Introduction: The Word Overly Used and Seldom Understood
Few words have been worn as smoothly as authenticity. It sells products and burnishes corporate mission statements; it crowds the shelves of the self-help section, where the standing promise is that a truer, freer self is waiting to be released. In ordinary usage, the word has drifted toward something like spontaneity or sincerity — a mood, available to anyone willing to drop their guard for an afternoon.
Humanistic psychology offers something far more demanding. Here, authenticity is not a feeling, a brand, or a lifestyle choice but a specific and describable stage of psychological identity development — one reached, if at all, through sustained and often painful inner work.
In Ken Wilber’s developmental map, as John Rowan reads it, authenticity belongs to the Centaur level: the point at which the rider-and-horse split between intellect and body that defines ordinary mental-ego functioning gives way to bodymind unity (Rowan, 2001).
The move into this stage is typically wrenching — precipitated by crisis or by a deliberate turn toward growth — and it carries a person away from the performance of social roles and toward a self that is genuinely their own (Rowan, 2001).
This article assembles the scholarly (and, to some extent, empirical) portrait of that person available in the humanistic tradition, drawing on Abraham Maslow, John Rowan, Carl Rogers, Rollo May, Ken Wilber, and Marshall Rosenberg.
Its guiding question is deceptively simple: what does an authentic, self-actualizing person actually look, think, feel, and act like?
The answer matters because the humanistic claim is not merely descriptive or translative but aspirational and empirical. It articulates, with remarkable clarity, the potential of mature human functioning, serving as a framework for what therapy, education, and a thoughtfully navigated life could aspire to.
This detailed outline provides insight into the key characteristics and behaviors that define a fulfilled and balanced existence, highlighting the objectives that individuals and practitioners might strive for in their journeys of personal development and growth.
Authenticity as a Level of Development: The Wilber–Rowan Framework
Humanistic psychology’s account of authenticity is best understood inside the developmental architecture supplied by Ken Wilber. Wilber holds that every phenomenon has four irreducible aspects — interior and exterior, individual and collective — which he maps as four quadrants (Wilber, 2000).
The one that concerns us is the Upper-Left: the interior of the individual, the domain of consciousness and subjective experience, the quadrant Wilber says contains the interior individual sciences, from mental analytical to phenomenology (Wilber, 2000). It is within this interior dimension that the levels of psychological development unfold. The placement is instructive. Because the Upper-Left is the domain of interiors — what something looks like from within rather than from outside — to locate authenticity here is to say, at the outset, that it is a transformation of consciousness, not a behavior that can be performed (Wilber, 2000).
John Rowan reads that interior sequence as a single line of growth: from the pre-personal stages of infancy, through the personal stages, to the Mental Ego — and then beyond it, first to the Centaur and then to the transpersonal levels, which Rowan, following Wilber, names the Psychic, the Subtle, the Causal, and the Nondual (Rowan, 2001). Authenticity is the signature of the Centaur — the stage Rowan calls the Real Self and Jenny Wade, in his account, called Authentic consciousness (Rowan, 2001).
At the Mental Ego, the personality is organized like a controlling rider, the intellect, mounted on a controlled horse, the emotions, and the body; at the Centaur, that split dissolves into bodymind unity, the integration of body and mind into a single transparent whole (Rowan, 2001; Wilber, 2000).
The gap between appearing authentic and being authentic is easy to underestimate, and Rowan offers himself as the cautionary case. Drawn to humanistic psychology partly by its prizing of autonomy, he assumed he had already achieved it, but…
…the truth of the matter was that I did not have autonomy at all. What I had was what Reich, and Lowen, and Fairbairn and Lake call a schizoid defence system. In other words, I was rather distant and private and emotionally shut down.
This was partly, and perhaps mainly, because in my first 30 years I had lived in 30 different places, and to avoid feeling upset about leaving people, places, pets, and toys, I had developed a protective defense against getting attached to them.
It was this enforced and pathological independence that I had mistaken for autonomy.
