David Foster Wallace and pre-empting the editorial reader
The therapist said that she felt she could support the depressed person’s use of the word ‘vulnerable’ far more wholeheartedly than she could support the use of ‘pathetic,’ since her gut (i.e., the therapist’s gut) was telling her that the depressed person’s proposed use of ‘pathetic’ felt not only self-hating but also needy and even somewhat manipulative.…
The behaviors, in other word, were primitive emotional prophylaxes whose real function was to preclude intimacy; they were psychic armor designed to keep others at a distance so that they (i.e., others) could not get emotionally close enough to the depressed person to inflict any wounds that might echo and mirror the deep vestigial wounds of the depressed person’s childhood, wounds which the depressed person was unconsciously determined to keep repressed at all costs.
(italics mine, from ‘The Depressed Person’, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men)