02/05/2026
Silence has a way of pretending it’s neutral. It sits in a room like a closed window, neither kind nor cruel, until you realise the air has gone stale. Edith Eger understood that kind of silence intimately, as a lived condition, something enforced and something later chosen, sometimes mistakenly, as a form of survival.
Eger’s observation about depression and expression comes from The Gift, published in 2020, decades after she survived Auschwitz as a teenager and rebuilt her life in the United States. She trained as a clinical psychologist, worked with trauma survivors and veterans, and became a late life public voice for psychological freedom. Her earlier memoir, The Choice, traced her survival and recovery; The Gift is more distilled, less historical, and more focused on the everyday habits of the inner life. The line sits where those two books meet: the lived knowledge of unspeakable horror and the professional understanding of how the mind copes when it’s overwhelmed.
What makes the idea unsettling is how ordinary it is. Many of us learn early that keeping things in is safer. Don’t complain or burden people. Keep moving. The body often co-operates for a while. You go to work. You answer messages. You smile at the neighbour. But inside, feelings that haven’t been named don’t dissolve. They harden or leak sideways. Sadness turns into numbness. Anger becomes irritability or fatigue. Fear settles into the bones and calls itself realism.
Eger isn’t romantic about expression. She isn’t suggesting that speaking is easy or that disclosure guarantees relief. Expression can be awkward, poorly timed, even misunderstood. Sometimes it comes out wrong. A sentence spills too fast. A truth hits heavier than intended. But she’s pointing to a psychological reality that has been quietly affirmed by decades of trauma research: what is suppressed doesn’t disappear. It seeks another route. Depression, in this light, isn’t a personal failure or a chemical accident alone. It’s often the cost of carrying too much, for too long, without language.
Her thinking sits in conversation with Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, whom Eger later knew personally. Frankl emphasised meaning as a path through suffering. Eger adds something more bodily and relational. Meaning helps, but so does release. So does saying the thing out loud, or writing it badly in a notebook, or letting grief move through the chest instead of locking it behind competence.
There’s also a cultural edge to her claim. Western societies, particularly in the post war period in which Eger came of age, rewarded stoicism. Emotional restraint was framed as maturity. For women especially, anger and despair were inconvenient feelings, often redirected into self-blame or silence. It’s not incidental that Eger, now in her nineties, has found a wide readership among women who were taught to cope quietly and are tired of paying the psychological price.
Expression doesn’t always look like confession. Sometimes it’s indirect. A line of poetry. A long walk taken without distraction. A conversation where the voice shakes slightly and keeps going. What matters is movement. What stays trapped tends to turn inward, breeding shame and isolation. What moves outward has a chance to change shape.
Eger’s life doesn’t deny the reality of suffering or imply that healing is quick. She knows that some experiences never fully leave us. But she insists on the possibility of not being ruled by what remains unspoken. In a world that still mistakes emotional containment for strength, her insight feels quietly radical.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
Image: U.S. Navy graphic by Petty Officer 2nd Class Andrea Rumple
