Splitting (psychology)
Encyclopedia
Splitting may mean two things: splitting of the mind, and splitting of mental concepts (or black and white thinking). The latter is thinking purely in extremes (e.g., goodness vs. evil, innocence vs. corruption, victimization vs. oppression, etc.), and as such can be seen as a developmental stage
and as a defense mechanism. In psychoanalysis, there are the concepts of splitting of the self as well as splitting of the ego. This stems from existential insecurity, or instability of one's self-conception.
-directed mood swings
. Consequently, the therapeutic process can be greatly impeded by these oscillations, because the therapist too can become the target of splitting. To overcome the negative effects on treatment outcome, constant interpretations by the therapist are needed.
Splitting contributes to unstable relationships and intense emotional experiences, something that has been noted especially with narcissists. Alexander Abdennur writes in his book on narcissistic personality disorder
, Camouflaged Aggression, that "[t]hrough this splitting mechanism, the narcissist can suddenly and radically shift his allegiance. A trusted friend can become an enemy; the partner may become an adversary."
Treatment strategies have been developed for individuals and groups based on dialectical behavior therapy, and for couples. There are also self help books on related topics such as mindfulness and emotional regulation that have been helpful for individuals who struggle with the consequences of splitting.
These people can suffer from intense fusion anxieties in intimate relationships, because the boundaries between self and other are not firm. A tender moment between self and other could mean the disappearance of the self into the other. This triggers intense anxiety. To overcome the anxiety, the other is made into a very bad person; this can be done, because the other is made responsible for this anxiety. However, if the other is viewed as a bad person, the self must be bad as well. Viewing the self as all bad cannot be endured, so the switch is made to the other side: the self is good, which means the other must be good too. If the other is all good and the self is all good, the distinction at which the self begins and ends is not clear. Intense anxiety is the result and so the cycle repeats itself.
, by perceiving himself as purely upright or admirable and others who do not conform to his will or values as purely wicked or contemptible. Given "the narcissist's perverse sense of entitlement
and splitting. . .[s]he can be equally geared, psychologically and practically, towards the promotion and towards the demise of a certain collecively beneficial project." (Abdennur, the Narcissistic Principle of Equivalence)
The cognitive habit of splitting also implies the use of other related defense mechanisms, namely idealization and devaluation
, which are preventative attitudes or reactions to narcissistic rage and narcissistic injury.
[ Breuer
and I] followed his example when we took splitting of the mind and dissociation of the personality as the centre of our position'. However he also differentiated 'between our view and Janet's. We do not derive the psychical splitting from an innate incapacity for synthesis...we explain it dynamically, from the conflict of opposing mental forces...repression'.
With the development of the idea of repression
, splitting moved to the background of Freud's thought for some years, being largely reserved for cases of double personality: 'The cases described as splitting of consciousness...might better be denoted as shifting of consciousness, – that function – or whatever it may be – oscillating between two different psychical complexes which become conscious and unconscious in turn'.
Increasingly, however, Freud returned to an interest in how it was 'possible for the ego to avoid a rupture...by effecting a cleavage or division of itself'. His unfinished paper of 1938, "Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence", took up the same theme, and in his Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940a [1938])...[he] extends the application of the idea of a splitting of the ego beyond the cases of fetishism and of the psychoses to neuroses in general'.
The concept had meanwhile been further defined by his daughter Anna Freud
; while Fenichel
summarised the previous half-century of work to the effect that 'a split of the ego into a superficial part that knows the truth and a deeper part that denies it may...be observed in every neurotic'.
Kohut
would then systematize the Freudian view with his contrast between 'such horizontal splits as those brought about on a deeper level by repression and on a higher level by negation', and ' a vertical split in the psyche...the side-by-side, conscious existence of otherwise incompatible psychological attitudes'.
...The division of objects into congenial and uncongenial ones...making "disconnections"'.
