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SPLITTING AS A DEFENSE MECHANISM.
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Examines concepts of six theorists regarding splitting of the psyche or personality.... More...
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Paper Abstract:
Examines concepts of six theorists regarding splitting of the psyche or personality. Object-relations view of the splitting defense. Views of Freud; ego splitting and pathology. Melanie Klein; internal objects concept. Michael Balint; infant-mother relationship. Edith Jacobson; experience of self in the environment. D. W. Winnicott; ego defense & subjective experience. W. R. D. Fairbairn; role of maternal bonding with child.
Paper Introduction:
This research examines the manner in which six theorists of object relations conceptualize the ego defense known as splitting. The research will set forth the background for the object-relations treatment of the splitting defense and then discuss the views of each theorist in turn.
The concept of ego-defenses has been connected to psychoanalytical theory almost from the earliest days of the discipline. Freud cites the psychopathology implicit when "the boundary lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly . . . subject to disturbances[,] and the boundaries of the ego are not constant" (Freud, 1961, p. 13). Kernberg (1986, p. 352) refers to Freud's link of ego splitting to pathology, as well as his definition of ego splitting as "the co-existence of two contr
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New York: W.W. R. Winnicott. These are components of the ego that are its agencies of mediation,"function[ing] as indispensable counterbalances to each other" (Mitchell &Black, 1995, p. 52). The infant bonds with whatever quality of mediation, for good orill, the mother conveys to the infant, but a failure of mediation upsetsthe content of the bond, with the result that organizational capabilitiesare not shaped and the ego remains fragmented, split from itself. Greenberg, J.R., & Mitchell, S.A. Essential Papers on Object Relations. 47). Theory of the parent-infant relationship.Essential Papers on Object Relations. Unlike Klein,Balint does not altogether set aside the Freudian hypothesis of id-ego-superego and drives. 1 4). 52). . New York: New York University Press. Jacobson, E. Civilization and its discontents. Object relations inpsychoanalytic theory. Greenberg and Mitchell (1983, p. Transference problems in the psychoanalytictreatment of severely depressive patients. Libido . New York: BasicBooks/Perseus. . Revised psychopathology of the psychosesand psychoneuroses. (1961). (1986). Like Klein, Balint was psychoanalyzed by Freudiandisciple (and partial heretic) Sandor Ferenczi and began theorizing as anextension of Ferenczi's views (Mitchell & Black, 1995). Mitchell and Black cite Bion's description of the mind's attack onitself as "attacks on linking, in which the connections among things,thoughts, feelings, people are all broken" (p. Sexual abberations. 235) forcefully argues means that infant and mothercare "belong to each other and cannot be disentangled." The infant(wrongly) interprets what comes to be formulated as maternal mediation inthe infant's experience as omnipotence. References Fairbairn, W. What the psyche has perceived asbeing partitioned, or split, turns out to have been a misperception,although this does not prevent the individual from developing hatred ofwhat is "bad" about the mother, or, envy, i.e., hatred of what is "good"about the mother. If linking isconsidered to be a situation connected to integration and wholeness, thenan attack on linking can be considered an exercise in splitting thatoriginates in the unconscious but that may become manifest in conscious-world relationships, behavior, and attitudes. (1986). 128). In neurotics the balance may be upset. Kernberg, O. 115;Fairbairn, 1986). Essential Papers on ObjectRelations. Initially, the infant internalizesonly partial, or split, realities of the whole, e.g., the mother's breastbut not the mother, as the focus of life experience, a "good" to beaggressively and sadistically exploited when it is present, or a "bad" tobe raged at when it is withdrawn. 226). Buckley (Ed.).New York: New York University Press. (1986). . Mitchell, S.A., & Black, M.J. To put it another way, the split is permanent. 