FREUD AND SPLITTING
J. A. Brook
Summary
Freud is the bread and butter of this paper and clinical vignettes provide some filling in the
middle. First we examine Freud's discussions of splitting, using clinical vignettes. It turns out he
discussed all three of the major kinds of splitting: dissociated or split-off psychic groupings,
splitting of objects and affects, and splitting of the ego, though not always in contemporary
terminology. I then focus on the kind of splitting which most interested Freud late in his life,
splitting of the ego, and explore a clinical example. Finally, we examine the history of the
development of the idea of the splitting of the ego in Freud's work. Though he only laid down the
term 'splitting of the ego' in 1937, he discussed the phenomenon itself repeatedly throughout his
life, beginning as early as 1909. By the end of his life he may have been edging toward viewing it
as the foundation of all defense.
Splitting is often linked particularly to borderline and severe narcissistic conditions. Freud shows us that kinds of splitting not distinctively associated with such serious pathology are also important.
The various things called splitting in psychoanalysis can be sorted into three major types, though
any such typology will draw clearer lines than we find in the actual clinical material, where mixed
types are common. Historically, the first type of splitting to appear was the splitting off of what
Freud called separate psyche groupings or ego nuclei (cf. 1894, 46, fn.1 for references). This form
of splitting is commonly linked to dissociative states and was exemplified for Freud by the way
highly integrated but completely unconscious psychical material operates in post-hypnotic
suggestion. It was this form of splitting that led Freud to the phenomenon of repression.
A second type of splitting and the next to appear historically is the splitting of objects and affects
into good objects (or part objects) of affection and bad objects of hostility. When psychoanalysts
talk of splitting, this is the type of splitting they most frequently have in mind. The same sort of
splitting is involved when the sense of self splits, too, though in other respects object splitting and
splits in the sense of self are quite different from one another. Since what actually splits in these
cases are representations, I will follow Lichtenberg and Slap (1973), Blum (1985) and others and
call this type of splitting the splitting of representations. Note that at least three different kinds of
representation can split, representations of objects, representations of affects, and representations
of self.
A third type of splitting and historically the last to appear is the splitting of the ego. This is the type of splitting which most interested Freud late in his life. Freud used the term 'splitting of the ego' as a general term for a number of specific forms of splitting, both neurotic and psychotic. As applied to neurotic splitting, he used the term to describe both the splitting of the psyche or ego into a self-observing component and an acting component and the splitting which consists of adopting two or more opposed or conflicting attitudes to a single event or object. The latter, the splitting of attitudes, is the form of splitting which most interested Freud late in his life. From now on,
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Presented to the Ottawa Psychoanalytic Society, September, 1989. Levin Prize Essay, Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, 1991. I am grateful to those who have heard the paper and to anonymous referees for this journal for helpful criticisms and suggestions.
when I speak of splitting of the ego, this splitting of attitudes is what I will
have in mind.
Freud made comments about splitting throughout the whole of his forty-five years of writing
about psychology and psychoanalysis. At one time or another, Freud discussed all three types of
splitting I have just identified, though he discussed the splitting of representations only three
times and the specific form of it which we call the splitting of the sense of self only once.
Moreover, he discussed each of the three types separately, which is some indication that he
thought they are different from one another. His remarks on splitting can be grouped into three
periods, each of them centred on a different type of splitting. The first is 1893-5. In this period,
his main interest was the splitting off of 'psychic groupings' from the rest of the psyche (which
remains integrated), a subject which continued to interest him for the rest of his life (at least one
reference to it occurs as late as 1934-1938, 77-78(1)). The second period is 1915 to 1925. In this
period Freud discussed splits in representations three times (1915a, 1923, 1925), the only times he
ever referred to this type of splitting in any work. The third period is 1927 to 1938. It was in this
period that Freud identified splitting of the ego as a distinct phenomenon (1938a, 1938b). Though
he had been describing occurrences of this form of splitting at least since the Rat Man (1909), he
did not give it a separate name until 1937. However, he used a closely comparable term in 1924
(p. 153). In this period, virtually all Freud's remarks on splitting concern splitting of the ego, the
splitting which consists of taking up opposed and contradictory attitudes to a single object or
event. In the end, Freud seems to have thought that this type of splitting is more important than
either of the other two. As we will see, there are some good reasons for taking this position.
In the first part of the paper, I will explore what Freud had to say about each of the three major
types of splitting, with clinical illustrations. Then, focussing on the splitting of the ego, I will give
a vignette from an analysis of a man I will call Mr. B., in which this form of splitting played a
significant role. Finally, in a purely historical discussion, I will explore how the idea of the
splitting of the ego developed in Freud's work and briefly point to some implications this
discussion may have for Freud's final conception of the basic mechanism used by the defenses in
general.
The Splitting Off of Psychic Groupings
The first type of splitting Freud discussed was the splitting off from the mind of psychic
groupings. For Freud, this variety of splitting could take a number of forms: post-hypnotic
suggestion, dissociated sleep-like hypnoid states, fugues and absences, and in extreme cases
complete multiple personalities. Much later in his work he once said that we find this type of
splitting in analysands who have suffered severe real trauma as children (1934-1938, 77-78). This
observation makes a nice introduction to an analysand whom I will call Ms. A.
Both Ms. A.'s parents were alcoholics. Her mother was particularly difficult, a hostile,
unpredictable binge drinker who drank to punish her family. Though Ms. A. has done relatively
well, coming within a few months of finishing a major professional degree and later achieving a
senior position in a large organization, she has suffered from lifelong terrors, depersonalization
and depression. Her memories, sadness, fear and loneliness are seldom directly in evidence, but
they always seem to be just below the surface.
Almost every weekend and in many analytic sessions for the first two years of her analysis,
"everything", as she put it, would "go silent in my head. I feel like the thoughts I have are not
from me, as though I've withdrawn into a little corner of myself". Her introspective consciousness
would lose its sense of being in touch with the world around her and even with her memories.
Depersonalization, sadness, anger, emptiness and fatigue would ensue. Most of the time Ms. A.
was excited and active in her sessions, but this childhood psychic grouping could break through
her excitement and take over her consciousness in a matter of seconds.
A few years into her analysis, the severe splitting just described had largely been resolved. At that
point, another split-off psychic grouping began to appear. She put it this way. "How to say this?
