Eater of Flasks

"When the cohesion of the self is defective, experience is not metabolized; it echoes. In personality disorder this echo becomes the self's own soundtrack. The person feels a void, yet that void resounds with the very words she uses to fill it." - Heinz Kohut

"The disordered personality often speaks in a voice that is not her own. Her idiom belongs to an early object, a parent or ideal, internalized and now mistaken for self. To speak authentically would require the absence of this internal companion, but its absence would feel like death. Thus she continues to talk herself into existence, maintaining the void as the price of coherence." - Christopher Bollas

"Despair is the will's unwillingness to be itself. It hides from itself by presenting only fragments, by leaving unsaid that which would reveal its falsity. Thus the self becomes a kind of lie told by omission: the parts of existence that do not fit its story are quietly set aside." - Soren Kierkegaard

"Where the parent's personality is organized defensively, the child learns to respond to omissions. The parent's absence of spontaneous gesture forces the child into precocious sensitivity; she must imagine the feelings that are withheld. Thus deprivation reproduces itself in the next generation as hyper-attunement and fear of direct expression." - Donald Winnicott

"The person who must protect a fragile self-system learns to omit. He edits his own communication, withholding not to deceive another but to maintain equilibrium within himself. In time, he cannot recover what he has withheld; the omissions become his reality." - Harry Stack Sullivan

"When self-idealization has become compulsive, honesty to oneself is dangerous. The individual begins to leave out of awareness every perception that contradicts the ideal image. This silent omission, repeated endlessly, creates an inner vacuity where authentic experience might have been." - Karen Horney

"Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges." - George Orwell

"She says nothing, not to hide but to keep the words from making it real. Silence is her way of saying what cannot be said without undoing her. Yet every silence is a sentence withheld." - R D Laing

"Withholding is a mode of self-creation. By refusing to disclose, the person keeps her inner world from being metabolized by the other. What is not spoken becomes an enclave of selfhood, but one drained of life. The more she withholds, the more she inhabits the silence she has made." - Christopher Bollas

"If communication of the true self is met by impingement, the individual learns to communicate only compliance. Omissions replace expression; she speaks around the truth rather than from it. Eventually she cannot distinguish reticence from honesty, concealment from self." - Donald Winnicott

"The authoritarian character conceives of truth as possession, not relation. She withholds it from others as she withholds it from herself, using secrecy as proof of power. The lie of omission becomes the form her freedom takes - freedom from the anxiety of exposure." - Erich Fromm

"When she renounces saying what she knows, she consents to her own inauthenticity. Silence, which was first a weapon, becomes a prison. The unspoken truth corrodes from within, creating in her the very emptiness she hoped to avert." - Simone de Beauvoir

"The deliberate omission of truth, when practiced habitually, produces thoughtlessness. In time the liar loses not the ability to tell truth, but the capacity to distinguish it. The self becomes its own propaganda." - Hannah Arendt

"When lying becomes habitual, not only the liar but those who must live with her are deprived of a common world. The victim of untruth suffers not from ignorance but from isolation; reality itself becomes unreliable." - Hannah Arendt

"Patients with diffuse personality pathology often engage in omission rather than commission. The self-talk is edited: sentences stop short of the intolerable clause. What is left unsaid forms the perimeter of the personality - the borders of what can safely be known." - Nancy McWilliams