It was the latter sense of the term which was predominantly adopted and exploited by Melanie Klein. After Freud, 'the most important contribution has come from Melanie Klein, whose work enlightens the idea of "splitting of the object" (in terms of "good/bad" objects)'. In her object relations theory
, Klein argues that 'the earliest experiences of the infant are split between wholly good ones with "good" objects and wholly bad experiences with "bad" objects', as children struggle to integrate the two primary drives, love and hate, into constructive social interaction. An important step in childhood development is the gradual depolarization of these two drives.
At what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position
, there is a stark separation of the things the child loves (good, gratifying objects) and the things the child hates (bad, frustrating objects), 'because everything is polarised into extremes of love and hate, just like what the baby seems to experience and young children are still very close to'. Klein refers to the good breast and the bad breast as split mental entities, resulting from the way 'these primitive states tend to deconstruct objects into "good" and "bad" bits (called "part-objects")'. The child sees the breasts as opposite in nature at different times, although they actually are the same, belonging to the same mother. As the child learns that people and objects can be good and bad at the same time, he or she progresses to the next phase, the depressive position, which 'entails a steady, though painful, approximation towards the reality of oneself and others': integrating the splits and 'being able to balance [them] out...are tasks that continue into early childhood and indeed are never completely finished'.
However, Kleinians also utilize Freud's first conception of splitting, to explain the way 'In a related process of splitting, the person divides his own self. This is called "splitting of the ego"'. Indeed, Klein herself maintained that 'the ego is incapable of splitting the object – internal or external – without a corresponding splitting taking place within the ego'. Arguably at least, by this point 'the idea of splitting does not carry the same meaning for Freud and for Klein': for the former, 'the ego finds itself passively split, as it were. For Klein and the post-Kleinians, on the other hand, splitting is an active defence mechanism'. As a result, by the close of the century 'four kinds of splitting can be clearly identified, among many other possibilities' for post-Kleinians: "a coherent split in the object, a coherent split in the ego, a fragmentation of the object, and a fragmentation of the ego"'.
If a person fails to accomplish this developmental task satisfactorily, borderline pathology can emerge. 'In the borderline personality organization', Kernberg found 'dissociated ego states that result from the use of "splitting" defences'. His therapeutic work then aimed at 'the analysis of the repeated and oscillating projections of unwanted self and object representations onto the therapist' so as to produce 'something more durable, complex and encompassing than the initial, split-off and polarized state of affairs'.
Developmental stage
One of the major controversies in developmental psychology centres around whether development is continuous or discontinuous. Stage theories of development rest on the assumption that development is a discontinuous process involving distinct stages which are characterised by qualitative differences...
and as a defense mechanism. In psychoanalysis, there are the concepts of splitting of the self as well as splitting of the ego. This stems from existential insecurity, or instability of one's self-conception.
Relationships
Splitting creates instability in relationships, because one person can be viewed as either personified virtue or personified vice at different times, depending on whether he or she gratifies the subject's needs or frustrates them. This along with similar oscillations in the experience and appraisal of the self lead to chaotic and unstable relationship patterns, identity diffusion, and OtherOther
The Other or Constitutive Other is a key concept in continental philosophy; it opposes the Same. The Other refers, or attempts to refer, to that which is Other than the initial concept being considered...
-directed mood swings
Mood Swings
Mood Swings is an album by Koby Israelite released in 2005 on Tzadik.- Track listing :# "Dror Ikra" - 3:03# "Return of the Idiots" - 2:19# "It Is Not a War Here" - 7:05# "Ethnometalogy" - 5:08# "Europa?" - 2:49# "Hiriya On My Mind" - 4:53...
. Consequently, the therapeutic process can be greatly impeded by these oscillations, because the therapist too can become the target of splitting. To overcome the negative effects on treatment outcome, constant interpretations by the therapist are needed.
Splitting contributes to unstable relationships and intense emotional experiences, something that has been noted especially with narcissists. Alexander Abdennur writes in his book on narcissistic personality disorder
Narcissistic personality disorder
Narcissistic personality disorder is a personality disorder in which the individual is described as being excessively preoccupied with issues of personal adequacy, power, prestige and vanity...
