Splitting: why the whole picture can disappear

Freud used the German word Spaltung, meaning splitting, for a person holding contradictory attitudes at the same time.

You can see it in his paper on fetishism (1927) and in "Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence" (written in 1938): one part of the person acknowledges something, while another goes on acting as though it isn't true.

His focus was the ego (roughly, the part of the mind that deals with reality) keeping those attitudes side by side.

So where is the all-good and all-bad person? That familiar account came later.

Melanie Klein worked with children in the 1930s and 40s. Her account of splitting sits behind much of the language people use today, including some unusual terms for what she thought a baby experiences. Bear with those terms. They make more sense once you see what she was trying to describe.

Comfort and frustration

Klein pictured the infant's early life as a series of powerful experiences. This is before a stable sense of a whole, continuous caregiver has developed. Two kinds of experience stand out:

• being fed, warm and held, with a feeling Klein described in terms of bliss;
• being hungry, in pain or left waiting, with feelings she understood as terror and rage.

In her theory, the infant initially keeps those experiences apart. The "good breast" feeds and soothes. The "bad breast" seems to withhold or threaten.

Odd language, I know. What she is describing is a baby relating to what the caregiver does and how it feels, before recognizing the caregiver as a whole person. Klein called these part-objects.

What the separation protects

Why keep them apart? Klein thought the separation protected the comforting relationship from the infant's own anger.

If you rage at the person you depend on, your anger can seem to endanger the comfort you need. In her account of infant fantasy, keeping good and bad apart lets the good remain safe.

One thing to keep in mind: she was proposing an explanation of early experience, which a baby cannot describe to us directly.

The paranoid-schizoid position

She called this organization of experience the paranoid-schizoid position. The name sounds heavier than it is. Each part of it describes something in the theory:

• Paranoid is the fear of being attacked or harmed by something experienced as bad.
• Schizoid is the splitting: the good and bad experiences are kept apart.

And why "position"? Klein chose the word because she thought people could return to this way of experiencing others throughout life.

Fear, exhaustion or humiliation could make someone you usually see in a complicated way seem entirely good or bad. Development, in her model, helps you recover a more mixed view.

What gets pushed out, and what gets taken in

Two other terms help explain what Klein thought was happening:

• Projection means experiencing your own unwanted feelings as belonging to someone else. For example, you feel angry but experience the other person as the one attacking you.
• Introjection means taking an experience of someone into your inner world. In this account, repeated experiences of being comforted help you develop an inner source of comfort.

In Klein's account, this is how feelings about yourself and other people can become entangled. Your own anger may be experienced as danger coming from someone else.

Recognizing one whole person

Then something changes. Klein placed the beginnings of it around the middle of the first year.

The infant starts bringing the comforting and frustrating experiences together: they belong to the same person. Memory and development make a more continuous relationship possible.

She called this the depressive position. Don't read that as a diagnosis of depression. The term means sadness and concern about someone you love. Recognizing a whole person brings several changes in her theory:

Recognizing the whole person also makes repair possible in Klein's account. You can regret what you said without deciding that either of you is entirely bad.

And it isn't a one-way trip. She thought people moved in and out of this capacity: stress could bring back the split view, while feeling secure could help them recover perspective.

Ronald Fairbairn, a Scottish analyst working in the same period, explored a difficult variation. What about the child who keeps the parent good by becoming the bad one?

In his work with children who had experienced neglect or mistreatment, he noticed that some defended their parents and blamed themselves. He wanted to understand what that self-blame was doing for the child.

His explanation was the moral defense.

A child depends on the adults around them and may have no way to leave. If those adults are unsafe, the whole world can feel unsafe.

Blaming yourself leaves a possibility that blaming them seems to take away: if I can become good enough, perhaps they will love me.

Notice where the badness has gone. It is placed in the self, which preserves goodness in the person the child depends on.

Fairbairn also described parts of the ego organized around a longed-for, exciting parent and a rejecting one. His model offers a way to understand how an adult's harsh inner critic might carry forward an old attempt to protect an important relationship.

Margaret Mahler and her colleagues observed toddlers and mothers during the 1950s–70s. Her separation-individuation model describes how a child develops a sense of being a separate person while remaining connected to a caregiver.

She called one part of that process rapprochement, roughly at 15–24 months.

The toddler wants to explore and discover what she can do. Then being separate feels frightening, and she wants mum close again.

"Go away" and "don't leave me" can arrive very near each other. It is the pull between independence and needing reassurance.

In Mahler's model, object constancy develops as a child can hold a steadier inner picture of the loved person during absence or frustration.

The adult version sounds ordinary: I'm furious with my partner, and I still know we care about each other. That remembered connection helps the argument remain one event in a longer relationship.

Mahler's model connects these early tensions with the weight that separation, rejection and fears of abandonment can carry later.

One caution, though. An adult's difficulty with separation does not, by itself, establish what happened in their childhood.

Otto Kernberg, an Austrian-American psychiatrist, brought these ideas into his work with adult personality from the 1960s onward. His account helps explain why splitting became so closely associated with borderline personality organization.

He began with a simple-sounding question: what does an emotionally important relationship leave behind in the mind?

The experiences we carry with us

Kernberg described emotionally important experiences as combinations of:

• a picture of yourself: perhaps small, needy and frightened;
• a picture of the other person: perhaps cold or rejecting;
• the feeling connecting the two, such as rage or fear.

He called these object relations units. "Object" isn't a thing here. It means the person as represented in your mind.

Loving experiences leave combinations too: a cared-for version of me, a warm version of mum, a feeling of bliss. Each unit includes who you were with that person and what being together felt like.

How those experiences fit together

Kernberg thought development gradually brought these experiences together. You can recognize both yourself and the other person across them.

Someone who disappoints you can still be the person who cared for you, and being hurt does not erase everything else you know about yourself. That continuity supports a steadier identity.

Why keeping them apart can feel safer

So why would the mind keep them apart? Kernberg emphasized both temperament and environment.

Intense aggression or negative emotion, whether constitutionally influenced or stirred up by difficult early relationships, can make integration feel threatening. Allowing painful experiences near the loving ones may feel as though it will destroy the good relationship.

Splitting keeps them apart, and that defense can persist into adulthood.

Borderline personality organization

Kernberg used this term for a level of personality functioning, broader than the formal diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. His description includes difficulties with identity and a reliance on splitting and related defenses, while reality testing is generally preserved:

Kernberg grouped idealization, devaluation, projective identification, denial and omnipotent control among the "primitive defenses." Here, primitive describes where they sit in his developmental theory.

His Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP) works with these patterns as they appear in the relationship with the therapist.

Last week, the therapist may have seemed uniquely understanding. This week, cold and rejecting.

The work is to examine both experiences and gradually recognize the same person across them, along with the different versions of yourself in that relationship.

Wilfred Bion studied how groups organize around shared fears and wishes, including dependence on an idealized leader or unity against an enemy.

Later clinicians described staff splitting in hospitals. A patient experiences some staff as entirely good and others as entirely bad, and the team begins to take those sides. Colleagues can end up fighting over the same patient because each has encountered a different side of the relationship.