Splitting (psychology)

Splitting people, ideas, and things into categories of either good or bad can be typically seen in childhood development, but "is expected to recede once the child has developed the capacity to understand primary caretakers as simultaneously possessing both good and bad qualities." The individual will often perceive something that contradicts with their image of themselves or a person close to them as a rejection or slight, a perceived attempt to isolate or abandon them, or even a feeling of unwanted attraction. Psychoanalysis theories propose the idea that idealization and devaluation means there is polarization in not only an individual's self model but their perceived view of others as well. Individuals with borderline personality disorder have been shown to interpret social acceptance as subterfuge or deception. They have also been shown to be less sensitive to verbal irony due to a negative bias in interpreting ambiguous information. Individuals diagnosed with borderline personality disorder may also believe that they will be abandoned if they trust anyone around them. This can be exacerbated in times of professional or personal stress. Splitting can also result in dispositional and situational attributes of others' actions. This means that both a liked person's good behavior and an unliked person's bad behavior are both dispositional attributes; however, a good person's bad behavior would be situational and attributed to symptoms like stress or intoxication. With people with Cluster B personality disorders, this often involves the embellishment or invention of grievances that garner an emotional response from those around them that they feel matches their own distress at the situation. The more valuable the social bond they are trying to preserve or the higher their general need for social acceptance, the higher the probability that they engage in psychologically abusive behavior. This can cause intense psychological distress in the person they are devaluing and can be met by legal challenges of abuse or slander. Splitting also impacts self-esteem, as the dichotomous good or bad thinking is applied to an individual's own self image and how they perceive themselves. ==Management==

For the loved ones of those with borderline personality disorder there are several seemingly contradictory factors to balance: • Privacy of the subject versus seeking external help • Acknowledging the subject's emotions while not endorsing or encouraging their behavior • Helping the subject navigate their episode while not protecting them from the consequences of their actions. The New England Personality Disorder Association recommends always involving the wider group in the discussion of issues, not responding to or ignoring threats or accusations (even if untrue) in the moment, and then discussing the episode in an open and realistic manner when the subject has calmed, and never protecting the subject from social or legal consequences of their actions. Certain difficulties arise from validating emotions and not endorsing the behavior of splitting, as the loved ones of the person with borderline personality disorder risks could become complicit in both the problematic behaviors themselves and their reinforcement. Examples provided by Gunderson and Berkowitz == 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 they gratify the subject's needs or frustrate them. This, along with similar oscillations in the experience and appraisal of the self, leads to chaotic and unstable relationship patterns, identity diffusion, and mood swings. The therapeutic process can be greatly impeded by these oscillations because the therapist too can come to be seen as all good or all bad. To attempt to overcome the negative effects on treatment outcomes, constant interpretations by the therapist are needed. Splitting contributes to unstable relationships and intense emotional experiences. Splitting is common during adolescence, but is regarded as transient. It has been noted especially in persons diagnosed with BPD. There are also self-help books on related topics such as mindfulness and emotional regulation that claim to be helpful for individuals who struggle with the consequences of splitting. The fear of incurring the social consequences of splitting has been theorised to lead people with BPD to avoid social or romantic relationships with those they perceive to be critical and/or prone to assertive or aggressive behaviour and conversely seek out individuals they perceive to be passive. == Disorders ==

Autism spectrum disorder Dichotomous or black and white thinking is a common feature of autism spectrum disorder. Borderline personality disorder Splitting is a relatively common defense mechanism for people with borderline personality disorder (BPD). One of the DSM IV-TR criteria for this disorder is a description of splitting: "a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation". In psychoanalytic theory, people with BPD are not able to integrate the good and bad images of both self and others, resulting in a bad representation which dominates the good representation. People with BPD are especially prone to splitting, causing the breakdown of social relationships, as they often seek positions of control in social situations, are hypersensitive to criticism, are prone to paranoia, and have an intense need for social acceptance. Additionally, they often have "domineering, intrusive, and vindictive styles of relating to others correlated with perpetrating psychological aggression", thus reducing their ability to resolve conflicts amicably. Narcissistic personality disorder People matching the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder also use splitting as a central defense mechanism. Most often narcissists do this as an attempt to stabilize their sense of self-positivity in order to preserve their self-esteem, by perceiving themselves as purely upright or admirable and others who do not conform to their will or values as purely wicked or contemptible. The cognitive habit of splitting also implies the use of other related defense mechanisms, namely idealization and devaluation, which are preventive attitudes or reactions to narcissistic rage and narcissistic injury. Schizophrenia In schizophrenia, the term splitting is described as mental fragmentation or a loosening of their mental associations. They are shown to have a lower ability to retrieve information solely from memory and make slower physical and mental decisions. Splitting in schizophrenia is likely related to a decrease in amygdala activity and a lack of control of the prefrontal cortex which may reflect an inability to express feelings and emotions. Unlike BPD and NPD, splitting in schizophrenia is not characterized by a split of the ego like thoughts of all good or all bad, grandiosity, or a sense of entitlement. Instead, splitting in schizophrenia is characterized by a split of consciousness in which an individual may exhibit psychopathological manifestations due to their decreased mental tensions and inhibited brain activity. This can also lead to individuals integrating their memories which is where their brain activities and memory combine and overlap that creates memories that are made up of one another. Dissociative identity disorder In dissociative identity disorder, a split refers to the creation of distinct personality alters. The development of alters in DID is related to extreme traumatization, in which an individual will "split" and create alter personalities as a response to adverse traumatic experiences. Though the word splitting is used in the context of both dissociative Identity disorder and borderline personality disorder and there is comorbidity between the two, the definition of splitting is not the same. == History ==

Splitting of consciousness ("normal self" vs. "secondary self") was first described by Pierre Janet in ''De l'automatisme psychologique (1889). His ideas were extended by Eugen Bleuler (who in 1908 coined the word schizophrenia from the Ancient Greek skhízō and phrḗn'' ) and Sigmund Freud to explain the splitting () of consciousnessnot (with Janet) as the product of innate weakness, but as the result of inner conflict. 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. However, his late work saw a renewed interest in how it was "possible for the ego to avoid a rupture... by effecting a cleavage or division of itself", a theme which was extended in his Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940a [1938]) beyond fetishism to the neurotic in general. His daughter Anna Freud explored how, in healthy childhood development, a splitting of loving and aggressive instincts could be avoided. There was, however, from early on, another use of the term "splitting" in Freud that referred 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, has been repressed". Such splitting was closely linked to the defence of "isolation ... The division of objects into congenial and uncongenial ones ... making 'disconnections. It was the latter sense of the term that 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 use 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". 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: • The child does not experience the self and the object, nor the good and the bad as different entities. • 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". • 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". == Horizontal and vertical ==

Heinz Kohut has emphasized in his self psychology the distinction between horizontal and vertical forms of splitting. Traditional psychoanalysis saw repression as forming a horizontal barrier between different levels of the mind – so that for example an unpleasant truth might be accepted superficially but denied in a deeper part of the psyche. Kohut contrasted this with vertical fractures of the mind into two parts with incompatible attitudes separated by mutual disavowal. == 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 ==