, Camouflaged Aggression, that "[t]hrough this splitting mechanism, the narcissist can suddenly and radically shift his allegiance. A trusted friend can become an enemy; the partner may become an adversary."
Treatment strategies have been developed for individuals and groups based on dialectical behavior therapy, and for couples. There are also self help books on related topics such as mindfulness and emotional regulation that have been helpful for individuals who struggle with the consequences of splitting.
Borderline personality disorder
The borderline personality is not able to integrate the good and bad images of both self and others, so that people who suffer from borderline personality disorder have a bad representation which dominates the good representation. This makes them experience love and sexuality in perverse and violent qualities which they cannot integrate with the tender, intimate side of relationships.These people can suffer from intense fusion anxieties in intimate relationships, because the boundaries between self and other are not firm. A tender moment between self and other could mean the disappearance of the self into the other. This triggers intense anxiety. To overcome the anxiety, the other is made into a very bad person; this can be done, because the other is made responsible for this anxiety. However, if the other is viewed as a bad person, the self must be bad as well. Viewing the self as all bad cannot be endured, so the switch is made to the other side: the self is good, which means the other must be good too. If the other is all good and the self is all good, the distinction at which the self begins and ends is not clear. Intense anxiety is the result and so the cycle repeats itself.
Narcissistic personality disorder
People matching the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder also use splitting as a central defense mechanism. Most often the narcissist does this as an attempt to stabilize his sense of self positively in order to preserve his self-esteemSelf-esteem
Self-esteem is a term in psychology to reflect a person's overall evaluation or appraisal of his or her own worth. Self-esteem encompasses beliefs and emotions such as triumph, despair, pride and shame: some would distinguish how 'the self-concept is what we think about the self; self-esteem, the...
, by perceiving himself as purely upright or admirable and others who do not conform to his will or values as purely wicked or contemptible. Given "the narcissist's perverse sense of entitlement
Entitlement
An entitlement is a guarantee of access to benefits based on established rights or by legislation. A "right" is itself an entitlement associated with a moral or social principle, such that an "entitlement" is a provision made in accordance with legal framework of a society...
and splitting. . .[s]he can be equally geared, psychologically and practically, towards the promotion and towards the demise of a certain collecively beneficial project." (Abdennur, the Narcissistic Principle of Equivalence)
The cognitive habit of splitting also implies the use of other related defense mechanisms, namely idealization and devaluation
Idealization and devaluation
In psychoanalytic theory, when an individual is unable to integrate difficult feelings, specific defenses are mobilized to overcome what the individual perceives as an unbearable situation. The defense that helps in this process is called splitting. Splitting is the tendency to view events or...
, which are preventative attitudes or reactions to narcissistic rage and narcissistic injury.
Janet and Freud
Splitting was first described by Pierre Janet, who coined the term in his book L'Automatisme psychologique. Sigmund Freud acknowledged Janet's priority, stating that 'weJosef Breuer
Josef Breuer was an Austrian physician whose works laid the foundation of psychoanalysis.Born in Vienna, his father, Leopold Breuer, taught religion in Vienna's Jewish community. Breuer's mother died when he was quite young, and he was raised by his maternal grandmother and educated by his father...
and I] followed his example when we took splitting of the mind and dissociation of the personality as the centre of our position'. However he also differentiated 'between our view and Janet's. We do not derive the psychical splitting from an innate incapacity for synthesis...we explain it dynamically, from the conflict of opposing mental forces...repression'.
With the development of the idea of repression
Repression
Repression may refer to:* Memory inhibition, the ability to filter irrelevant memories from attempts to recall* Political repression, the oppression or persecution of an individual or group for political reasons* Social repression...
, splitting moved to the background of Freud's thought for some years, being largely reserved for cases of double personality: 'The cases described as splitting of consciousness...might better be denoted as shifting of consciousness, – that function – or whatever it may be – oscillating between two different psychical complexes which become conscious and unconscious in turn'.
