Splitting

In 1893 Breuer and Freud described a splitting of consciousness in every case of hysteria. Freud soon explained such divisions dynamically, as the outcome of a conflict kept in place by repression, and that line of thought is now treated under dissociation.

Freud returned to the word in a different sense at the end of his life. In a fragment written in 1938 and published after his death as "Die Ichspaltung im Abwehrvorgang" (The Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence), he described a child whose ego serves a powerful drive demand it is used to satisfying. The child comes to learn that continuing the satisfaction would bring a real danger that is hard to bear. Faced with this conflict between the claim of the drive and the objection of reality, the child, Freud wrote, does neither one thing nor the other, or rather does both at once. On one side it rejects reality and lets nothing be forbidden it; on the other, "im gleichen Atem" (in the same breath), it recognises the danger and takes on the fear of it as a symptom. Freud noted dryly that only death comes free. The success is bought "auf Kosten eines Einrisses im Ich", at the cost of a rift in the ego that never heals and grows with time.

His example was the boy who creates a fetish as a substitute for the woman's missing penis. The boy has disavowed reality, but he has saved his own penis. Freud drew the lesson that the synthetic function of the ego, which is usually taken for granted, has conditions of its own and can be disturbed. This Freudian splitting, a coexistence of acceptance and disavowal of reality, is a different idea from the splitting of objects that Klein later developed. Rado's description of a good and a bad mother-imago in 1928 is counted among the precursors of hers.

Klein's own first account appears in Personification in the Play of Children¹ (1929). However many characters a child invents in play, she argued, they reduce to a few roles: a persecuting super-ego, a threatened but itself cruel id or ego, and a helper such as the "fairy mamma" who takes the child's side. Personification rests on splitting the super-ego into the identifications introjected at different stages of development and then projecting these figures into the outside world. Splitting and projection spare the ego the strain of holding together a single, tyrannical super-ego, and they let the internal conflict be moved into the external world. The easing of anxiety that results is, for Klein, a main driving force of the transference. The more extreme and sharply opposed the imagos, the poorer their eventual synthesis.

Klein's mature definition is set out in Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms² (1946). She held that an ego able to feel anxiety, use defences and form object relations exists from birth, but that it lacks cohesion and swings between integration and falling into pieces. Its primary anxiety is the fear of annihilation, which Klein derived from the death drive working within. Deflected outward, that fear returns as fear of persecutors (see persecutory anxiety).

Against this anxiety the chief defence is splitting. The breast is divided into a good, idealised object and a bad, persecuting one. Because the ego cannot split its object without being split itself, the same division runs through the self. Idealisation, denial and omnipotent phantasies of annihilating what is bad hold the split in place. Klein called this earliest phase the paranoid position, adding the term schizoid, which she took from Fairbairn; from 1952 she called it the paranoid-schizoid position. The "schizoid" in the name refers to this splitting of object and ego.

Klein did not regard splitting as pathological in itself. Held within bounds, it lets the infant keep good and bad experience apart, and it is the forerunner of the later mechanism of repression. The introjection of a good object, in the first place the good breast, forms a focal point in the ego that counteracts splitting and dispersal and makes integration possible.

When persecutory anxiety and splitting are too strong, the depressive position, in which the good and bad aspects of the object are brought together, cannot be worked through. Klein located the fixation points of schizophrenia in this first position.

The same paper introduced projective identification, which presupposes splitting. What the infant forces in phantasy into the mother are parts of the self that have first been split off. Klein treated excessive splitting and projective identification together as what weakens the ego in the earliest position.

Fairbairn gave splitting a structural role. In Endopsychic Structure Considered in Terms of Object-Relationships³ (1944) he traced the basic situation of the mind to the infant's frustration by its mother. The infant splits her into good and bad and internalises the unsatisfying object in order to control it. It then splits that object into a tempting side and a rejecting side and represses both, and the parts of the ego still attached to each are split off with them. The result is a central ego that represses two subsidiary egos: a libidinal ego bound to a needed or exciting object, and an internal saboteur, later the antilibidinal ego, bound to a rejecting object (see endopsychic structure and libidinal ego).

For Fairbairn the splitting of the ego and repression are one process, and its dynamic is aggression. Expressing hatred risks losing the good object, and expressing love to a rejecting mother risks humiliation. So the child turns a maximum of aggression against a maximum of libidinal need, a technique he called divide et impera. He read the dissociations of hysteria as splits of the ego and placed the schizoid position at the centre of psychopathology. His collected Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality⁴ (1952) adds the moral defence, in which the child takes the bad aspects of its parents into itself so that the outer world can remain good.

Herbert Rosenfeld defined a pathology by the failure of splitting. In Notes on the Psychopathology of Confusional States in Chronic Schizophrenias⁵ (1950) he described confusional states as the outcome of a breakdown in the normal, structuring split between good and bad objects, and between the loving and hating parts of the self. When the split fails, love and hatred become mixed, and the patient fears that destructive impulses will overwhelm loving ones. Where envy predominates, the good object itself is attacked, so that good and bad can no longer be told apart. Rosenfeld placed confusion between splitting and integration. Klein took up the idea in Envy and Gratitude⁶ (1957).

