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‘ROUGH SEAS MAKE GOOD SAILORS’ WORDS: RIALDA ŠEBEK, PSYCHOANALITIC, PSYCHOTHERAPIST, M.A., UKCP BACP REGISTERED self’ ( Winnicott) to look ‘as if genuine’, is in the desired result. To assume an ‘as if’ mode as a safer way of being in the world; to fit and comply with the norms set without thinking it through. Orientation in this case is towards the ‘what?’ and not on the ‘how?’ How something is done or comes into existence opens up a narrative and possibility of 3 D thinking - e.g. ’How babies are born?’ The question that sets out our idiosyncratic Book of Genesis and Oedipal trajectory. ‘How?’can moves us forward absorbing the experience of the past. An authentic existence requires as its precondition a radical and previously not received experience of the past. It requires spontaneous curiosity; psychic movement embodied in the present time. There is no present like the present! When it comes to authenticity I am somehow missing a verb. Take the verb ‘to intimate’; to intimate ( lat. intimare) means ‘to make the unknown known’, ‘familiar’. In intimacy we appropriate internal relational space in which we can feel contained and true to ourselves with the other. We can also intimate knowledge, experience, conceptional and physical worlds. false-self has a problem with intimacy. In a cultural climate of ‘post truth politics’ It The constantly under threat of being objective facts are less influential in shaping exposed as a feels fraud. It is anxiously keeping public opinion than appeals to emotion and its undercurrent work employing defence personal belief. What does it mean to be mechanisms. “authentic” in the overwhelming presence of the ‘fake it to make it’ trend? Or is it about we manage our potentiality to make people wanting so badly ‘to do it right’ that they anHow authentic makes the very fabric of have forged impossible goals for themselves? the relational living, politics we adopt. If we adopt to be true only to what to please the What is it like to live in the cultural milieu of internal Other, we make seems a bargain. It doesn’t ‘post truth’? have to be of Faustian proportions still Facts do not cease to exist because they are a bargain. ’Faking it up’ can onlybut come at ignored and truth won’t change according to the expense of reflexiveness and detachment our ability to stomach it. our inner reality. We create a Double with What makes as to be in self denial for the from whom we have to live whether we like it or sake of approval? Whose approval we seek? not: Emotional economies and bargains often strange internal bedfellows. A Double It’s ‘winner-takes-all-attitude’ which more produce invented to win and compensate for genuine often than not sets us on a path of fighting social wisdom, may try to erase the other people’s battles and losing our own original. This iseventually when fashionable concepts peace of mind. The focal point in making ‘false BROJ #35, JANUAR 2018.