Authenticity is what? We often encounter this concept in everyday life, and when immersed in specific areas. Interestingly, the meaning of the word “authenticity” can be radically different depending on the context in which it is used. Initially, the term comes from the Greek word authenticus, which literally means authenticity. Thus, authenticity is a certain authenticity of properties and principles. However, the sonorous term was borrowed by representatives of several scientific fields at once, which entailed the forking of definitions of the same concept. Consider the main ones.
Authenticity is a concept from psychology.
Psychologists use this concept, implying a person's awareness of his own feelings and experiences, his access to his own consciousness from various angles, the integrity of this consciousness itself. An authentic person (in other words, it is called congruency) is a holistic person. He is himself without pretense or “running away” from his own fears and addictions. An example
conscious incongruence may be a lie, a simulation, a different kind of pretense. If such a phenomenon manifests itself regardless of the will of a person, it is a mental disorder. For example, psychotherapists use the concept of “authenticity” when they describe the process of an open psychic connection between the therapist and the patient. Perhaps, of all the definitions of the term in a psychological context, it turned out to be the most confusing. However, here it also means a certain authenticity (and at the same time integrity).
Authenticity is also from a wide range of humanitarian fields.
Indeed, this term is used in history, art, and copyright issues. So, for example, in the latter case, the concept of authenticity is used when it is necessary to protect the creator's rights to a cultural product: text, music, video, and so on. Assignment by another person of an authentic (same) product is called plagiarism and is prosecuted. However, redoing authentic text in
only formally excellent (changing a part of notes, rearranging phrases in a sentence, etc.) is also forbidden, although it is much more difficult to trace. For art critics, the term means the correspondence of the actual content of a certain content (the same music, text, paintings, and so on). As we have already noted, authenticity is what distinguishes an original from plagiarism. The same thing is practiced in art, but not for the purpose of protecting legislation, but preserving cultural heritage. In literature, painting, music, real works differ from copies (pirate fakes, if you use modern slang) in small details, manner and technique, style that is inherent in the author and so on. Authenticity in the mouth of a historian-researcher or archaeologist will mean a genuine artifact, a material thing that has come down to us from the depths of centuries. Such relics are important in that they can tell a lot about the past of mankind.