Perfection is defeat. …Perfection belongs to the gods; completeness or wholeness is the most a human being can hope for.  …It is in seeking perfection by isolating and exaggerating parts of ourselves that we become neurotic.  The chief sign of the pursuit of perfection is obsession.  Obsession occurs when all the psychic energy, which ought to be distributed among the various parts of the personality in an attempt to harmonize them, is focused on one area of the personality to the exclusion of everything else.  Obsession is always a fixation–a freezing-over of the personality so that it becomes not a living being but something fixed, like a piece of sculpture, locked into a complex.
    
Addiction to perfection is at root a suicidal addiction.  The addict is simulating not life but death.  Almost inevitably a woman addicted to perfection will view herself as a work of art, and her real terror is that the work of art, being so precious, may in one instant be destroyed.  She has treat herself as a rare piece of Ming porcelain or what Keats described as a ‘still unravished bride of quietness,’ a ‘foster-child of silence and slow-time.’  …To move toward perfection is to move out of life, or what is worse, never to enter it.