A frequently mentioned worry with the ideal of authenticity is that the focus on one’s own inner feelings and attitudes may breed a self-centered preoccupation with oneself that is anti-social and destructive of altruism and compassion toward others.  Christopher Lasch (1979) points out similarities between the clinical disorder referred to as Narcissistic Personality Disorder and authenticity. According to Lasch, narcissism and authenticity are both characterized by deficient empathic skills, self-indulgence and self-absorbed behavior. Similarly, Allan Bloom (1987: 61) maintains that the culture of authenticity has made the minds of the youth “narrower and flatter,” leading to self-centeredness and the collapse of the public self. While Lasch and Bloom worry about the threat that the self-centeredness and narcissism of the “culture of authenticity” poses to morality and political coherence, Daniel Bell voices worries about its economic viability.  What Bell fears is that the “megalomania of self-infinitization” that comes with the culture of authenticity will erode the foundations of market mechanisms that are “based on a moral system of reward rooted in the Protestant sanctification of work” (Bell 1976: 84). More recently, critics have argued that when properly analyzed, authenticity demands positing the existence of a “true self.” It requires positing an essentialist structure leading to metaphysical problems that current accounts of authenticity fail to solve (Bialystok 2014). Correspondingly, Feldman (2014) argues in favor of abandoning the ideal of authenticity because it builds on confused assumptions about the self, the value of one’s “gut feelings” in revealing one’s values, and the supposedly corrupting influence of the “external” social realm (for a critique of this position, see Bauer 2017; Ferrara 2009) 