Wilfred Bion, working within Klein's account of the paranoid-schizoid position, carried splitting further in Attacks on Linking⁷ (1959). What the psychotic part of the personality splits, empties and destroys is not only the object but whatever it feels to be a link between two objects. That link may be the breast between infant and mother, the parents in intercourse, the words between patient and analyst, or finally the patient's own capacities for thought, emotion and perception. Because emotions themselves link one object to another, they too come under attack.

Donald Meltzer distinguished a neighbouring process. In Explorations in Autism⁸ (1975) he described dismantling, in which attention lapses and the self comes apart along the lines of the senses. Like splitting it breaks experience apart, but it is passive rather than sadistic, and the senses come together again easily once attention returns.

Kernberg brought splitting into the diagnosis of personality disorders. In Borderline Personality Organization⁹ (1967) he argued that borderline patients do not occupy an unstable zone between neurosis and psychosis. Instead they share a specific and stable pathological organisation, whose central defence is splitting. Contradictory ego states and introjections are actively kept apart so that aggression does not contaminate the good images. Splitting is supported by primitive idealisation, projective identification, denial, and omnipotence with devaluation, and it feeds ego weakness in a vicious circle. Kernberg traced the organisation to excessive pregenital, especially oral, aggression, and linked the resulting failure to integrate images of self and others to identity diffusion. The paper joined Klein's ideas on splitting and projective identification to Edith Jacobson's ego psychology of self and object representations.

In Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism¹⁰ (1975) Kernberg described the split material as units of self-image, object-image and affect. In borderline patients, early aggression prevents the loving and hating images of self and others from being brought together.

Klein's 1929 paper already drew a technical lesson from splitting. The analyst must accept whatever role the child assigns, the hostile ones included, and must prefer none, whether the role is given openly in play or hidden in the negative transference. As interpretation relieves anxiety, the figures in play change from bad mother to good, and the frightening imagos give way to milder, more realistic identifications. In the 1946 paper she described patients who split off feelings and parts of the self, so that interpretations seem to leave them untouched. Bringing the split-off parts together brings anxiety and depression to the surface.

For Fairbairn the aim of therapy was to narrow the split in the ego and to reduce the attachments and the aggression held within it, releasing bad objects from the unconscious through the relationship with the analyst.

Kernberg's 1975 book set out an expressive psychoanalytic psychotherapy for most borderline patients. In it the primitive defences, splitting first among them, are confronted and interpreted as they emerge in the transference, and the negative transference is taken up in the here and now. The approach was later manualised as transference-focused psychotherapy. In Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality¹¹ (1999), John Clarkin, Frank Yeomans and Kernberg describe the borderline patient's inner world as split into polarised, affect-laden pairs of self and other representations, such as idealised and persecutory or victim and destroyer. These pairs are enacted with the therapist, who is drawn into shifting roles. The therapist names the dominant pair, clarifies, confronts and interprets it, and uses the countertransference as information. The aim is to integrate split-off parts of the self, so that the patient comes to experience self and others as whole people.

The authors who developed the concept disagreed about what splitting is and where it stands in relation to repression. For Klein, moderate splitting is a normal developmental achievement and the forerunner of repression. For Fairbairn, splitting of the ego and repression are a single process. For Kernberg, splitting and repression mark different levels of organisation: splitting predominates in borderline organisation and repression in neurotic organisation.

The disagreement between Klein and Fairbairn went further. In his 1944 paper Fairbairn held that both Freud's structural theory and Klein's depressive position had been built on melancholia, and he set the schizoid position, with its splits, at the centre instead. In the 1946 paper Klein accepted much of Fairbairn's account of schizoid phenomena but objected to his neglect of anxiety, aggression and the death instinct.

Others marked the limits of the concept by defining processes against it. Rosenfeld's confusional states describe what happens when splitting fails, and Meltzer's dismantling describes a division of experience that is passive rather than defensive in Klein's sense. Freud's late splitting of the ego remains a separate notion, concerned with the coexistence of acknowledgement and disavowal of reality rather than with good and bad objects.

Projective identification presupposes splitting, since what it projects are split-off parts of the self. The paranoid-schizoid position is the developmental setting Klein built on splitting, and the depressive position is the one in which its divisions are brought together. Idealisation sustains the good side of the split, and persecutory anxiety attaches to the bad side.

Confusional states, attacks on linking and dismantling are later concepts defined in relation to it. In object-relations theory, splitting shapes the internal objects and the endopsychic structure that Fairbairn described. In the diagnosis of personality, it is central to borderline personality organization and its identity diffusion. The older notion of a splitting of consciousness is treated under dissociation.