Most of the time, here too, I have a whole pattern of thoughts that are not available to the outside.
Those thoughts are not of interest to other people, so what I say to people, to you, too, is very
different from these thoughts. You respond to what I say, not to those thoughts. How could you?
Then I get frustrated." These hidden thoughts had been and are fully conscious. In retrospect, Ms.
A. was well aware that she thought them and reflected on them constantly but said utterly
different things to me and other people.
Splitting off of psychic groupings, to use Freud's term, thus appeared in Ms. A. in both severe
and less severe forms, a very severe form dominating her early analysis and a less severe form
appearing after a couple of years. What Ms. A. had split off in both cases, what re-appeared first
in breakthroughs of an affective sense of emptiness in the first case and in a conscious
reintegration of two separate patterns of thought and intention in the second case, was a complete
grouping of representations: memories, affects, drive derivatives, values, fantasies and so on. For
Freud, such splits are instituted as an activity of defense in childhood (1934-1938, 78).
Freud followed Breuer and others in thinking that the splitting off of psychic groupings occurred mainly in hysteria and it was in this context that he described it. (Some of the history of Freud's relationship not only to Breuer but also to Charcot and Janet and others on the matter of psychic splitting can be found in Pruyser (1975).) The theory was that hysteria resulted when something traumatic which had never been properly integrated into or synthesized with the rest of the psyche came to live a mischievous life of its own. "When this process occurs", Freud tells us,
there comes into being a nucleus and centre of crystallization for the formation of a psychical group divorced from the ego -- a group around which everything which would imply an acceptance of the incompatible idea collects. The splitting of consciousness in these cases of acquired hysteria is accordingly a deliberate and intentional one. At least it is often introduced by an act of volition; ... [1893-5, 123].
The idea that this sort of splitting is restricted to hysteria is no longer plausible. Certainly Ms. A.
is not overtly hysteric. But Freud diagnosed a much broader range of cases as hysterics than we
would now. Whereas we would think of Ms. A. as having a narcissistic disorder of some sort,
Freud would probably have thought of her as an hysteric. At any rate, this sort of splitting seems
to be common not just in the neuroses but in everyday life. Freud's description of it is still
valuable.
Breuer seems to have thought that this kind of splitting resulted when a constitutionally
susceptible person happened to be in a dissociated, hypnoid state at the moment a traumatic
experience occurred. (Sleep-like hypnoid states were thought at that time to be quite common in
housewives and others.) The idea was that the memories which the traumatic experience leaves
behind never get connected to the main psychic formations. But as the last line of the passage
just quoted makes clear, Freud did not agree with Breuer on this. He held that splitting off a
psychic grouping is the result of a deliberate though unconscious decision, a deliberate defensive
act (cf. also 1914, 11).(2)
One crucial feature of the splitting off of psychic groupings is that not just the ego but all the
psychic systems are split. Thus a split-off psychic grouping 'divorced from the ego', as Freud put
it, can contain within itself drive derivatives, ego functions and moral constraints and ideals -- the
whole range of psychic material. Indeed, in multiple personalities split-off groupings can cohere
into complete alternative personalities, each with its own kind of drives, morality and so on.
Thus it is interesting that Freud never called this kind of splitting the splitting of the ego, though
that might seem like a natural name for it. He did call it a number of other things: splitting of
consciousness (in the quotation above and in (1915b, 170); splitting of the mind (a term of
Breuer's (Breuer and Freud 1893-5, 225; cf. 1912, 263) and even the splitting of personality or
double conscience (1909, 177). But never splitting of the ego. And he was right, I think, not to do
so. All three of his later systems are involved in it, not just the ego.
What happens to consciousness when a psychic grouping splits off is an interesting question. As
Freud saw it, 'the function of consciousness' "oscillat[es] between the two different psychic complexes which become conscious and unconscious in alternation" (1912, 263). But consciousness,
the 'I', the "owner of experiences", as Freud once put it (1912, 263), does not split: it is "the same
consciousness [that] turns to one or the other of these groups alternately" (1915b, 171). Thus,
using the term 'splitting of consciousness' for the splitting off of psychic groupings, as we just
saw Freud doing, was perhaps a bit unfortunate. What splits is the material in consciousness, the
representations and drive derivatives and values, and the capacities and abilities with which the
mind manages these contents, not the mind itself. However, Freud continued to use the term
'splitting of consciousness' as late as 1915 (1915b, 171).
In classical cases of multiple personality or what he called double conscience, Freud's view of
what happens to consciousness seem to be right. Each of the split-off personalities is usually fully
introspectible and present in consciousness in its turn. The same may be true in cases of
childhood trauma, where the traumatic memories can alternate between being accessible to introspection and being utterly cut off from consciousness, sometimes for years at a time. Here it is
plausible to say that consciousness oscillates, to be sure very slowly, between the main psychic
grouping and the split-off material.
In some other cases, however, Freud's view seems less plausible. The less severe split which
appeared later in Ms. A.'s analysis is an example. Here Ms. A. did not oscillate in consciousness
between two groupings, for both were always "present and conscious" at the same time, to use
Kohut's phrase (1977, 210). It was just that she was not conscious of them together. This is a split
or a lack of cohesion within consciousness itself. I think this sort of simultaneous presence
without integration of consciousness or full unified introspectibility is common in cases of the
splitting off of psychic groupings. What has been split off is often not entirely lost to
consciousness, but it is not entirely integrated in consciousness either.
That introspective consciousness can itself split is extremely important. Theorist seldom take this
into account because it is so hard to make sense of it. What could the psychic life of such people
be like? What would it be like to be such a person? In my view, we cannot make complete sense
of it; it is impossible to imagine what it would be like to be such a person. We cannot 'project'
ourselves into the inner life of these people, because they do not have a single, coherent
consciousness to project ourselves into (cf. Nagel 1971, 1974). But the fact that we cannot form a
coherent picture of what it would be like to be a person whose introspective consciousness is split
does not make the phenomenon any less real or significant.
Splitting of the self is another form of splitting in which consciousness itself splits, in which there
is a split within consciousness. In someone whose sense of self is split into an empty/inferior self
and a grandiose/superior self (Kohut 1971, 177), a person is often conscious of each the halves of
the self and even conscious of each of them at the same time. But there is no unified
consciousness of both of them together.
