Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott distinguished the true self, which is spontaneous and unmediated, from the false self that develops as a coping mechanism to meet external expectations. When the false self dominates, a person feels lifeless and fragmented. Authenticity means the true self can override the false self when it matters.
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I wanted to mention a psychoanalyst that I like called Donald Winnicott. And Donald Winnicott has just a very simple explanation for what authenticity is. And I think it's just a great starting point for the conversation. His idea is that we have a true self and a false self. He doesn't mention authenticity specifically, and he says that the true self in infants is just simply being alive and spontaneous. So in other words, an infant not having a personality, not having any mind or capacity to think, is simply spontaneously alive, and in that spontaneity is expressing something genuine and real. But he says that the infant as the infant grows older, develops a false self, which is not false in a negative term. It's more like the self that the infant is using to understand the world around them and be what the world requests or asks of them. So they get feedback from their parents, they get feedback from their siblings and their peers, and they develop a coping mechanism to deal with the world. But he says that your false self, even though it's kind of your way to manage the people around you, is actually— there's like a hierarchy. And your true self, if it's an important issue, your true self should be able to override and express what you naturally feel, which is a spontaneous feeling, a spontaneous expression. He says if you have to plan what you're going to say, it's not authentic. Because it should be something that just comes and you don't think about it first. And so he says that a lot of people get trapped in allowing their false self to override their true self instead of the other way around. So he says we have both, and you could say the false self is how you develop EQ, how you function in the world, how you learn what's expected of you at a job or what your parents want you to be. But the difference is your false self should not be the entirety of you. Because then you don't feel alive and you don't feel genuine and you don't feel whole. So even though that's a kind of technical definition for it, I thought that the word spontaneity really captured something because, you know, throughout our lives we do try to plan who to be more than we just kind of show up and wing it. And I think that just alludes to the fact that we do live in a society of expectations that are always put on us, and we develop a self that can adapt to other people's expectations, that can please other people. And that's the dance between that true self and that false self. So if anybody wants to jump in, that's just my starting point.
