On Splitting

Five-year-old John is brought to therapy because of the return of night terrors which first emerged following the birth of his brother when he was two years old. He awakens each night in a state of fright, screaming out his deepest anxieties, “I don’t want to die!” His parents comfort him and put him back to sleep. When he awakens the next morning, he has no recollection of the experience.

In an early session, John tells me about a “very, very scary dream”:

First, my dad and mom, and my brother were found where there was a giant place with giant things. We sat at a giant table. We heard the door open a little bit. Out came a WITCH. She tried to eat us but could not. She blew slime and smoke on me and my family. We ran and ran. We found a bigger size Empire State Building. We were so strong that we lifted it up. The witch was coming closer, so we trapped her, and she fell under a bridge, into the water.

The dream contains many elements that were to emerge in John’s treatment: the intensity of his anxiety, manifested in the magnified dream imagery; the imago of an evil, devouring maternal figure in conflict with a loving, protective one; the omnipotent phantasy of being able to make the dreaded figure disappear under water, at the same time splitting off the aggressive part of himself that wishes to harm his loved objects (mother, brother, mother with father); the sense of guilt and fear of punishment from the terrifying witch-mother.

In her early child analyses, Melanie Klein discovered that small children feel a tremendous amount of anxiety and guilt, especially in relation to their destructive wishes and phantasies (Klein, 1926/1975). Klein’s first mention of splitting occurred during the analysis of six-year-old Erna, a depressed, obsessional girl who exhibited a “cleavage of personality into ‘devil and angel,’ ‘good and wicked princess’” (Frank, 2018, p. 172). Unable to tolerate the “evil principle” within herself, Erna split her awareness, projecting her sadism into her mother, who became a cruel figure (Klein, 1932/1975).

Many analysts identify Melanie Klein with the defensive process of splitting, and with projective identification, with which splitting is associated. These two concepts, splitting and projective identification, most likely account for the popularity of Klein’s paper, Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms (Klein, 1946/1975), the most frequently cited article on Pep-Web. According to one of her supervisees, Klein referred to her Schizoid Mechanisms paper as “my splitting paper” (Gammill, 1989). Having previously published two papers on the depressive position (Klein, 1935/1975, 1940/1975), Klein went back to the earlier infantile period, characterized by persecutory anxiety and splitting mechanisms, that she named the paranoid-schizoid position.

Adopting Freud’s later thinking about the life and death instincts, Klein believed that the infant comes into the world overwhelmed by persecutory anxiety – the fear of dying – which it must deflect outward for its own survival (Klein, 1946/1975). At the same time, the infant is oriented toward life and attaches to the source of nourishment, the mother’s breast. To protect the life-sustaining experience, the baby separates the maternal object into ideal/good which it wants to take in and be, and persecutory/bad which it wants to get rid of as “not me.” Klein held that it is not possible to split the object without splitting the ego, meaning that the baby’s experience of itself is simultaneously divided into good and bad, creating two separate “self-with-object” experiences. This primary splitting allows the nascent ego to cohere around good experiences of care. Klein emphasizes that splitting, like other defenses, originates in bodily experiences, expressing unconscious meanings that are inherently relational, for instance, being hungry and lonely (Blass, 2017). She writes: “It is in phantasy that the infant splits the object and the self, but the effect of this phantasy is a very real one, because it leads to feelings and relations (and later on, thought processes) being in fact cut off from one another” (Klein, 1946/1975, p. 6).

To understand splitting it is important to understand better the depressive position. As the infant feels more secure in its possession of the good object, it begins to relate to the mother as a whole person with a mixture of good and bad qualities. The apprehension of the whole object completes the “inner world,” and all efforts are devoted to its preservation. The greatest danger is the loss of the loved object, feared by the baby to be the result of its own destructiveness. Feelings of guilt bring the urge to repair, coupled with grief and a deeper awareness of love. In Klein’s words, “sorrow, guilt, and anxiety are part and parcel of the complex relation to objects which we call love” (Klein, 1936 in Steiner, 2017, p. 37).

Some babies and adults, however, cannot abide the “additional burden” of the depressive position – the anxiety of impending loss, the uncertainty of reparative efforts, the perils of dependence – and are pulled back to splitting and the paranoid-schizoid position (Klein, 1935/1975). As John’s treatment deepened, I became a despised figure, into which were projected his hating and hated self. In session, he attacked me relentlessly: “You’re so annoying … “You’re the worst doctor” … “You’re a puny baby!” I was meant to suffer what it was like to be an unloved, rejected baby/boy. Instead of interpreting or reassuring, I worked in a projected mode, living out with him what it was like to feel so impotent and hated. What I have found with John and other patients, is that holding the projections is an essential step in working with splitting in the transference.