(Rowan, 2001, ch. 3.)
This bears directly on the article’s central claim: authenticity is achievable but uncommon, and very rare (Daniels et.al., 2018, Singelton et.al., 2021). Rowan locates it beyond the Mental Ego and, therefore, beyond the reach of most people, invoking Kohlberg’s work on moral development in support (Rowan, 2001).
Yet he is emphatic that the stage is not reserved for a gifted few; it is open to anyone “prepared to do their own growth work” (Rowan, 2001).
Maslow’s Characteristics: The Empirical Portrait
If the Wilber–Rowan framework establishes where authenticity sits in the architecture of development, Maslow supplies its empirical content — what the stage actually looks like in a living person. His portrait of the self-actualizing person, set out in a single chapter of Motivation and Personality (Maslow, 1970), remains the descriptive heart of the humanistic account.
The qualities are not a checklist to be scored but a family of overlapping traits, and they fall naturally into four groups:
- how authentic people perceive,
- how they stand in relation to themselves,
- how they relate to others, and
- how they act in the world.
The first group concerns perception. Self-actualizing people, in Maslow’s account, see reality with unusual accuracy — detecting the spurious and the dishonest, tolerating ambiguity, unafraid of the unknown — and keep a capacity for fresh appreciation, meeting the ordinary goods of life again and again with something close to wonder; spontaneous peak experiences are common among them (Maslow, 1970).
Maslow explains that such people see more clearly because they have largely stopped distorting what they see. Where most of us perceive through the filter of unmet needs, forever comparing and judging, the self-actualizing person can instead “perceive reality more efficiently, fully and with less motivational contamination than we others do” (Maslow, 1999). The clearest instances of such seeing, he held, are the peak experiences themselves, in which cognition becomes momentarily whole (Maslow, 1999).
A second group describes a hard-won inner freedom. Self-actualized people accept themselves and others without crippling guilt, shame, or defensiveness, and they are spontaneous, simple, and natural in their inner life even when they observe social convention with a good-humored shrug (Maslow, 1970); Rowan, crediting Moreno, adds the useful caution that such spontaneity is not to be confused with impulsiveness (Rowan, 2001).
Authentic persons are autonomous and self-contained, sustained by growth and fullness rather than by the deficiency needs that leave most people dependent on the good opinion of others, and they keep a measured detachment from the culture around them (Maslow, 1970).
Most striking of all, the old internal wars have quieted: the age-old opposition between heart and head, reason and instinct, cognition and conation gives way to synergy, so that desire and reason point to the same conclusion — “Be healthy and then you may trust your impulses” (Maslow, 1970).
The third group is relational, and it contains a real paradox. Self-actualizing people feel a deep identification with humanity, as though all people belonged to one family; they are democratic in the deepest sense, ready to learn from anyone; and their interpersonal relations are deeper and more profound than those of other adults (Maslow, 1970).
Yet these same people prize solitude and privacy, need others less than most do, and reserve their profound attachments for very few: their circle of intimates is small, and the people they love deeply are few in number (Maslow, 1970). Their capacity for profound attachment and their ease in solitude are not in tension; they are two expressions of the same inner security.
The fourth group gathers the outward-facing qualities of purpose, expression, and ethics. Authentic people are problem-solving-centered rather than ego-centered, typically devoted to some task beyond themselves; they hold firm moral standards and discriminate clearly between means and ends, and between good and evil, even when their ethics depart from convention; and they treat as ends in themselves many activities that others endure merely as means (Maslow, 1970).
Creativity, in their case, transcends the notion of mere talent; it is a fundamental aspect of their entire being. This vibrant quality permeates every endeavor they undertake, infusing each with a unique flair and perspective. At the core of their intrinsic worth lies a personal value system, distinct and unparalleled, reflecting the fact that no two individuals are the same. Every personal experience and trait weaves together to form a rich tapestry of individuality that shapes their creative expressions. Finally, their humor is philosophical rather than hostile: they laugh at the human condition without wounding anyone (Maslow, 1970).
