18: Reconstruction of Reality

A reconstruction of reality involves pretending a situation to be something other than what it really is.

The distinction the author offers is that inauthenticity means a person accepts the situation as it is and pretends himself to be different than he really is, whereas reconstruction means accepting one's own character but applying pretenses to the situation.

The example the author gives is the break-up of a relationship - in which the girl tells the boy that she doesn't want to be involved with him anymore, and the boy then tells his friends that he dumped her rather than the other way around.

When this is done consciously, the boy knows he has been dumped, it is merely social posturing. But when the boy convinces himself that the decision was his, it becomes an instance of self-deception.

The same is also true at the beginning of a relationship, in which a person imagines that the other person is in love with them because of certain things they had said or done - whether these details are fictionalized or merely removed from their original context.

(EN: This "chapter" was simply a long paragraph, so there's no more to it than that.)