Psychological "Splitting" as Defense Mechanism

"Splitting" is a psychological phenomenon often thought to be a defense mechanism. The term was coined as such due to the person's splitting others into two (or more) persons in order to keep the "good" attributes of the other pristine and uncorrupted by the "bad" attributes.

Splitting can be viewed as one manifestation of psychological rigidity and emotional ambivalence, in which a person's contradictory attitudes toward others and toward objects and ideas are compartmentalized such that rather than realizing that one feels both positively and negatively toward one and the same thing, one alternates between extremes.

In the case of splitting, the ambivalence is taken to such an extreme as to compartmentalize not merely one's feelings toward the other, but rather the other herself.

Psychoanalytical Underpinnings
Melanie Klein is a key figure in the advent of psychological notions such as splitting, emotional ambivalence, and projective identification or projection.

To briefly summarize Klein, infants see the world as parts, and oftentimes consider a bad breast versus a good breast rather than both breasts as belonging to the same mother as a whole. This primitive form of splitting is eventually usually overcome through maturity, as the child synthesizes the world and the self, and with great guilt comes to realize that the "bad breast", the object of his sadistic impulses belongs to one and the same mother to which the "good breast" belongs. However, sometimes the development in this direction is arrested, and remnants of this kind of splitting remain intact as defense mechanisms against the anxiety and guilt of having to deal with the world and others as grey areas. So objects, and most importantly for splitting, other persons, become split into good/bad.

Commonplace Splitting
Splitting is characterized by alternately idealizing and devaluing the same person rather than seeing the person as a whole who is a mixture of good and bad. We can see this often in such instances as when a person has a crush on or infatuation with another, and then when something sours, the other suddenly "becomes" evil, hated, despised. "I didn't like her anyway, she's such a bitch" - that sort of thing. This is common, and even if childish, generally falls within the range of the non-pathological.

Another less common form of splitting but one that's still perhaps not quite pathological is the kind in which for instance a woman splits her man up into the good man who provides a home and food and the bad man who drinks and roughs her up. This way she can keep the good man from being contaminated by the bad man and thus creating additional anxiety. Similar goes with children and abusive parents.

One aspect of this that might be interesting to explore is the extent to which persons who have extreme personality shifts, such as drunken rage or pathological moodiness may actually "encourage" their own divided selves onto the interpretations of others and cause others to participate in the splitting in something of a co-dependent manner.

Pathological Splitting: Borderline Personality Disorder and a Couple of Personal Examples
Borderline personality disorder takes splitting as one of its common manifestations. A typical scenario involves the extreme idealization of another person alternating with hatred toward the other. Sometimes the relationship is purely fantasized, such as for instance with celebrities and their stalkers. Glenn Close's character in "Fatal Attraction" is often cited as an example of a borderline personality.

With BPD, the splitting is so extreme that the attitude toward the other may shift from worship to denigration in seemingly as little as five minutes. I have dated two women who were diagnosed as borderline, so this is the voice of learning the hard way. One of the women idealized the singer in a band, and it seemed the further away he stayed from her and the further chronologically removed she was from having met him, the more he was idealized. The other woman was slightly milder but she too practiced splitting, especially as concerned me. With each, one moment I was the best thing since sliced bread, the next I was dirt. The fits of rage truly send a piercing chill through your spine, especially if like me you were raised in a very docile home.

When I tried distancing myself from the second woman, she came to my home and when I didn't answer the door she wandered all around looking in the windows trying to get me to answer (I worked a tight schedule from my home at that time). Then she called from her cell phone, and finally when I relented and answered the door she offered me a teddy bear as a gift, for which I thanked her but declined it, and then she came back and shoved the bear inside my door. I've omitted the even more "colorful" scenes I had with these two women.

Moods, Borderlines, and Splitting
Rather than "having" moods, or "being-in" such and such mood, borderlines seem to BE their moods. Think of when someone "artsy" goes to a Halloween party dressed as a mood, such as rage, love, lust, etc. and then you get the gist of what I mean. This seems to meld well with splitting in that others are often seen as different others depending upon the mood either of the splitter or the splittee or both, almost as if the borderline's own lack of integration or own liability is projected onto others as part of the splitting process. Again, rather than being seen as wholes, others are seen as now all good, now all bad.