Psychoanalysis and authenticity.

This is an answer offered recently on social media (a corner for discussion of psychoanalysis in general) to this question:

My purpose in life is to be as authentic as possible. I want to experience every fiber of myself truthfully.

Is analysis aligned with that goal or are there any other approaches that are more helpful?

This question is really quite interesting. Thanks for it.

What do we mean when we say 'authentic'? We have auto, self, and hentes, doing or being – it could be being oneself, in which case we might question what the self is. In my orientation we speak of a subject, which is not divisible from the language in which it is caught, and thus not as contained as one might imagine. If authority is a correspondant of autonomy, well, at the level of the subject, perhaps analysis is not aimed there. And at the same time the subject has a kind of emptiness, or being barred, and realising for oneself something of the emptiness of the subject is something that might be achieved in analysis, there's something missing, in the terms traditional to psychoanalysis, realising ones castration. This might be considered a kind of authenticity.

The orientation of analysis to which I belong tends towards a making use of the symptomatic remainders, bits and pieces of the real of the drive of each, singluar to each, which have not lent themselves to captation in meaning or signification. Indeed the end of an analysis would come with an identification with those remainders, and this might be thought as a kind of authenticity. Indeed Lacan proposes that in a sense, the end of analysis has an aspect of being self authorised in ones position of an analyst (albeit not without aspects of this needing to be accepted by a group of one's own parrish so to speak) – to be self authorised, this is one of the meanings of authentic. There is an older sense of authentic to do with being authoritative, duly authorised, and the need for a school which would recognise that strange thing which would be an analyst (just as a joke needs its audience), implies sometihng of this too, but it's not, for all that, authoritative in the sense of cannonical. Since the authorisation of an analyst is something that happens anew each time, because the one-by-one of them doesn't amount to a canon.

If we think of authentic as a synonym of genuine – if it implies a kind of naturality, then I would contest that psychoanalysis tends firmly against naturality. We start from the polymorphous perversity of the drives, and the ways that they are organised and disorganised in whatever passes for civilisation or culture at a given time or place. So, no authenticity in the mode of genuine naturality.