The Seba library treats Inauthenticity in 7 passages, across 5 authors (including McGilchrist, Iain, Hollis, James, Epstein, Mark).
The routine of daily life, in which things have their familiar place and order (right hemisphere), can dull things into what Heidegger called inauthenticity (left hemisphere), through the very weight of familiarity
McGilchrist maps Heideggerian inauthenticity onto left-hemisphere dominance, wherein the conceptual re-presentation of things supplants their lived, right-hemisphere encounter.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
the pain of forced inauthenticity may remain unconscious; yet it engenders profound suffering which one may internalize as depression, externalize as violence, anaesthetize with substances, or somaticize as illness
Hollis identifies forced inauthenticity — living in service to an imago alien to the soul — as the covert engine of the most pervasive forms of human suffering.
, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, 2001thesis
it risks, in its own way, lapsing into the inauthenticity of Heidegger’s Verfallen… In Heidegger’s terms, Dasein becomes aware of its inauthenticity and strives towards its more authentic self.
McGilchrist frames the right hemisphere’s risk of lapsing into Verfallen and the corrective role of left-hemisphere detachment in awakening Dasein to its inauthenticity.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
Such a child is forced to construct what Winnicott called a ‘False Self’ to manage the demands of the alternatively intrusive and ignoring parent. The person then struggles against this necessary construction, the false self, in the attempt to feel real.
Epstein, drawing on Winnicott, presents the False Self as the developmental substrate of inauthenticity: a defensive construction that progressively severs the person from spontaneous self-expression.
, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, 1995supporting
The falling everydayness of Dasein is acquainted with death’s certainty, and yet evades Being-certain. But in the light of what it evades, this very evasion attests phenomenally that death must be conceived as one’s ownmost possibility
Heidegger demonstrates inauthenticity at its most acute: Dasein’s evasion of its own death-certainty, the paradigmatic flight into das Man that defines inauthentic existence.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
it is a still greater evil to be full of them and unwilling to recognize them, since this entails the further evil of deliberate self-delusion
Pascal anticipates the depth-psychological critique of inauthenticity by locating its moral core in self-concealment — the refusal to acknowledge one’s own defects compounds the original fault.
, Pensées, 1670supporting
‘The old ego dies hard,’ observed the playwright Samuel Beckett, ‘such as it was, a minister of dullness, it was also an agent of security.’
Epstein, via Beckett, characterizes the ego’s defensive routinization — a functional analogue to inauthenticity — as simultaneously deadening and stabilizing.
, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness, 1998aside