Authenticity occupies a pivotal, contested position across the depth-psychology corpus, radiating outward from existential-phenomenological foundations into clinical, somatic, and cultural-critical registers. Heidegger’s treatment in Being and Time provides the conceptual armature most frequently implicated: authenticity as Dasein’s wresting of itself from the levelled-down absorption in das Man, attested through conscience and resoluteness. This framework is largely absorbed, often without citation, into therapeutic discourses that reframe inauthenticity as the developmental residue of trauma. Gabor Maté offers the most clinically elaborated treatment, arguing that the bifurcation between attachment needs and authentic self-expression constitutes a foundational wound underlying chronic illness, addiction, and emotional dysregulation. Philip Flores, writing from a group-psychotherapy and self-psychology orientation, emphasises the interpersonal terror that shadows authentic risk-taking—particularly the fear that genuine self-disclosure will confirm one’s fundamental unlovability. Marion Woodman anchors authenticity in somatic and feminine-instinctual ground, warning that spirituality achieved through purely intellectual identification bypasses the embodied authenticity she regards as essential. Ingrid Clayton extends the analysis into the fawn-response literature, where authenticity’s loss is mapped onto shapeshifting adaptations to relational danger. Across all these voices a structural tension persists: authenticity is simultaneously a birthright suppressed by developmental injury and a difficult, ongoing achievement requiring courage, self-inquiry, and often communal witness.