Increasingly, however, Freud returned to an interest in how it was 'possible for the ego to avoid a rupture...by effecting a cleavage or division of itself'. His unfinished paper of 1938, "Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence", took up the same theme, and in his Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940a [1938])...[he] extends the application of the idea of a splitting of the ego beyond the cases of fetishism and of the psychoses to neuroses in general'.
The concept had meanwhile been further defined by his daughter Anna Freud
Anna Freud
Anna Freud was the sixth and last child of Sigmund and Martha Freud. Born in Vienna, she followed the path of her father and contributed to the newly born field of psychoanalysis...
; while Fenichel
Otto Fenichel
Otto Fenichel was a psychoanalyst of the so-called "second generation".Otto Fenichel started studying medicine in 1915 in Vienna. Already as a very young man, when still in school, he was attracted by the circle of psychoanalysts around Freud...
summarised the previous half-century of work to the effect that 'a split of the ego into a superficial part that knows the truth and a deeper part that denies it may...be observed in every neurotic'.
Kohut
Heinz Kohut
Heinz Kohut was an Austrian-born American psychoanalyst best known for his development of Self psychology, an influential school of thought within psychodynamic/psychoanalytic theory which helped transform the modern practice of analytic and dynamic treatment approaches.-Early life:Kohut was born...
would then systematize the Freudian view with his contrast between 'such horizontal splits as those brought about on a deeper level by repression and on a higher level by negation', and ' a vertical split in the psyche...the side-by-side, conscious existence of otherwise incompatible psychological attitudes'.
Melanie Klein
There was, however, from early on, another use of the term "splitting" in Freud, referring rather to resolving ambivalence "by splitting the contradictory feelings so that one person is only loved, another one only hated. . .the good mother and the wicked stepmother in fairy tales." Or, with opposing feelings of love and hate, perhaps 'the two opposites should have been split apart and one of them, usually the hatred, have been repressed'. Such splitting was closely linked to the defense of 'isolationIsolation (psychology)
Isolation is a defence mechanism in psychoanalytic theory, whereby the person "isolates" the unpleasant idea from the normal emotional response. For example, describing a murder in graphic details without an emotional involvement invokes isolation....
...The division of objects into congenial and uncongenial ones...making "disconnections"'.
It was the latter sense of the term which was predominantly adopted and exploited by Melanie Klein. After Freud, 'the most important contribution has come from Melanie Klein, whose work enlightens the idea of "splitting of the object" (in terms of "good/bad" objects)'. In her object relations theory
Object relations theory
Object relations theory is a psychodynamic theory within psychoanalytic psychology. The theory describes the process of developing a mind as one grows in relation to others in the environment....
, Klein argues that 'the earliest experiences of the infant are split between wholly good ones with "good" objects and wholly bad experiences with "bad" objects', as children struggle to integrate the two primary drives, love and hate, into constructive social interaction. An important step in childhood development is the gradual depolarization of these two drives.
At what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position
Paranoid-schizoid position
Melanie Klein describes the earliest stages of infantile psychic life in terms of a successful completion of development through certain positions. A position for Klein describes is a set of psychic functions that correspond to a given phase of development, always appearing during the first year of...
, there is a stark separation of the things the child loves (good, gratifying objects) and the things the child hates (bad, frustrating objects), 'because everything is polarised into extremes of love and hate, just like what the baby seems to experience and young children are still very close to'. Klein refers to the good breast and the bad breast as split mental entities, resulting from the way 'these primitive states tend to deconstruct objects into "good" and "bad" bits (called "part-objects")'. The child sees the breasts as opposite in nature at different times, although they actually are the same, belonging to the same mother. As the child learns that people and objects can be good and bad at the same time, he or she progresses to the next phase, the depressive position, which 'entails a steady, though painful, approximation towards the reality of oneself and others': integrating the splits and 'being able to balance [them] out...are tasks that continue into early childhood and indeed are never completely finished'.
