What is our Authentic Self?

True And False Self, Owned And Unowned Being

Most of us, at some point in our lives feel that we are being inauthentic or not fully true to ourselves. Luckily, this has been an ongoing subject of exploration for psychotherapists and philosophers alike, so we have lots of interesting and insightful ideas to help us along our journey to a full experience of selfhood.

Donald Winnicott, the famous psychoanalyst, talked about true and false self in 1960. He talked about true-self being a sense of authenticity, spontaneity and realness. In contrast he described the false-self as being a place we retreat to in the face of trauma, where things appear real to the outside world, but never feel real to ourselves. Many people today experience this, at a time when appearances are paramount we neglect our inner lives, our inner selves, at our peril.

Winnicott

Winnicott was likely drawing from many years of work in philosophy into authentic being that has largely been associated with the Existential schools of thought. Existentialism has been linked with names such as Sartre, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. But one of the most important names in this traditional in Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Heidegger was a complex and contradictory man, who went on to completely dismiss any connection of his work to Existentialism. He was also arguably the most important philosophical thinker of the 20^thCentury. Heidegger’s work spoke directly to the question of authenticity. He said that authentic experience is that which is owned, that with is mine or yours. When in a state of inauthenticity we never feel like the experience is fully part of us. This often leaves us feeling uncanny or eerie, a state that Heidegger called Unheimlicht. This uncanniness leaves us with doubt, uncertainty and the feeling that things are not as they ought to be. This doubt creates a sense of unease, dread and anxiety, which unlike fear is not directed at a thing (snakes or the dentist for example), but is a pervasive sense of what Heidegger called Angst.

Heidegger

How Do We Find Our Authentic Self?

So how do we create a sense of authenticity in the face of Angst? The key appears to be to return to that which is most owned. Affect theory suggests that emotional states are innate, and we react to the emotional states of others even as newborns. In the Conversational Model we would state that these emotional states are wholly owned by us. In the practice of the Conversational Model the therapist is trying to deeply attune to the emotional states of their patient. In doing so they are engaging with them in a fundamentally authentic way, helping the patient to reconnect with their own emotions.

The inability to own our emotions and slip into a state of inauthentic uncanniness, much like Unheimlich, is called dissociation by psychotherapists. This is a subtle and oblique phenomena that has been identified clinically since the earliest days of psychotherapy. Dissociation is a fragmentation of our usual experience or ourselves, it feels like slipping away into what the psychotherapist Russell Meares calls a state of ‘painful incoherence’. A dissociated state is the ultimate un-owned experience, where our sense of ourselves becomes atomised, reduced and sheared off from normal experience. Dissociation is a common experience for people who have experienced emotional trauma.

As life becomes more and more hectic, often overwhelming, it is easy to become entrapped by the stimulus surrounding us and loose our connection to meaning, authenticity and ourselves. In typically impenetrable language Heidegger stated that ‘Discourse is existentially equiprimordial with state-of-mind and understanding’. Robert Hobson, the psychoanalyst stated much more elegantly ‘I can only find myself in and between me and my fellows in a human conversation’. In this Hobson is beautifully articulating the essence of what Heidegger is saying, that the essence of authenticity is found within our relationships to our fellows; within a human conversation.

Psychotherapy And The Authentic Self

The remedy for Unheimlich is the careful work of psychotherapy, with a therapist who can empathically engage you in the most authentic and meaningful way possible.

Talkingminds is a multidisciplinary practice where practitioners trained in psychotherapy can help you create a sense of authenticity. Visit our website or contact us to discuss making an appointment. I can be contacted directly on duncan.loasby.psychotherapy@gmail.com or 0424 605 812.

Further reading on the Authentic Self:

Forms of feeling, Robert Hobson 1985.

Heidegger for beginners, Lemay and Pitts, 2007.

Playing and Reality, Winnicott, 2005