The term ‘authentic’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along two largely distinct but philosophically interrelated axes. The first and most systematically elaborated is Heideggerian: in Being and Time, authenticity names the mode of Dasein that has appropriated its own ownmost possibility — above all, Being-toward-death — rather than losing itself in the dispersal of the ‘they.’ Here conscience, resoluteness, anticipatory anxiety, guilt, and fate converge as the structural conditions of authentic existence, which Heidegger carefully distinguishes from moral prescription. The second axis is somatic-imaginal: within the Jungian lineage, ‘Authentic Movement’ — codified by Mary Starks Whitehouse and developed by Janet Adler and Joan Chodorow — designates a disciplined practice in which the mover follows inner impulse rather than imposed choreography, thereby enacting active imagination through the body. Tozzi’s treatment places this practice within the broader Jungian economy of symbol-formation and psychic polarity. A tertiary usage appears in Plotinus, where ‘authentic’ (ἀληθινός) qualifies the Intellectual-Principle and the Authentic Beings as archetypes prior to their sensory copies. Finally, emotion psychology distinguishes authentic from hubristic pride as a socially adaptive versus narcissistic modality. The tensions across these usages — existential appropriation, somatic presence, metaphysical primacy, and affective genuineness — reveal ‘authentic’ as one of the corpus’s most semantically loaded terms.
Dasein makes possible, first and foremost, its authentic potentiality-for-Being. But because Dasein is lost in the ‘they’, it must first find itself… attested by that which… is familiar to us as the ‘voice of conscience’.
Heidegger identifies authentic potentiality-for-Being as recovered through the call of conscience, which wrests Dasein from its lostness in the anonymous ‘they.’
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
When one has an understanding Being-towards-death as one’s ownmost possibility, one’s potentiality-for-Being becomes authentic and wholly transparent.
Anticipatory resoluteness toward death is for Heidegger the definitive structure by which Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being is rendered fully authentic and transparent to itself.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
Factically, Dasein maintains itself proximally and for the most part in an inauthentic Being-towards-death. How is the ontological possibility of an authentic Being-towards-death to be characterized ‘Objectively’?
Heidegger poses the central problem of authentic Being-toward-death, acknowledging that Dasein’s default comportment is inauthentic and that authentic dying remains structurally concealed from others.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
One knows about the certainty of death, and yet ‘is’ not authentically certain of one’s own. The falling everydayness of Dasein is acquainted with death’s certainty, and yet evades Being-certain.
Heidegger diagnoses everydayness as a structural evasion of authentic certainty: Dasein knows death abstractly while fleeing its own-most attestation of that certainty.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
Dasein’s authentic historicality has fate and repetition… resoluteness lies the existentiell constancy which, by its very essence, has already anticipated every possible moment of vision that may arise from it.
Authentic historicality, grounded in fate and repetition, constitutes for Heidegger an existentiell constancy that anticipates and holds open all future moments of decisive vision.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
Being, in each case mine, is free either for authenticity or for inauthenticity or for a mode in which neither of these has been differentiated.
Heidegger establishes the ontological tripartition of Dasein’s Being: authenticity, inauthenticity, and an undifferentiated average everydayness that precedes the distinction.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
The future, the character of having been, and the Present… make temporality manifest as the ἐκστατικόν pure and simple… the basic possibility of authentic or inauthentic existence.
Temporality — the ekstatic unity of future, past, and present — is shown to be the primordial ground that makes possible the differentiation between authentic and inauthentic existence.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
If historiology, which itself arises from authentic historicality, reveals by repetition the Dasein which has-been-there… the Present discloses the ‘today’ authentically.
Heidegger argues that genuinely historical inquiry is rooted in authentic historicality, which discloses the present ‘today’ through a repetition of past existential possibility.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
Authentic Movement is a dynamic form, in continual evolution… offers us the opportunity to promote a confrontation, not only between the polarities innate in our psyche, but also between what is within us and what is outside of us.
Tozzi presents Authentic Movement as a living, collective practice that mediates between intrapsychic polarities and the external world, functioning as an embodied analogue of active imagination.
, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training, 2017thesis
As a teacher of Authentic Movement, she studied with Janet Adler and Joan Chodorow. She leads international workshops on Authentic Movement and since 2004 has been collaborating with Joan Chodorow.
This passage locates Authentic Movement within a specific lineage of Jungian somatic practice transmitted through Adler and Chodorow, anchoring the term in institutional depth-psychological pedagogy.
, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training, 2017supporting
Pallaro, P. (ed.) (1999). Authentic Movement: Essays by Mary Starks Whitehouse, Janet Adler and Chodorow. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
A bibliographic citation confirming the canonical textual sources for Authentic Movement as a Jungian somatic discipline.
, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training, 2017aside
As authentic Intellection, it has authentic intellection of the authentically existent, and establishes their existence… The Authentic Beings must exist before this All, no copies made on a model but themselves archetypes, primals, and the essence of the Intellectual-Principle.
Plotinus uses ‘authentic’ to designate the archetypes of the Intellectual-Principle as ontologically prior to all sensory copies, grounding the term in a Neoplatonic metaphysics of original versus derivative being.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
Side by side exist the Authentic All and its counterpart, the visible universe. The Authentic is contained in nothing, since nothing existed before it.
Plotinus distinguishes the Authentic All — unconditioned and self-containing — from the visible universe as its dependent counterpart, deploying authenticity as a marker of ontological primacy.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
Authentic pride is held to be the more adaptive of the two forms of pride… pride that stems from tangible achievement… authentic forms of pride.
Within emotion psychology, authentic pride is defined as achievement-grounded and socially adaptive, contrasted with hubristic pride as the more pathological variant.
, The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018supporting
Beauty is the unique and authentic nature of a particular thing… the aesthetic and therapeutic task becomes one of appreciating the uniqueness and the truly authentic nature of ourselves and of the people and things in our environments.
McNiff transposes the concept of authenticity into an aesthetic-therapeutic register, equating authentic nature with the irreducible uniqueness of persons and things as the ground of healing.
, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting
Her idea of authentic politics… the most salient kinds of judgment… that Arendt makes of the various non-evil forms of government… are existential (and sometimes aesthetic) rather than moral.
An aside situating Arendt’s concept of authentic politics within an existential rather than moral framework, contextually relevant to depth-psychological discussions of authenticity and political judgment.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981aside
Dasein’s Attestation of an Authentic Potentiality-for-Being, and Resoluteness… The existential structure of the authentic potentiality.
A table-of-contents entry mapping the architectonic structure of Heidegger’s treatment of authentic potentiality-for-Being and resoluteness within Being and Time.
, Being and Time, 1962aside