Two essential truths anchor this portrayal, preventing it from devolving into mere glorification; both can be attributed to Maslow.
The first is that self-actualizing people are not saints: they can be boring, stubborn, and irritating, capable of an unexpected ruthlessness, occasionally absent-minded or tactless, and at times so absorbed in their work or so indulgent of difficult people that they neglect others — “There are no perfect human beings” (Maslow, 1970).
The second is methodological. In Toward a Psychology of Being Maslow openly conceded the “unavoidable shortcomings in sampling and in availability of data” behind his account (Maslow, 1999), and worried that studying mature individuals had made self-actualization look like a fixed final destination when it was better understood as a dynamic process — even as fleeting moments of fuller functioning available to anyone in their most perceptive hours (Maslow, 1999).
The portrait, then, describes not a separate species of person but a way of being that ordinary people enter at their best.
Rowan’s Eleven Extensions: Authenticity at the Centaur Stage
Maslow described the self-actualizing person; it fell to the existential wing of humanistic psychology to say precisely what authenticity is. The most usable definition comes from James Bugental, for whom authenticity is “a central genuineness and awareness of being,” with three functional marks:
- the authentic person is broadly aware of self, relationships, and world;
- accepts that living is a continuous making of choices; and
- takes full responsibility for those choices and their consequences
(Bugental, 1981, as cited in Rowan, 2001).
Broad awareness, choicefulness, full responsibility — this is what authenticity means operationally, and it anchors the eleven characteristics Rowan adds to Maslow’s, all of them describing the Centaur stage (Rowan, 2001).
The first of Rowan’s three movements concerns the real self as ground. At the Centaur, a person discovers a center to the personality that is genuinely their own — not the prop-dependent and analytical Mental Ego but, in Rowan’s image, “a centered gyroscope with its own power supply,” the true center against which the social periphery comes to feel comparatively false.
Two further characteristics follow from that center. One is the discovery that “I create my world” — that it makes sense to take responsibility to the very limit (Rowan, 2016, 2001). The other is intentionality: because such people stand fully behind what they do, real commitment becomes possible (Rowan, 2001).
Here Rowan’s account meets Rollo May’s, for whom intentionality is “what underlies will and decision” — not merely prior to willing and deciding but the very thing that makes them possible (May, 1969).
The second movement is a liberation from role and defense, gathering five of Rowan’s items:
- authenticity proper (no gap between intention and action),
- integration (no split between thinking and feeling, persona and shadow),
- non-defensiveness (seeking the truth in what another says rather than warding it off),
- intimacy, and
- presence (Rowan, 2001).
The last two are inherently relational, and they are where Carl Rogers’ work belongs. Rogers’ congruence — being “genuine and without ‘front’ or facade,” so that what one feels, is aware of, and communicates are the same (Rogers, 1961) — is the inward condition; intimacy and presence are its outward face. One can be intimate, or genuinely present, only when the roles have been laid aside, Rowan observes, for a performed presence is just an act, and no presence at all (Rowan, 2001).
The third movement concerns an expanded mode of thinking and a final openness. The expanded mode is what Wilber calls vision-logic: a postformal cognition that, instead of forcing a choice between competing positions, holds multiple perspectives at once and weaves them into a larger whole (Rowan, 2001; Wilber, 2000).
Rowan presses the point with a saying he borrows from a former colleague — “Never let yourself be bullied by an either-or” (Rowan, 2001). Allied to it is the paradoxical theory of change drawn from Beisser: the insight that real change comes not from straining to become what one is not, but from fully inhabiting what one already is (Beisser, 1972, as cited in Rowan, 2001).
And finally, there is openness, which one line of thought holds to be the single key element of the entire Centaur experience (Mittelman, 1991, as cited in Rowan, 2001).