However, Kleinians also utilize Freud's first conception of splitting, to explain the way 'In a related process of splitting, the person divides his own self. This is called "splitting of the ego"'. Indeed, Klein herself maintained that 'the ego is incapable of splitting the object – internal or external – without a corresponding splitting taking place within the ego'. Arguably at least, by this point 'the idea of splitting does not carry the same meaning for Freud and for Klein': for the former, 'the ego finds itself passively split, as it were. For Klein and the post-Kleinians, on the other hand, splitting is an active defence mechanism'. As a result, by the close of the century 'four kinds of splitting can be clearly identified, among many other possibilities' for post-Kleinians: "a coherent split in the object, a coherent split in the ego, a fragmentation of the object, and a fragmentation of the ego"'.
Otto Kernberg
In the developmental model of Otto Kernberg, the overcoming of splitting is also an important developmental task. The child has to learn to integrate feelings of love and hate. Kernberg distinguishes three different stages in the development of a child with respect to splitting:- First stage: the child does not experience the self and the object, nor the good and the bad as different entities.
- Second stage: good and bad are viewed as different. Because the boundaries between the self and the other are not stable yet, the other as a person is viewed as either all good or all bad, depending on their actions. This also means that thinking about another person as bad implies that the self is bad as well, so it’s better to think about the caregiver as a good person, so the self is viewed as good too. 'Bringing together extremely opposite loving and hateful images of the self and of significant others would trigger unbearable anxiety and guilt'.
- Third stage: Splitting – 'the division of external objects into "all good" or "all bad"' – begins to be resolved when the self and the other can be seen as possessing both good and bad qualities. Having hateful thoughts about the other does not mean that the self is all hateful and does not mean that the other person is all hateful either.
If a person fails to accomplish this developmental task satisfactorily, borderline pathology can emerge. 'In the borderline personality organization', Kernberg found 'dissociated ego states that result from the use of "splitting" defences'. His therapeutic work then aimed at 'the analysis of the repeated and oscillating projections of unwanted self and object representations onto the therapist' so as to produce 'something more durable, complex and encompassing than the initial, split-off and polarized state of affairs'.
Transference
It has been suggested that interpretation of the transference "becomes effective through a sort of splitting of the ego into a reasonable, judging portion and an experiencing portion, the former recognizing the latter as not appropriate in the present and as coming from the past." Clearly, 'in this sense, splitting, so far from being a pathological phenomenon, is a manifestation of self-awareness'. Nevertheless, 'it remains to be investigated how this desirable "splitting of the ego" and "self-observation" are to be differentiated from the pathological cleavage...directed at preserving isolations'.See also
- BetrayalBetrayalBetrayal is the breaking or violation of a presumptive contract, trust, or confidence that produces moral and psychological conflict within a relationship amongst individuals, between organizations or between individuals and organizations...
- CompartmentalizationCompartmentalization (psychology)Compartmentalizing is the act of splitting an idea or concept up into parts, and trying to enforce thought processes which are inhibiting attempts to allow these parts to mix together again. This process is performed in an attempt to simplify things, and to defend against anxiety. According to...
- DehumanizationDehumanizationDehumanization is to make somebody less human by taking away his or her individuality, the creative and interesting aspects of his or her personality, or his or her compassion and sensitivity towards others. Dehumanization may be directed by an organization or may be the composite of individual...
- Dialogical selfDialogical selfThe dialogical self is a psychological concept which describes the mind's ability to imagine the different positions of participants in an internal dialogue, in close connection with external dialogue...
- Emotional detachmentEmotional detachmentEmotional detachment, in psychology, can mean two different things. In the first meaning, it refers to an "inability to connect" with others emotionally, as well as a means of dealing with anxiety by preventing certain situations that trigger it; it is often described as "emotional numbing" or...
- False dilemmaFalse dilemmaA false dilemma is a type of logical fallacy that involves a situation in which only two alternatives are considered, when in fact there are additional options...
- Idealization and devaluationIdealization and devaluationIn psychoanalytic theory, when an individual is unable to integrate difficult feelings, specific defenses are mobilized to overcome what the individual perceives as an unbearable situation. The defense that helps in this process is called splitting. Splitting is the tendency to view events or...
- Love–hate relationship