In addition to this question of whether consciousness itself splits or can split, a number of other
questions arise in connection with Freud's account. What is this 'function of consciousness' that
does the oscillating? If the contents of the mind are the object of oscillation, then what is doing
the oscillating? Pruyser (1975) is a psychoanalytic writer who has asked this question,
Dennett (1978, Ch. 9) is a recent philosopher. Another question is: who or what is the agent who
performs and/or maintains a split? Yet a third question concerns the integration of the psyche
which splitting disrupts. What is this integration like and how is it brought about? In an important
paper, Pruyser asks all these questions, indeed insists that these, not questions about splitting, are
the important ones. I agree with him that they are important. It is unfortunate that no one can
answer them. But I do not agree that they are more important than questions about splitting or
that we should forestall examination of splitting until we can answer them. In fact, it seems to me
that a lot of Pruyser's objections to the notion of splitting amount to no more than a reluctance to
apply the word 'splitting' to phenomena which others find good reason so to describe. He does
not disagree on the facts, just the terminology. Important as these questions are, they would take
us too far afield. So let us return to splitting.
In contemporary work, the concept of splitting most similar to Freud's splitting off of psychic
groupings is probably Kohut's vertical splitting of the psyche. Vertical splitting of the psyche is
more that the splitting of the self mentioned just above. The splitting of the self is just a split in a
complex representation, the sense of self, but in vertical splitting as Kohut conceived it whole
groups of wishes, demands, values, beliefs, affects, etc. are involved. They split off from the
integrated nuclear self, though in a way which allows them to remain "present and conscious" to
it (Kohut's phrase again). Thus, vertical splitting of the psyche is wider than splitting of the self.
Because vertical splitting of the psyche invariably involves splitting of the self, Kohut tended not
to distinguish them, not before 1977 (207) at any rate. But the latter is only part of the former.
The Splitting of Representations
With the exception of a few remarks in 1909 on what he will later call the splitting of the ego, the
kind of splitting which Freud next discussed was the splitting of representations. Klein and Kernberg have made this kind of splitting central to psychoanalysis. In the form of a split in the sense
of self, it also appears in the work of Kohut and other self-psychologists. By 'representations',
theorists mean images and descriptions (imagoes) of objects or events, real or imaginary, and the
psychic states which give them to us. In the splitting of representations, affects, drive-derivatives
(which are representations, unlike drives themselves), and perceptions, memories and fantasies of
objects and events split, so that two imagoes, one good and one bad, develop out of a single
original representation. The two imagoes then co-exist in splendid isolation. The same thing can
happen to representations of self, as Kohut has shown. As Kernberg (1976) and Ross and Dunn
(1980) and others have noted, splits in more than one kind of representation can occur together,
splits of object and affect running in tandem, for example, with splits in the sense of self.
Ms. A. displayed this kind of split, too. Here the transference was the vehicle. From one session
to the next and occasionally within a session, the analyst could change from being a good,
nurturing object who understood her to being a stupid, pathetic object incapable of matching her
either intellectually or morally. Whichever phase the transference was in, Ms. A. had little
memory of it ever having been in the other one. This would not have been enough by itself to
establish part-object splitting. But in other areas, too, nothing good could be in any way bad and
nothing bad could be in any good for Ms. A. The cumulative weight of many such examples
seemed to rule out other explanations.
Freud was certainly aware of the splitting of representations. However, he discussed it only three times, once in connection with introjection and projection near the end of 'Instincts and Their Vicissitudes' (1915a), once in The Ego and the Id (1923), and once in 'Negation' (1925). In the first discussion he also mentions splitting of the self. As with later thinkers, Freud held that the splitting of representations occurs in early infancy. Here is what happens:
In so far as the objects which are presented to [the ego] are sources of pleasure, it takes them into itself, 'introjects' them ... ; and, on the other hand, it expels whatever within itself becomes a cause of unpleasure ( ... the mechanism of projection). ... For the pleasure-ego the external world is divided into a part that is pleasurable, which is incorporated into itself, and a remainder that is extraneous to it. It has [also] separated off a part of its own self, which it projects into the external world ... [1915a, 136].
Freud is clearly talking here about the splitting of the object. In the last sentence, he also speaks
of the splitting of the self.
The discussion of the splitting of representations in 1923 turns to an object rather different from the objects of the 1915 discussion!
It does not need much analytic perspicacity to guess that God and the Devil were originally identical -- were a single figure which was later split into two figures with opposite attributes [1923, 86].
Even if God is rather different from the objects Freud had in mind in 1915, he is still talking about
the splitting of representations.
In 'Negation', Freud refers us back to the passage from 'Instincts and Their Vicissitudes' quoted
above and retraces the steps he took in that passage. Here, however, he leaves out the splitting of
the self. With the dubious exception of the remark about God and the devil just noted, this
discussion in 'Negation' and the one in 'Instincts and Their Vicissitudes' are the only two discussions in the whole of Freud's work of the kind of splitting Klein and Kernberg have emphasized.
The splitting of representations played little role in his work.
In 'Instincts and Their Vicissitudes' Freud speaks, for the only time in his work, of the splitting of the self. Because part of the self is projected out, what Freud had in mind is rather different from the splitting of the self Kohut discussed. That Freud speaks of splitting of the self at all, however, is interesting, as is the fact that he speaks of splitting of the object and splitting of the self together. Nowadays, splitting of the self is usually thought to be something very different from the splitting of objects. At the level of what is split and how, however, the two are similar; they are both the splitting of a representation. Here is a clinical vignette of splitting of the self -- of Kohut's kind, however, not Freud's:
Mr. B. was struck by how he viewed people with disdain. Upon my suggesting to him that he thought of himself as superior to them, he responded by saying, "Isn't it strange. I also think of myself as inferior. But you are right. I do think of myself as superior too. Its strange that I've never noticed that before."
Mr. B.'s response does not illustrate the actual split in his sense of self, perhaps, so much as his
first step down the road to resolving it, but there can be no doubt that it was based on such a
split.
