Splitting and the Use of the Object

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune, the Titanic sails at dawn.
Everybody’s shouting, “Which side are you on?!” Bob Dylan (1965), “Desolation Row”

I will make three major points, only one that is original. Together they suggest that splitting is best understood as a cluster phenomenon that gets at a few very distinct and overlapping psychic processes.

We are all in varying degrees of bits and pieces

Most theories of splitting in the 1980s assumed a modicum of personality integration to begin with. I think of psychological integration as a kind of institutionalized fantasy on the part of psychoanalysis, an epiphenomenal illusion of sorts (Cooper, 2019, 2023). In contrast, Winnicott (1968, 1988, p. 117) had it right when he said that each of us are a collection of “our bits and pieces”), an idea that Bromberg developed well in his later writing as did Davies and Frawley (1992) and Joan Didion in hers about the ubiquity of dissociation of everyday life.

Winnicott believed, and I agree, that we are never all whole. Traditional definitions of defensive splitting rely on a view that we are at some point integrated and then use elements of splitting to titrate or manage anxiety, a radical psychical step indeed. In the mid-1980s, I objected to Stolorow and Lachmann’s (1980) formulation that splitting is actually a result of a developmental deficiency in the trajectory toward integration of a whole object (e.g., of good and bad feelings, anger and love, etc.). I was working with patients who clearly had developed levels of integration but used splitting as a way to manage overwhelming degrees of anger or love (e.g., Kernberg, 1975). Now I see that the disagreements between Kernberg and Stolorow and Lachman were couched as theoretical debates but, in my view, they were actually also describing very different types of patients (Cooper, 1989; Perry & Cooper, 1986).

Splitting and the use of the object

The most original point that I wish to make is that sometimes what appears to be splitting is better understood in terms of the creative destruction and finding of an object (Winnicott, 1968). I have found in several analyses that patients will idealize an object while devaluing me in ways that superficially look structurally like splitting. To some extent it is true that the patient is unable to integrate loving and hostile feelings, but on closer examination, there is an unconscious request toward the analyst to hold and survive the patient’s destruction of the object (analyst). Holding of this devaluation promotes the possibility of finding a new object who can allow the patient to love and hate. Sometimes the attempt to destroy the analyst is through an idealization of another object, intended to induce envy or degradation in the analyst. The analyst here is engaged in another kind of survival (e.g., Cooper, 2023)

Our view of splitting whether that proposed by Kernberg (1975) or Stolorow and Lachmann (1980) was focused on the debilitating impact of aggression either inducing regression or failure for integration. I am proposing that at times splitting is part of a “creative aggression” (Cooper, 2023) that was so prominent in the various theory development of both Winnicott and Bion in post-WWII Britain. Our theory of splitting historically lacked the intersubjective component intrinsic to Winnicott’s revolution in defense theory proposed in the True and False Self paper. He proposed that we have defenses against objects when there is profound object failure. From this perspective, of course we can explain what sometimes looks like defensive splitting as an attempt to destroy an object (the disappointing bad object) in order to discover and create a new capacity for object experience.

Splitting is not going anywhere soon

My sense is that splitting has always been an adaptive function of humankind, part of our tragic homeostasis. Strong evidence suggests that Cro-Magnon’s killed many Neanderthals from the beginning along with cohabitating with some. Perhaps the origins and enduring sociological nature of splitting resides in our need to know our enemies even though there were and are frequent miscalculations (false positives) regarding knowing who those enemies are.

Sadly, milder everyday uses of splitting are on display in various debates about race and political conflict in which we discursively reenact the very problems being addressed. Again, this suggests how adaptive and thus refractory splitting has been in historical terms, particularly when we see well-meaning people unable to integrate feelings of good and bad, safe and dangerous. It is less important whether we assume that we have constitutional aggression or aggression that is reactive to environmental failure (I believe that we have both) than that our tendencies toward splitting and projection have been ubiquitous, durable and we might conclude, tragically adaptive. They are not going anywhere soon, beckoning us to work as creatively and compassionately toward formidable forces from within and outside us.