Rogers and May: Two Portraits of the Authentic Interior
Two of humanistic psychology’s greatest therapists drew the authentic interior in very different ways, and Rowan stages the disagreement directly (Rowan, 2001). For Carl Rogers, becoming a fully functioning person meets no real obstacle: there is a natural process of organismic growth that needs only to be unhindered and allowed to unfold (Rowan, 2001).
The reason lies in Rogers’ conviction about what sits at the bottom of a human being. The innermost core of human nature, he held, “is basically socialized, forward-moving, rational and realistic” (Rogers, 1961) — positive, sociable, and trustworthy once the distortions are cleared away. What damages a person, on this view, is external: children come to grief when conditions of worth are imposed on them, valued only for conforming to others’ wishes, so that they lose their internal self-evaluation and their contact with the real self (Rowan, 2001). Remove those conditions, meet the person with acceptance, and the organism rights itself.
Rollo May found this too optimistic to serve as a complete account of the person (Rowan, 2001). His central objection concerned the daimonic — for May, a real and natural force, “the urge in every being to affirm itself, assert itself,” which “becomes evil when it usurps the total self” rather than being integrated (May, 1969). The negative, for May, is not a distortion to be cleared away but a permanent dimension of human life, and the struggle with it is strengthening rather than incidental.
Freedom, correspondingly, is not a given that unfolds of its own accord but something achieved — not the bare saying of yes or no to a decision but “the power to mold and create ourselves,” exercised in the undramatic, day-to-day work of becoming a self (May, 1953).
Anxiety belongs to that same work. May took inner emptiness to be the central affliction of the modern age (May, 1953), and held that an era which can give no clear picture of what we are and ought to be throws each person back on the search for the self (May, 1953).
Both portraits are necessary, and Rowan resolves to refuse the choice (demonstrating his own authenticity) — the human truth, he writes, is “not optimistic or pessimistic, it is just human” (Rowan, 2001).
Rogers supplies the organismic ground, the trustworthy forward tendency on which all growth depends; May supplies its existential weight, the daimonic energy, and the hard-won character of freedom. Read together, they yield the article’s recurring point: authentic persons are not those who have never struggled, but those who have taken up their struggle and made it their own.
Authentic Communication: Rosenberg’s Contribution
Authenticity is not only an interior condition; it shows itself in how a person speaks and listens. This is where Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication earns its place in the portrait.
Rosenberg builds communication around four components — observation, feeling, need, and request — and puts them to work in two outward directions, expressing ourselves honestly and receiving others empathically (Rosenberg, 2015), with a third turned inward as self-empathy, “checking in with your own feelings and needs” (Rosenberg, 2023).
The discipline lies in a pair of key distinctions:
- The first component separates observation from evaluation: describing what actually happened rather than delivering a verdict on it (Rosenberg, 2015).
- The second distinguishes a request from a demand — requests, Rosenberg notes, are received as demands when the listener expects blame or punishment for refusing, so that genuine requesting requires openness to a ‘no’ (Rosenberg, 2015).
That openness rests on a hard-won settlement about whose feelings belong to whom, and Rosenberg maps the route to it as three stages in the growth of emotional responsibility (Rosenberg, 2015).
The first he calls ‘emotional slavery’ — the condition of believing oneself responsible for everyone else’s feelings, forever laboring to keep others happy; it is authenticity’s opposite, a self dissolved into the moods of the room.
The second is ‘the obnoxious stage,’ the overcorrection that follows, in which a person refuses to admit to caring what anyone else feels or needs — free of the old bondage but at the cost of connection.
Only the third, ’emotional liberation,’ holds both truths at once: we take full responsibility for our own feelings and none for others’ feelings, while being aware that ‘we can never meet our own needs at the expense of others’ (Rosenberg, 2015).
The destination is not the obnoxious stage’s hard autonomy but a paradoxical balance that maps closely onto the Centaur’s resolution of the same tension, where the prizing of solitude and the capacity for profound human connection turn out to be two faces of one inner security.