What characterizes the splitting of representations? Unlike the splitting of psychic groupings, the
splitting of representations happens to imagoes, percepts or fantasies and their contents, not to
complete psychic groupings and basic mental abilities. A representation of an object splits, so
that we end up with two imagoes of it, a good and a bad one. Or one's affective response splits,
into an affectionate and cooperative tendency which alternates with a hostile and devaluing
tendency. Or one's sense of oneself splits, so that one ends up with two imagoes of oneself.
Though the splitting of representations is central in current psychoanalysis, Freud paid little
attention to it.(3)
The Splitting of the Ego
The third major form of splitting Freud discussed and the one on which he focussed in the last decade of his life was the splitting of the ego, in which the ego takes up two or more inconsistent attitudes to some single thing or event. By 'attitudes', Freud meant not representations but the stances the psyche takes to representations, stances such as acceptance, doubt, belief, disavowal, and so on. (As well as these epistemic stances, the psyche can take up affective stances, such as fear, anger and love, and volitional stances, such as desire, distaste and disgust, too, but Freud did not discuss splits in these latter kinds of stances.) Descriptions of splits in attitude first appear in Freud's writings, as I said, as early as 1909. They play a larger role in his mature work than any other kind of splitting. (Freud also called our ability as subjects to take ourselves as objects a split in the functions of the ego (1933, 58), but this notion illuminates little clinically and plays only a minor role in his work.)
The attitudes which are split usually consist of a simultaneous acknowledgement and disavowal. "The two attitudes persist side by side", Freud tells us, "without influencing each other" (1938a, 202-4). Freud says that children (and not only children!) tend to deal with unpleasant realities by disavowing them. But often when such disavowals are studied closely, they turn out to be,
half-measures, incomplete attempts at detachment from reality. The disavowal is always supplemented by an acknowledgement; two contrary and independent attitudes always arise and result in the situation of there being a splitting of the ego [1938a, 204].
As is well-known, Freud discussed the splitting of the ego by name only twice, in 'Splitting of the
Ego in the Process of Defense', finished early in 1938, and in the Outline of Psychoanalysis,
written in mid-1938. I will begin with the paper.
In one respect the paper 'Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense' is a bit idiosyncratic.
Most recent commentators and Freud himself in other works find the splitting of attitudes in a
variety of different kinds of cases, parental loss in particular (Blum 1985). In people who lost a
parent in childhood, the acknowledgement would consist in accepting that the parent is dead and
the disavowal would consist in nevertheless retaining some unconscious belief that the parent
continues to be alive. As we will see, Mr. B., already mentioned earlier, manifested just this
pattern. But in 'Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense', Freud restricts his discussion to the
somewhat special case of fetishism.
Should an oedipal-aged boy who is threatened with castration happen to observe that females do
not have penises, Freud tells us, he will feel terrible anxiety. One way of controlling this anxiety is
to deny what he observes and hold on to his belief that females do have penises. If he can do this,
the danger of losing his own penis will feel less real. But most little boys cannot simply hallucinate a penis where none exists. So instead they will displace the role or 'value' of a female penis
as a means for reducing anxiety onto something else -- feet, hands, hair, etc. --, which then
becomes a fetish object.
It is at this point that splitting of attitudes enters. 'With one part of his mind', as one is inclined to
say, the boy disavows what he sees and removes the reason for fearing castration by instituting
the fetish object. However he also retains an intense fear that his father will punish him. This,
Freud thinks, shows that he must also be continuing to accept, to acknowledge, what he has just
disavowed, that females have no penises. Thus his attitudes to the absence of the female penis are
split; he both denies and acknowledges what he see. (There is displacement with the acknowledgement, too, incidentally. The little boy's fear of his father is, as Freud puts it, "silent on the
subject of castration" (277) and appears instead as a fear of being eaten by his father.)
Unlike the account in 'Splitting of the Ego ...' which we have just been examining, the account in
the Outline of Psychoanalysis (201-4) is not restricted to fetishism. Thus this account holds
special interest. It occurs near the end of the work. Freud begins by reminding us of the two great
original psychical splits, between acknowledgement and denial of reality and between consciousness and the unconscious, and of the different forms they take in neurosis and psychosis. When
consciousness is dominated by the denial of reality and the id has free play, we have psychosis.
In psychotics, the acknowledgement of reality is unconscious, showing up primarily during sleep
in dreams. By contrast, neurotics deny reality while asleep and let the id have free play, but
acknowledge it while awake and repress the id. Freud calls such oscillation between acknowledging and denying a splitting of the ego. What makes this sort of splitting of the ego interesting, he
says, is that something like it is also found in states similar to the neuroses such as fetishism, and,
finally, in the neuroses themselves (202). This is a puzzling remark. Presumably what Freud
meant is that in fetishism and the neuroses the two sides of something like the primordial split
between acknowledgement and disavowal of reality is also found within waking life, not just
distributed between waking life and sleep as in the psychosis and repression. Freud says they co-exist as a compromise, as what we would now call a compromise formation.
Next he recapitulates the account of fetishism already examined. Then, reminding us that children tend to deal with unpleasant realities by disavowing them, he gives the famous description of splitting of the ego quoted earlier, which I will repeat. In such cases disavowals always turn out to be
half-measures, incomplete attempts at detachment from reality. The disavowal is always supplemented by an acknowledgement; two contrary and independent attitudes always arise and result in the situation of there being a splitting of the ego [204].
Freud then tells us that splits of this kind "occur very often and not only with fetishists" (204).
Remarkably enough, Freud then concludes his account. He does not furnish even a single
example of such splitting of attitudes in connection with anything other than fetishism. Yet such
splitting is found in a vast number of contexts. One of the most common and straight-forward
examples is the analysand who both acknowledges a need for help and at the same time disavows such a need and tries to ward off all therapeutic interventions.
What Freud meant by splitting of the ego has not been well understood. The most common mistake is to read the notion as just another name for an already-delineated type of splitting, to fail to see how radically new Freud's idea was. Kernberg (1976, 20-21), for example, takes splitting of the ego to be just a particular form of large-scale splitting of representations with denial; thus he utterly misses Freud's crucial distinction between contradictory attitudes to a single representation and splitting a representation into a number of representations. As Blum has noted, Freud's concept
does not refer to the segregation of polarized affect states of affection and hostility but to contradictory ego states in which reality is, on the one hand, acknowledged and, on the other hand, denied [1985, 321].
