Aspects of Authenticity: In the Clinical Thinking of Freud, Winnicott, Bion, and Lacan1

One of the themes that has preoccupied me over the course of my analytic career is the basis of the analytic relationship and the nature of the uneasy dialogue between analyst and patient. Whereas Freud characterized this discourse as one that both requires and enhances a unique capacity for honesty, I have always found it more useful to characterize this relationship in terms of a quest for authenticity, a project that was first articulated by existentialist philosophers. Even when authenticity is not explicitly invoked by the person who aspires to it—which is usually the case in psychoanalysis—analytic patients and practitioners alike nevertheless allude to authenticity in the way they oftentimes characterize the goals of treatment and the demands that are made on both participants in the analyst-patient relationship.

Though authenticity is not a technical term in any psychoanalytic text with which I am familiar, the idea of what I take “authenticity” to mean has pervaded psychoanalysis from its inception. For example, when Freud (Breuer & Freud, /1955, p. 305) suggested that the goal of analysis is to “transform hysterical misery into common unhappiness,” he was invoking authenticity as an essential, if undeniably ambiguous, goal of psychoanalysis. Similarly, when Winnicott (1989, p. 199) argued, “If we are successful [as analysts] we enable our patients to abandon invulnerability and become a sufferer,” he was addressing the analysand's capacity to accept the inescapable reality of suffering and the need to embrace such suffering honestly, or authentically. And when Bion (1974, p. 13) says that whenever analyst and patient meet together, both of them should be experiencing fear, and that if they are not, they have no business being there, he was also invoking authenticity as an inevitable presence in every analytic encounter. Neither Freud nor Winnicott nor Bion, of course, employs authenticity in his writing, but the sense of it pervades the corpus of their resp