Splitting
Immature defence at the major image-distorting level of the DSM-IV scale; primary in McWilliams' scheme. People, including oneself, are experienced as all good or all bad with no stable blend, and the label can flip completely after one event.
What drives it
Keeps love safe from hate by keeping them apart: the good figure can't be contaminated by disappointment, and the person never has to hold mixed feelings toward someone they need.
How it shows
Work
A new hire is “the best person we've ever had” in month one and “toxic” by month four after one mistake. Staff are sorted into the favoured and the damned. The organisation splits too: head office is evil, my team is pure. Nuance produces impatience: “Whose side are you on?”
Relationships
The partner is wonderful on Saturday and a monster on Sunday, with no access to the good while angry. Parents or exes are pure villains. Friends feel pressure to take a side, and mentioning the other person's good qualities during the bad phase is treated as betrayal.
Self
You can't summon a single warm memory of someone you're angry with, or a single flaw in someone you admire. Your view of yourself swings between brilliant and worthless within a day.
What tells it apart
All-or-nothing thinking: All-or-nothing thinking judges events and performance and can be corrected in conversation; splitting is about people, and the opposite view is sealed off, so earlier warmth is genuinely unavailable.
Ambivalence: Ambivalence holds love and anger at once and feels conflicted; splitting holds one at a time and feels certain.
Idealise-devalue-discard cycle: The cycle describes a relational sequence that is often exploitative; splitting is the inner mechanism and can run without any intent to use the other person.
A test
During the bad phase, ask them to describe something good about the person; with splitting they can't, or they say it without feeling, whereas with ambivalence they can and it hurts.
Questions to carry
- In the bad phase, asked for something good about the person, what comes out and how does it sound?
- Which person has flipped in my mind from all good to all bad after one event?
How strong the research is
clinical. Well described in clinical work with borderline organisation; research on unstable person-perception supports it, but direct measures are few.
Where it comes from
Sigmund Freud (splitting of the ego), 1938; Melanie Klein, 1946; Ronald Fairbairn, 1940s; Otto Kernberg, 1967 and 1975
Sources
- Melanie Klein, Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms (1946)
- Otto F. Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (1975)