Lichtenberg and Slap (1973), on the other hand, take Freud's notion of the splitting of the ego to
be just another way of talking about the splitting off of psychic groups. Both misreadings go
wrong for the same reason. They both fail to see that with the splitting of the ego, Freud was
introducing something new: the idea that, as well as representations and psychic groupings, attitudes can split, too.
A clinical vignette, again from the analysis of Mr. B., will illustrate this new form of splitting. Mr.
B. lost a parent when he was four, so he has the additional interest of being one of the types of
case in which Freud himself said splitting of the ego is common.
Mr. B. is a 45 year old single male. He is university educated, but has worked his whole adult life
in an unskilled job, though one with a high degree of independence. He has never married and,
though he has a long-standing girl-friend, he has never lived with her and the couple seldom has
intercourse. He derives little from the relationship.
When Mr. B. was four, his Father died without warning of a heart attack. Mr. B. was not allowed
to see his Father's coffin, though he wanted to do so, and never grieved his Father's death. He has
not visited his Father's grave since he was a little boy.
Mr. B.'s life has been a monument to his Father's death, aimless and depressed. However, Mr. B.
has also had a lifelong sense of forlornly waiting for something-he-knows-not-what. This
combined sense of loss and sense of waiting pointed to the possibility that Mr. B., though he had
clearly acknowledged the death of his Father and the losses he had suffered, might also have
unconsciously disavowed it. About six months into treatment, he had the following dream:
"I'm living with my Mother. My Father comes to visit. He looks younger than in my childhood
photos of him; in fact, he looks younger than I do now. He resembles X [a former friend who had
saved Mr. B. after a suicide attempt]. I ask him where he's been living all these years. 'Gatineau',
he replies, as if that were the most logical place in the world to live. 'Why did you leave like you
did and never come back?' 'I met a woman', he replies. The explanation seems to satisfy me."
Later in the dream Mr. B. blames his Mother for driving his Father off and dreams of the new
woman as a "spiritual healer, almost a sorceress". Mr. B. is glad to see his Father again and when
leaving, his Father says, "We'll see each other again" and they hug awkwardly.
This dream could be interpreted as a standard wish-fulfillment dream. But Mr. B.'s associations
did not fit that pattern. Rather than feeling a sense of relief at seeing his Father alive, he said,
"when I woke up, I felt in some strange way that this dream was confirming something I already
knew". I said to him, "If your Father is alive, you can be saved. But if your Father is dead, that
dooms you." Mr. B.: "Yes, yes, that's right. So I've kept my Father alive." Later, in similar vein, I
said, "I wonder if you felt you could be alright only if your Father came back ... ". "... have what it
took", said Mr. B. "That's why I need freedom on the outside -- I'm in jail on the inside".
In short, the dream and the associations together seemed on balance to be a concrete representation (Freud 1900, Chapter VI(c)) of something Mr. B. already believed unconsciously, that his
Father was still alive. This dream, the sense of waiting for something, etc., seemed to be
expressing an attitudinal split of just the sort Freud described. Unlike the acknowledgement, of
which Mr. D. was not only conscious but to which he had long since reconciled himself --
consciously --, Mr. B.'s disavowal of his Father's death was of course entirely unconscious.
Nor is this split between acknowledgement and disavowal of his Father's death the only split in
Mr. B.'s attitudes. As another example, he acknowledges his Mother's suffering after his Father
death but also disavows it unconsciously and feels that she deliberately made his Father
disappear. Likewise, he acknowledges himself a victim of his childhood tragedy but at the same
time he holds himself entirely responsible for his lack of success and does not believe
unconsciously that anything in his childhood could have affected his development or absolves
him of blame for later problems.
Such splitting takes other forms, too. For example, in his attitudes to others (including the
analyst), Mr. B. both admires and emulates people and at the same time devalues them in waking
life and deforms them in dreams. There is a similar split in Mr. B.'s attitudes to himself. He views
himself as both grandiose/superior and empty/inferior. (Here we see how a split in representations, in this case Mr. B.'s representation of himself, can be accompanied by a split in attitudes, in
this case the attitudes Mr. B. takes to himself.) In general, attitudinal splitting of the ego is
extremely widespread in Mr. B.
Discussion: Pinning Down the Various Types of Splitting
Cases like Ms. A. and Mr. B., where attitudinal splitting of the ego is both widespread and
clinically significant, make us wonder about the notion more generally. There are few clinical
papers on the splitting of the ego, Bowlby (1963) and Blum (1985) being the only two I know of.
Though Freud clearly prized the notion as naming a major mechanism of defense, it is seldom
mentioned in lists of the defenses (Brenner (1982) does not mention it, for example). In textbooks it gets a few asides (Fenichel 1945) or is not mentioned at all (Brenner 1955). As LaPlanche
and Pontalis remark, few analysts have adopted the notion (1973, 429). So perhaps it is time to
reexamine it.
Part of the reason the notion is largely ignored in current work is that analysts tend to run it
together with other types of splitting, as we saw earlier, and thus fail to see how distinctive it is. In
fact, there is a tendency to run all the various types of splitting together, to neglect the ways in
which any of them are different. With this goes a failure to see just how rich and diverse Freud's
insights into splitting actually were. Even the bare fact that he isolated and discussed all the major
types of splitting is little known. Thus, before we can do justice to the concept of splitting of the
ego, we must do some work on the concepts of splitting in general.
Various types of analysis play a role in psychological science. Psychoanalysis is one. Factorial
analysis is another. (It is sometimes said that you can divide psychiatrists and psychologists by
whether they think 'psycho-' or 'factorial' should come in front of 'analysis'.) I want to introduce a
third type -- conceptual analysis. As Freud was acutely aware (1915a, 117), a science is only as
good as its concepts. For the concepts in a science to develop and mature, time is needed; but so
is analysis.
