Defense Mechanism – Splitting

It is expressed through the tendency to see oneself and others in categories of "all good" or "all bad," meaning in an unrealistically positive way (a saint, hero, savior) or in a negative way (a devil, traitor, abuser).

This exclusivity creates an unrealistic "black-and-white" perception of oneself and the world and reduces the ability to recognize intermediate values ("gray areas"; "both good and bad sides"). A person often varies in this black-and-white experience, so they see themselves or others, in shorter or longer intervals, as the complete opposite (a hero becomes a traitor, a saint becomes a criminal). The splitting mechanism keeps contradictory representations of oneself and others at a distance and prevents them from merging into a realistic representation.

Splitting in Early Development

Splitting is a normal mechanism in the early phase of development because it allows mental development to be organized around positive experiences that are kept at a safe distance from negative representations. One of the most important tasks of mental development is to merge contradictory representations into a complete, "both good and bad" representation of oneself (the so-called integrated self and whole object).

In the case of a personality disorder, splitting pathologically persists as a dominant defense mechanism and continues to protect positive representations, which are threatened in conditions of massive introjection of negative representations (this can happen in situations of abuse, neglect, or constitutionally strong emotions of anger or fear). If a merger were to occur under these conditions, the massive negative representations would overwhelm the minority of positive representations, thereby endangering further development.

Splitting requires little energy; it is more economical than repression (which requires at least as much energy to repress unacceptable content) but is pathological (because it gives an unrealistic perception of reality in extremes). Other immature defense mechanisms operate in such a fragmented inner world that can more easily manipulate the fragmented, split-off parts of inner and outer reality than would be possible with whole representations, i.e., if splitting did not exist.

How to Recognize Splitting?

The work of splitting encompasses several phenomena that are relatively easy to recognize in practice: a person alternatively experiences contradictory feelings or beliefs, without being bothered by their striking contradiction; the person has very low motivation ("they don't care") to resolve contradictory experiences; they have a tendency to unrealistically idealize some people, to see them as perfect, while seeing others as completely bad, without any positive qualities (with longer or shorter oscillations, these exclusive representations can reverse into their opposite); a person can typically cause conflicts between people by describing the same situation differently to different people or to the same people at different times.

Clinical manifestations of splitting also include: a reduced ability to experience ambivalence (conflicting feelings towards an object), fluctuations in self-esteem, intensification of affect, impaired decision-making, and ego-syntonic impulsivity which the person dismisses as unimportant and which is not accompanied by guilt.

Nemanja Kurlagić – psychotherapist using the O.L.I. method