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Also known as Spaltung

Keeping contradictory images of self or object apart, as wholly good and wholly bad.

Melanie Klein 1929 In 1929 Klein first describes the child splitting its super-ego and imagos into separate good and threatening figures, which it projects into the roles of its play. From 1935 to 1946 she makes this the splitting of the object, the breast first, into good and bad. Her precursors are Rado's good and bad mother-imago (1928) and Freud's splitting of the ego (1927, 1938), which is a different idea.

Projective identification 1946 In Klein's account projective identification presupposes splitting: what is projected into the object are parts of the ego that have first been split off, and she treats excessive splitting and projective identification together as what weakens the ego in the earliest position of infancy, which the 1946 paper calls paranoid or schizoid and which she later named paranoid-schizoid.
Paranoid-schizoid position 1946 Klein built the earliest position on splitting. The schizoid in its name refers to splitting of the object and the ego, the defence against persecutory anxiety by which the infant keeps the good breast apart from the bad.
Confusional states 1950 Confusional states are defined against Klein's splitting: they arise when the primary split between good and bad objects, and between loving and hating parts of the self, fails or breaks down, so that the two cannot be told apart.

Melanie Klein 1946 In 1946 Klein makes splitting the central defence of the earliest, paranoid-schizoid position. The breast is divided into an idealised good object and a persecuting bad one, and since the ego cannot split its object without splitting itself, the division runs through the self too.
Otto F. Kernberg 1967 Kernberg made splitting, the active keeping apart of all-good and all-bad images of self and others, the central defence of borderline organization, and tied it to a failure to integrate early object relations.
Ronald Fairbairn Fairbairn made the splitting of the ego, together with the splitting of the internalised object, the universal basis of mental structure.