, in this light, isn’t simply “being who we are” because much of who we are has been shaped by adaptation. Rather, it’s the slow process of integration. It’s recovering access to the self beneath the performances, the parts of us that were too risky, too sensitive, or too dissonant to be fully expressed. To be authentic is to develop a self that is coherent not because it’s consistent, but because it’s congruent.
Authenticity and the Interpersonal Field
Relational theorists remind us that there is no “true self” that exists in isolation. Our sense of self is co-constructed in the presence of others through language, gesture, recognition, and repair. Jessica Benjamin’s concept of mutual recognition positions authenticity not as self-disclosure, but as the ability to remain in contact with another without collapsing into compliance or control. It’s about presence.
This is particularly relevant in therapeutic work, where authenticity is often mistaken for full transparency. But being authentic in a relational context may mean setting a boundary. It may mean not sharing something before it’s metabolized. Authenticity isn’t exposure; it’s congruence between intention, sensation, and action, even when that congruence is invisible to others.
Authenticity as an Ongoing Practice
There is no finish line to becoming “authentic.” It is not a trait but a process: something we re-commit to in each conversation, choice, and relationship. It requires psychological flexibility, self-awareness, and a willingness to risk rupture.
What makes authenticity so difficult is that it is never free from context. We are always aware, at some level, of how we are being perceived. So perhaps authenticity is not about eliminating performance, but about reducing the dissonance between what is performed and what is felt. It’s about inhabiting our lives from the inside out, rather than curating them from the outside in.
In a world that rewards polish, authenticity can feel like a liability. But as both philosophy and psychology suggest, it may be one of the few pathways toward freedom. Not freedom from discomfort, uncertainty, or contradiction, but freedom within them.
