See also authenticity (philosophy) and authentication (which deals only with computer security).
In the arts, history, archaeology, the study of antiques, and similar fields involving unique or scarce artifacts from the past, and, with regard to documents in law, authenticity (Greek: αυθεντικός, from 'authentes'='author') is the truthfulness of origins, attributions, commitments, sincerity, and intentions; not a copy or forgery. See also provenance.
Webster's 1913 dictionary defines authenticity as
the quality of being authentic or of established authority for truth and correctness.
Genuineness; the quality of being genuine or not corrupted from the original.
In later writers, especially those on the evidences of Christianity, authenticity is often restricted in its use to the first of the above meanings, and distinguished from genuineness.
Simon Frith (2004, p.28) argues that the evaluation of authenticity in music is incoherent. "'Inauthentic,'...is a term which may be applied evaluatively within genres which are straight-forwardly, cynically, commercial," such as Eurodisco or "TV pop idols...It's as if people expect music to mean what it says, however cynical that meaning, and music can be heard as being false to its own premises." As examples he gives Madonna and Eminem.
Source
Washburne, Christopher J. and Derno, Maiken (eds.) (2004). Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415943663.
Most writers on inauthenticity in the twentieth century considered the predominant cultural norms to be inauthentic; not only because they were seen as forced on people, but also because, in themselves, they required people to behave inauthentically towards their own desires, obscuring true reasons for acting.
An early example of the connection between inauthenticity and capitalism was made by Karl Marx, whose notion of "alienation" can be linked to the later discourse on the nature of inauthenticity.
The connection of inauthenticity to capitalism is contained in the notion of "selling out," used to describe an artist whose work has become inauthentic after achieving commercial success and thus becoming to an extent integrated into an inauthentic system.
It may be the case that seeing past the pursuit of inauthentic "goals" (i.e., goals defined outside the phenomena themselves -- by, for instance, the psychiatric community concerned with functionality and health) we might open ourselves to the "authentic" goal which is no goal at all.
An inauthentic goal would be a goal defined by the "They", which admittedly often covers many of the persuits of psychotherapy (and perhaps all of the goals of Managed Care).
One initial, inauthentic goal would then be to attempt to stop the suicide in order to follow a set of pre-prescribed guidelines (indicating a need for the inauthentic as well as the authentic).
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