The relevance to the rest of this article is direct. Rogers’ congruence already extends to speech: the congruent person not only experiences feelings and is aware of them but is also “able to communicate them if appropriate” (Rogers, 1961).
Self-empathy is the internal expression of self-awareness, allowing individuals to gently connect with their own emotions and experiences. Meanwhile, honest expression and empathic listening represent the external manifestations of this internal understanding. Rosenberg provides a valuable method that clarifies the implicit nature of congruence, offering a structured approach—or a concrete grammar—for communicating truthfully without resorting to criticism, evaluation, or commands.
It is this kind of sincere and unguarded communication that fosters genuine presence, a quality that Rowan identifies as essential to the Centaur’s character. To truly be present, one must set aside the need to manipulate perceptions or to play a role, allowing for authentic interaction (Rowan, 2001).
Nonviolent Communication, while not the focal point of the broader humanistic view of authenticity, plays a crucial role in grounding this concept in practice. Interestingly, Rosenberg himself did not explicitly reference it. Yet, its significance lies in addressing a vital aspect that students often seek: the tangible, everyday self-awareness (of universal inner needs, or rather, potentials in the heart), language, and expressions of what it means to be a unique, authentic individual.
Through this lens, Nonviolent Communication provides valuable insights into the kinds of dialogue and interactions that reflect true authenticity in a person’s inner awareness, speech, and behavior.
The Practitioner’s Extensions: Seven Additional Characteristics
Maslow’s characteristics and Rowan’s additions rest on published scholarship; the final seven come from the consulting room. They are actually the work of yours truly, from a humanistic and transpersonal practice venue. I offer them explicitly as informed clinical and personal observation rather than peer-reviewed findings — I set them down “iz lastnih dolgoletnih izkušenj” [manual translation, non-official: “from my own long-standing experience”]. (Cigale, 2021).
I arranged the whole portrait as a tally: nineteen characteristics drawn from Maslow and eleven from my dear mentor, Dr. Rowan, to which I add these seven (Cigale, 2021). The referenced article is in Slovenian; no official English translation exists, and the renderings above and below are manual and non-official.
- Shadow integration. The shadow — Jung’s term for the dark, trauma-laden, unconscious part of the psyche —is, for the self-actualized person, a thing of the past, having been confronted and worked through.
- Self-engagement. Knowing that their perception is wholly subjective, the authentic person stops draining their energy by dramatizing others’ conduct and stays continuously in touch with their inner longings or needs.
- Personal structure. No longer needing society’s rules to function — unlike the Mental Ego, one level before authenticity — the authentic person lives by an inner order built through hard inner work, and, while still valuing structure, now dances to the rhythm of the music they have chosen themselves.
- Energy and uniqueness. From victories won by their own effort, such people are full of vigor and spontaneously radiate something that is uniquely their own.
- Fulfillment. They are actually and verifiably fulfilled across the domains that matter to them — work, relationships, finances, leisure, parenthood — having shed the shadow and learned to live from their authentic inner selves.
- Flexibility and tolerance. Rigidity and one-way thinking are foreign to them; they inhabit a paradoxical world where the roles of cops and robbers alternate in real time, with a tolerant, balanced view — their authentic self, in my view, being a reflection of the Subtle self or Soul.
- Longing. The truly authentic person begins, sooner or later, to long for still more — not for everyday victories but a deepening into spirituality and higher states of consciousness (Cigale, 2021).
This last characteristic points beyond authenticity itself, toward the transpersonal levels Wilber maps above the Centaur (Wilber, 2000) — the subject of the section that follows.
Authenticity as Gateway: The Transpersonal Horizon
It would be a mistake to read this portrait of an authentic person as the summit of human development. Authenticity is not the end of the road, as the early enthusiasts of self-actualization supposed; it is, in Rowan’s account, a necessary moment in the larger process of psychospiritual growth (Rowan, 2001). Actually, considering the entire Wilber map of psychological-transpersonal human identity development, it is not even halfway there.
