Abstract
Every stable form leaves something out. This paper argues that this is a condition of being stable at all: whatever holds a form must leave out part of what it forms, and what it leaves out still acts, its effects arriving without a locatable source. The paper calls those effects phantoms. Tracing one structure from the electron to the ego, it shows that every consolidation persists only between crystallization and dissolution, and that each generates the very residue that threatens and renews it. A toy model and the conditions under which the account would fail follow.