The Authentic, Deceptively Simple, Endlessly Complex

(Accepted for publication 27 April 2018)

Authenticity and the authentic, despite the absence of a consistent metapsychological conceptualization, is an important milestone in psychoanalysis, since defining the authentic, its conceptual and metapsychologicalsetting from a psychoanalytic perspective, can be an exciting challenge for a psychoanalyst for whom abstinence and neutrality are structuring guidelines. At the level of common language, authenticity is often attributed to spontaneous attitudes, behaviours or reactions. At the level of the psychoanalytic paradigm, spontaneity implies forms of manifestation that could belong to unelaborated, unprocessed drive dynamics that elude the censorship and the psychic transformation processes. There are reactions through an act that eludes the experience of psychical working over or the working-trough process specific to psychoanalysis. So the question naturally arises: how can we remain authentic if we transform the drive from a spontaneous reaction into a complex expression that uses representations and cultural forms carried out across several levels of symbolisation? What could the meaning of authenticity be, considering the concepts of psychical working over, working-through and transformation, specific to the psychoanalytic thinking and clinical experiences?