A number of psychoanalysts have done useful work on the various concepts of splitting. As
accounts of the relation of splitting of the ego to other forms of splitting, however, there are
problems with all these discussions. Rycroft (1968) was probably the first to attempt to define the
concept of splitting in general. He leaves out attitudinal splitting of the ego altogether. Kernberg
(1976, 20-21) includes it; but does not distinguish it, as I said earlier, from large-scale splitting of
representations, or perhaps split-off psychic groupings (it is a little hard to tell exactly what
Kernberg has in mind). Lichtenberg and Slap (1973) make the same mistake; they too take it to
be either a form of splitting of representations or splitting off of psychic groupings. One
commentator who does get it right is Blum (1985). I quoted the crucial passage earlier. He captures the central point Freud wanted to make perfectly: attitudinal splitting of the ego is a duality
of attitudes, not representations, attitudes aimed at a single object or event. Unfortunately, Blum
is all alone and even his discussion is very brief. To further the work he began, let us begin by
looking at the notion of splitting in general.
Why is splitting contrasted with repression, or, in alternative terminology, vertical splitting with
horizontal splitting? Beyond the metaphor of vertical and horizontal, what real difference is there?
In general terms, the difference seems to be something like this. In repression or horizontal
splitting, there is always a difference of level (hence the appropriateness of the metaphor of
horizontal splitting). The material which is repressed is different from the material which remains
unrepressed in a number of ways: cognitive sophistication, level of psychological integration,
rawness of affect, and so on. How different and in how many ways is a topic of controversy; is
anything in the unconscious pure primary process and if so, is everything? But there is always
some difference of level. In addition, by definition repressed material ceases to appear in consciousness, and in affect and behavior, except in deep disguise.
In all forms of splitting, by contrast, the material on both sides of the split is at the same level.
The same kind of material, often indeed the same material, appears on both sides of the split.
Thus a split off psychic grouping or ego nuclei is exactly the same kind of material as the rest of
the psyche which remains. When a representation splits, parts of the same object appear on both
sides of the split. When the ego splits by taking up contradictory attitudes to something, the two
or more attitudes taken up are both attitudes, and are taken up to the same object or event.
In addition to this distinction between difference of level and sameness of level, can we also
distinguish repression and splitting by how they relate to consciousness? Here things are more
complicated. Repressed material, of course, does not appear in consciousness, by definition, and
unrepressed material does. The problem is that while sometimes the two sides of a split have the
same relationship to consciousness, sometimes they do not.
Here are some examples where the two sides of a split retain at least roughly the same relationship to consciousness (these examples touch on just a few of the possibilities):
(1) In the milder split I reported in Ms. A., the material on both sides of the split continued to be
"present and conscious", even on occasion accessible to focussed introspection. What made it a
split was that the material on the two sides was not integrated in consciousness and the patient
could not be simultaneously aware of material on both sides of the split.
(2) If the split-off material is not itself present in consciousness, it can still appear as a gap in
consciousness, a blank spot where the split-off or split-up material should appear. This was true
of the feelings of emptiness and depersonalization that characterized the more severe form of
splitting found in Ms. A. This sense of a gap, of an empty place where something should be, is
enough to distinguish these cases from repression.
(3) Both sides of the split can be neither present in consciousness nor accessible to introspection,
but in exactly the same way. This we find in the split into good and bad objects or part-objects
which showed up in Ms. A. in the transference. Neither the idealizing nor the devaluing side of
her imago of the analyst was accessible to her in introspective consciousness.
(4) Both sides of the split material can be present in consciousness to the same degree but not
fully so. This is what we found in the split of Ms. B.'s sense of himself into a grandiose and an
empty self. Here, too, it is the lack of integration in consciousness that makes these cases of
splitting.
These four kinds of case just scratch the surface. The parallel between the two sides of the split in
each of them so far as relationship to consciousness is concerned make them all fundamentally
different from repression.
There are also cases, however, where the material on the two sides of the split is not in the same
relationship to consciousness. In particular, this is usually true of splitting of the ego. For here
one of the contradictory attitudes is often completely unconscious. This makes splitting of the
ego something of a mixed case. It has the parallel in material which characterizes splitting --
indeed the split attitudes are attitudes to the same thing. But it has the asymmetry in relationship
to consciousness of repression. Perhaps that is part of the reason Freud could not settle his mind
as to whether the notion was "something long familiar and obvious or ... something entirely new
and puzzling" (1938a, 275). (However, there was more to his puzzlement than that, as we will
see.)
Note that splitting is not always just ego-ego, in contrast to repression as ego-id, not even
splitting of the ego, its name notwithstanding. Splitting can involve id and even super-ego
material, too. Parallels in the material, parallels in the system(s) involved, and, for many cases,
parallels in relationship to consciousness is what distinguishes splitting from repression, not a
difference in the systems in which or between which the two take place.
How Splitting of the Ego is Different from Other Types of Splitting
With the above brief analysis of how the varieties of splitting differ as a group from repression, let
us return to the question of how splitting of the ego differs from other types of splitting. One
fundamental difference is that a different mechanism of splitting is used in each of them: splitting
off, splitting up and splitting within. The splitting of psychic groupings makes use of splitting off.
In the splitting of objects and affects and also in the splitting of the self, a representation is split
up. Finally, splitting of the ego is splitting within, within a single ego, that is to say, within the
very thing that contains and organises the material split up or split off in the other types of splitting.
Attitudinal splitting is utterly different from the splitting of representations. In the latter, it is the
ego's contents, its representations, that split, not the ego itself. When attitudes split, by contrast,
the split occurs in the heart of the ego itself, in the very attitudes it takes to its representations.
Here a split takes place not just in representations but in the 'operating system' itself, in the
system which manages representations and imagoes. In fact, representations and imagoes need
not split; we can form contradictory attitudes to a single represented object, e.g. father, or event,
e.g father's death. Another difference is that in the splitting of attitudes, one side of the split
remains appropriate and in touch with reality. But in the splitting of representations, both sides
are usually out of touch with reality.
The splitting off of psychic groupings and the splitting of attitudes are different in another way,
too. It is natural to think of the splitting of representations as a kind of spatial or quasi-spatial
phenomenon, a separating or moving apart of representations or imagoes in the inner 'space' of
the mind into representations or imagoes of separate objects. Introjection, incorporation and
projection can easily be pictured in this way, too; even Freud pictured them this way, talking
about introjection and projection as though an actual taking in or expulsion out were going on.
By contrast, it is very difficult to think of the splitting of attitudes in spatial terms at all.
