Why wilderness? Alienation, authenticity, and nature

Focusing on the role psychoanalytic alienation plays in tourist motivation, this article contributes to recent scholarship that aims to redevelop the dialectic relationship between authenticity and alienation in tourism studies. Lacanian psychoanalysis is the primary lens through which this is accomplished, by application to wilderness and nature tourism in the Adirondacks of Upstate New York, USA. This approach adds further insight as to the draw of nature tourism by interrogating not only what nature tourists are seeking but also what drives them to seek it. As such, this attention to the dialectical relationship of authenticity and alienation has implications for theories of tourism that seek to understand the relationship of tourism motivation to touristic experience.