Toward an Understanding of the Experience of Inauthenticity

That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain; at least I am sure it may be so in Denmark.
HAMLET, Act I, scene 3

THE LITERATURE strongly supports the idea that certain communicational gestures, verbal or otherwise, on the part of one person may contribute to symptomatology in another. This theme has been elucidated in a significant body of work1 typified by Bateson et al, 2 Fleck, 6 Haley, 9 Laing and Esterson, 15 Lidz et al, 19, 20 Searles, 22 Singer and Wynne, 23 and Wynne et al. 28 In sum, the communicational stream seems to be

a sequence of contexts, both of learning and of learning to learn. … While, of course, the words that people say to each other have importance, the problem of describing the relationship between persons is not a question which can be answered by any summary of the dictionary meaning of their messages. There is a vast difference between the mechanical description "A gave B such and such information" and a description of the interchange "A answered B's question immediately." 1

It is my assumption that the way in which people communicate with each other under certain circumstances induces behavior that can be