The splitting of the ego is also quite different from the splitting off of psychic groups or ego
nuclei. When a psychic group splits off, the ego also split; it splits into two. In the splitting of
attitudes, the ego splits in quite a different way. A split occurs within it, but it remains one; it does
not split up. All that splits is the attitudes it takes to something. Just as its representations remain
intact (see the second-last paragraph), so does the ego.
This ends my analysis of the splitting of the ego, what makes it distinctive and why it is
important. Before I end the paper, however, I want to do one more thing. I want to take a look at
the very interesting history of how the notion of splitting of the ego developed in Freud's thought.
The History of the Notion of Attitudinal Splitting in Freud
Though Freud used the term 'splitting of the ego' in a publication only in 1938, he had been
discussing the phenomenon long before that. Going back from 1938, we find attitudinal splits of
one kind or another discussed in two works of the mid-1920's, in 1918, and again, even earlier
still, in 1909. Though Freud's original interest of the 1890's in the ego only became intense again
in the last two decades of his life, he never lost it altogether. The re-intensification of his interest
in the ego and intra-ego defenses in the 1920's resulted in the theory of isolation of 1926 and
ultimately prodded him to articulate his ideas on the splitting of the ego. But descriptions of the
phenomenon first appear in his work as early as 1909.
We have already examined the works of the late 30's. So let us work back from there. In the 20's, Freud discussed splitting of the ego (not by name) in two works, 'Fetishism' (1927) and Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926). 'Fetishism' is mainly an early account of the 1938 theory of fetishism we have examined already. In the last two pages, however, Freud discusses the phenomenon of splitting of the ego in general. These pages contain his first explicit reflections on the phenomenon. Indeed, he almost hit on the term. A few years earlier, he tells us, he had given an account of psychosis as a 'detachment' of the ego from reality in the service of the id. (That was in 1924.) He now suggests that this account cannot be the whole story about psychosis, because he has encountered the same disavowal ('scotomization') of a part of reality in two recent patients who were not psychotic. Both of them had disavowed the death of their father. Indeed, he says, he has run into disavowal of reality without psychosis both in general and over the absence of female penises in particular over and over. How to explain this? The solution, he tells us, is that the reality in question is not just disavowed. It is also acknowledged. In the young men who disavowed the death of their father,
[i]t was only one current in their mental life that had not recognized their father's death; there was another current which took full account of the fact [156].
Freud then says this is a split. He does not say 'split in the ego'. But clearly he is talking about the
same phenomenon.
What is so striking about this paper is that here Freud does not restrict his treatment of attitudinal
splitting to fetishism but also discusses a case of simultaneous acknowledgement and disavowal
of a parent's death, which is where more recent discussions have found it (Bowlby, 1963; Blum,
1985). Freud expands the range of application of the notion in other ways, too. He says that it can
form the basis of an obsessional neurosis and often underlies love-hate ambivalence. (These
suggestions about links to obsessionality and ambivalence are very plausible, yet they do not
appear at all in the 1938 accounts.)
Freud also discussed the splitting of attitudes (again not by name) in Inhibitions, Symptoms and
Anxiety (1926). Since this work focusses squarely on the theory of obsessional neurosis and
since obsessionality often manifests a lot of ambivalence and a lot of doubt and oscillation from
stance to stance, we might expect that attitudinal splitting would often be found in it. And indeed
it is. In Freud's discussion, however, splitting of attitudes turns up not in connection with
isolation, where we might expect it to turn up, isolation also being central to obsessionality, but in
connection with the obsessional's punitive super-ego and the distinctive manner in which they
defend against aggression.
Obsessionality is characterized, Freud tells us, by regression from phallic to anal aggressive drive
components. Thus one would expect obsessives to be highly aggressive. But that is not what we
find. Instead, says Freud, we find excessive tenderness, concern for humanity -- in short,
reaction-formations. The obsessive does more than react against his aggressivity, however; he
also disavows it. An obsessive no longer believes that he has a troublesome level of aggression.
This is not yet splitting, of course, just thorough-going disavowal. In addition, however, the
super-ego still punishes the obsessive. That shows that at the same time as he disavows his
aggression, he also acknowledges it. Now we do have attitudinal splitting, disavowal and acknowledgement together.
Some commentators think that another work of the mid-1920's discusses splitting of the ego, too,
namely 'Neurosis and Psychosis' (1924). It certainly discusses disavowal (153). It also talks about
the kind of splitting which consists of detachment from reality in one state of consciousness and
from the id in another, the kind of splitting which Freud thought to be central to both psychosis
and repression in different ways (1938a). It may also refer to the splitting off of psychic
groupings. Despite the fact that Freud uses the term 'cleavages in the ego' (153), however, it is not
clear that he discusses true splitting of attitudes in this paper anywhere. Strachey says Freud at
least hints at it (S.E. 23, 273); I suspect Strachey may have been conflating two different kinds of
splitting.
Continuing backward, we find Freud discussing the splitting of attitudes, though not by name, in the Wolf Man case study (1918), too. What Freud says here is fascinating. Again the simultaneous acknowledgement and disavowal of the absence of a female penis is the issue. Freud tells us that as a little boy the Wolf Man had refused to take any notice of the missing female penis at first, repressing what he saw. "This really involved no judgement upon the question of its existence" (84). But in time he came to recognize female "castration" as a fact. He then behaved, Freud tells us, in a manner characteristic of him, but one
which makes it difficult to give a clear account of his mental processes ... First he resisted and then he yielded; but the second reaction did not do away with the first. In the end there were to be found two contrary currents side by side, of which one abominated [disavowed?] the idea of castration, while the other was prepared to accept it and console itself with femininity as a compensation [85].
In addition, a third current continued to be "capable of coming into activity", the older one in
which the Wolf Man had repressed what he saw and the question of the reality of castration did
not even arise. The Wolf Man, then, manifested a three-way split. He acknowledged, disavowed,
and acted as though the question had never arisen, all at the same time! I think Freud had trouble
giving a clear account of all of this because in 1918 he was still more than a decade away from
even beginning to develop the terminology for describing such attitudinal splits.
There is a still earlier example of true splitting of attitudes in Freud's work. It occurs in his other
great case study, the Rat Man (1909). These are the earliest references to the phenomenon in his
work. Thus Freud first described attitudinal splitting of the ego at least thirty years before he
finally gave the phenomenon an official name!