Beyond the Centaur lie the transpersonal reaches of Wilber’s map (Wilber, 2000) — what Rowan, following Wilber, names the Psychic, the Subtle, the Causal, and the Nondual (Rowan, 2001). The Centaur is the threshold to that territory, not the territory itself.
What makes authenticity matter so much, on this view, is that it is the stable ground those further stages require. I would like to share this from experience: authenticity is, put in words, a condition for lasting access to the levels beyond it (Cigale, 2021). Read this way, the aforementioned longing, the seventh characteristic — the pull toward ‘still more’ — is not restlessness or pathology but a developmental signal, the mark of a self that has consolidated and is ready to reach further (Cigale, 2021).
This article terminates at that threshold. What lies beyond is an entirely different study.
Conclusion: What It Means to Be Authentic
We began with a word worn smooth by overuse — authenticity as a mood, a brand, a license to do as one feels. The humanistic tradition asks far more of it, and gives far more in return. To be authentic, on this account, is not to express oneself freely in the popular sense but to have become a particular kind of person; one who has done the slow and often painful work of growth, met and integrated both their defences and their shadow, healed the greatest battle of them all, between head and heart into a single bodymind, and learned at last to live from a real self rather than a performed one (Rowan, 2001; Wilber, 2000).
It is a demanding portrait, and an honest one. It promises no perfection — Maslow insisted there are no perfect human beings, that authentic people can be stubborn, ruthless, even cruel (Maslow, 1970) — only wholeness: a life lived from the center rather than the edge, in one’s own voice rather than a borrowed one.
This is why it reaches past the weekend seminar room. It gives (humanistic) therapy a direction, education an aim deeper than the translation of facts, and each of us a question worth carrying: not whether we are liked, accepted, right, or successful, but whether the life we are living is genuinely our own.
– Edmond Cigale, Ph.D.
References
Cigale, E. (2021, July 25). Samo-aktualizacija in avtentičnost [Self-actualization and authenticity]. Akademija TCT®. https://akademija-tct.si/samo-aktualizacija-in-avtenticnost/
Daniels, D., Saracino, T., Fraley, M., Christian, J., & Pardo, S. (2018). Advancing ego development in adulthood through study of the enneagram system of personality. Journal of Adult Development, 25, 229–241.
“According to Cook-Greuter (2002), only 7–17% of adults reach postconventional stages of development in adulthood.”
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-018-9289-x
Maslow, A. H. (1970). Motivation and personality (2nd ed.). Harper & Row.
Maslow, A. H. (1999). Toward a psychology of being (3rd ed.). John Wiley & Sons. (Original work published 1968)
May, R. (1953). Man’s search for himself. W. W. Norton.
May, R. (1969). Love and will. W. W. Norton.
Rogers, C. R. (1961). On becoming a person: A therapist’s view of psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin.
Rosenberg, M. B. (2015). Nonviolent communication: A language of life (3rd ed.). PuddleDancer Press.
Rosenberg, M. B. (2023). The nonviolent communication book of quotes. PuddleDancer Press.
Rowan, J. (2001). Ordinary ecstasy: The dialectics of humanistic psychology (3rd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315787794
Rowan, J. (2016). The reality game: A guide to humanistic counselling and psychotherapy (3rd ed.). Routledge.
Singleton, O., Newlon, M., Fossas, A., Sharma, B., Cook-Greuter, S. R., & Lazar, S. W. (2021). Brain structure and functional connectivity correlate with psychosocial development in contemplative practitioners and controls. Brain Sciences, 11, 728.
“…only about 10% of adults reach postconventional levels (Cook-Greuter 1999, 2011; Manners et al. 2004)”
https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11060728
Wilber, K. (2000). Sex, ecology, spirituality: The spirit of evolution (2nd ed., rev.). Shambhala.
Note. Bugental (1981), Beisser (1972), Mittelman (1991), and Wade (1996) are cited in the article only as “as cited in Rowan, 2001”; their primary works are left for you, dear reader, to explore on your own.