In the study of the Rat Man, we find Freud talking about the splitting of the ego, though again not by name of course, in a number of contexts, for example superstition. The Rat Man, Freud says,
... was at once superstitious and not superstitious ... he had two separate and contradictory convictions upon it [229].
Most of the time he was quite rational, feeling and acting in accord with his disbelief in
superstitions. Yet at the same time he could also act superstitiously and have feelings appropriate
to being superstitious. This was one cause of the remarkable oscillations and vacillations so
prominent in his behavior. The Rat Man displayed split attitudes about other things, too. Notably,
like Mr. B., he too both acknowledged and disavowed his father's death (174). In addition, he was
both a skeptic and a believer about an after-life (169). And so on.
It is important to remind ourselves just how early in Freud's work the Rat Man case study comes.
Not only does it come before the great structural works of the 1920's and the metapsychological
papers of 1914 and 1915, it even comes before the Clark lectures, 'Formulations on the Two
Principle of Mental Functioning' (1911) and 'A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis'
(1912). For so early a work, its subtlety and theoretical sophistication is remarkable. Indeed, it is
strong evidence for the view that Freud first observed things clinically and that his concepts
followed his clinical observations.
There is a touching reference to simultaneous acknowledgement and disavowal in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), too.
I was astonished to hear a highly intelligent boy of ten remark after the sudden death of his father: 'I know father's dead, but what I can't understand is why he doesn't come home to supper'.
Thus it might be thought that Freud was describing the phenomenon even earlier than 1909.
Unfortunately, that is not the case; this is one of the remarks Freud added to the 1900 work in the
revisions of 1909.
In 1938a, Freud said that he did not know whether his account of the splitting of the ego was
saying "something long familiar and obvious or ... something entirely new and puzzling". As we
have seen, Freud had been writing about the phenomenon for thirty years at that point. However,
he had never given it a special name before. That probably accounts for part of his puzzlement.
But I think there was more behind it than that. Freud began his psychological work with a rather
mechanical picture of defense, in which representations carry charges of energy and in order to
keep this energy from discharging in troublesome ways, we erect barriers in its path. These
barriers also keep it out of consciousness. As Freud progressed, his picture of defense became
more 'psychological'; defense became a process of the mind doing something to representations
(splitting them, splitting groups of them off, projecting and introjecting them, and so on), not a
process of erecting barriers against energy flows. In the 1920's, Freud's picture took on an
additional dimension of sophistication. Now the mind could not only split representations, it
could also lift affects off representations and move them to different representations or detach
them from representations altogether. This of course was isolation. Finally, in the 1930's, Freud
articulated an idea latent in his work since 1909, the idea of attitudinal splitting of the ego. This
idea moved his picture of defense to a higher plane of psychological sophistication yet. Here the
mind does nothing to representations themselves. Instead, to defend itself against unwelcome
representations and affects, it manipulates its attitudes to representations.
In one important respect, the splitting of the ego is the most distinctively psychological of the
mechanisms of defense. Unlike most other defenses, it wears its intentionality on its face.
Intentionality is aboutness, something being about something else, some object or event (which
can be real or imaginary.) It is close to being a defining characteristic of the mind. The mind operates by having states such as perceptions and memories which are about something and by taking
up attitudes to what these states are about, attitudes of belief, doubt, denial, acceptance, etc. In
the splitting of the ego, what is crucial is not what perceptions and memories are about, what they
represent, but what the mind does with the attitudes it takes up to these representations. The
mind manipulates these attitudes, simultaneously disavowing what it can nevertheless not help
itself from avowing. Unlike what is said to go on in the splitting off of psychic groupings and the
splitting of representations, it does nothing to the representations themselves. Thus it is much less
mechanical than these other forms of splitting. The other forms of splitting could occur even if
the mind had no intentionality. But not the splitting of the ego. Far from being indifferent to the
mind's intentionality, the splitting of the ego is a defensive manipulation of precisely that
intentionality.
Indeed, Freud's favoured description of the mechanism of repression comes close to saying the
same thing. I have in mind his 1915 idea (an idea which goes back as far as 1895, reoccurs in
1900, 574, and 1909, 223, and is found as late as 1934-1938, 97) that to make a representation
unconscious, what we do is detach all word-representations from it, so that only a thing-representation remains. Here too the representation itself (the psychically efficacious part of the representation, at least) is unchanged, and the defense consists in manipulating the mind's relationship
to it. It is the mind's linguistic relationship to its representations that is manipulated, not its
attitudes, but there is clearly a resemblance between this account of the mechanism of repression
and attitudinal splitting.
Thus the 1938 notion of the splitting of the ego contained something entirely new: the first
articulation of the idea that defense is a matter of how the mind manipulates its attitudes to
representations, not something it does to representations themselves. However, it also contained
something very old: in one of Freud's pictures of repression, a picture going back to 1895,
repression too consists of manipulating the mind's relationship to a representation, not in doing
something to the representation itself.
There is also an another point of contact between attitudinal splitting of the ego and repression.
As we saw earlier, when attitudes split, usually one of the resulting pair is relegated to the unconscious; this too parallels repression. We can now understand why Freud did not know whether he
had something entirely new in this notion of the splitting of the ego, perhaps even as new as a
new way to conceptualize the foundation of all the defenses, or something long familiar, as
familiar as his favoured picture of repression.
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Dept. of Philosophy
Carleton University
OTTAWA, Canada K1S 5B6
1. . When Freud wrote something a significant period of time before it was published, I will cite it by the year in which it was written. The numbers following the year cited give the page reference to the volume of the Standard Edition in which the work appears.
2. . Freud also connected this splitting to his drive-discharge model. Splitting is pathological because the possibility of memories 'discharging their energy' lies through the central formations of the mind. But split-off material is dissociated from these formations. As a result, the energy in them remains undischarged and free to cause trouble. I will not pursue these claims here.
3. . If, however, the ego itself is largely made up of representations, namely abandoned object-cathexes, identifications (1923, 29), we may have a way of linking Freud's notion of the splitting of representations to his older notion of the splitting off of psychic groupings. The splitting off of psychic groupings may simply be a massive splitting of representations.