1 3). Fairbairn. Contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressivestates. But this sets up a splitin the psychic life of the child, based on perception that the mother isboth good (source of gratification and love) and bad (source of withholdingof gratification or persecution of the psyche), such that "splits inobjects precipitate and correspond to splits within the ego" (Greenberg &Mitchell, 1983, p. 5-39. This sets up the condition of theinitial rupture (fault, split), which informs the full range of personalitydevelopment. New York: New YorkUniversity Press. In Fairbairn'sview, this means the ego split is universal, although it is also auniversal desire to be loved by and to be allowed to love one's parent(1986). The notion of splitting as an ego defense thatdominates Winnicott's theory is a feature of the overall "quality ofsubjective experience: the sense of inner reality, the infusion of lifewith a feeling of personal meaning" (Mitchell & Black, 1995, p. In situations of psychopathology, the prospect ofrelinquishing a pattern of, say, paranoia in a relationship, is morefearful than discarding paranoia and giving love, because at an unconsciouslevel discarding the pattern is felt to lead to conscious-world isolation--a form of splitting that is exactly the opposite result from the impulsetoward bonding that was present at birth. For Bion, the concept of splitting goes to the issue ofpsychic fragmentation that begins when an infant's projectiveidentification onto a parent is misaligned with the parental bondingprocess. The split comes about with the child adopting (unconsciously) the"unresponsive features of the parents" as a mechanism of bondingpsychically with them, while at the same time consciously seeking to bondwith them. P. P. 318-28s. . 352) refers toFreud's link of ego splitting to pathology, as well as his definition ofego splitting as "the co-existence of two contradictory dispositionsthroughout life . The key to healthfulpsychic development thus owes something to the manner in which theindividual ego copes with the various transactions. (1986). It is connected to Klein's concept of envy, which may be expressedas an envious attack on (say) the nurturant quality of the mother's breastin the first instance, and in the second instance as an attack on theindividual's own mind "connected to the [internal] object and reality ingeneral." Envy thus is "a kind of psychological autoimmunological disorder,an attack by the mind on itself" (Mitchell & Black, 1995, p. Thusrelationships that the individual has toward all objects are in some manneran attribute of the tendency toward the objective of reconstituting inone's psychological environment the presplit, predeprivation condition ofunconditional love. Now inevitably, disentanglement occurs, but the nature of thatdisentanglement is decisive for psychic formation. In object-relations psychology, acommon thread of theoretical discussion is the quality and content ofconnections and distinctions between the ego and its myriad "objects" ofperception (accurate or not), scrutiny, or encounter, whether these objectsare material structures, social structures, or other human beings. provides the psychic glue n developmental processes, integrating, for example, opposing images of good and bad objects and a good and bad self. D. Aggression . Thus, as Klein says (1986, p. . . 183). This is afailure of the bonding process, and the effect of that kind of failure isessentially that it obliges the developing infant to fend for himself, inthe process fostering what will become anxiety in the developing psychicorganism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (1995). 35 -84. energizes an awareness of differences, promoting separation [splitting] and the establishment of differentiated images of self and other (Mitchell & Black, 1995, p. 'the basic fault,' a fragmentation and disjunction at the core of the self which, in some fundamental sense, the patient comes to the analytic situation longing to heal (Mitchell & Black, 1995, pp. 4 -7 . Demands placed on the ego "fight againstits uncontrollable hatred," which fosters anxiety over the fate of theloved object, fear of losing that loved object altogether, and thus anattempt to restore identification with the good of that object. Gradually, the breast object fuses into,or integrates with, the maternal object in whole. In focusing on the individual's self-conscious"experience of himself in his environment" (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983, p.3 5), Jacobson provides the basis for the subject's life as a series ofobject relations. These attitudes are entirely subjective anddo not necessarily correspond to actual behavior of objects, such as themother (Mitchell & Black, 1995). The weaning process illustrates that point. New York: New YorkUniversity Press. According to Mitchell andBlack (1995, p. (1986). Nevertheless, these attitudes inform "asequence of object-directed aims (merging with and separating from) thatacquire a dynamic life of their own," setting up "transactions between the'self' and the 'object world'" (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983, pp. James Strachey(Trans.). Norton. Melanie Klein. Freud and beyond: A history ofmodern psychoanalytic thought. Freud cites thepsychopathology implicit when "the boundary lines between the ego and theexternal world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawnincorrectly . If the mother is "not-good-enough," then the transition fromomnipotence to objective reality may be experienced in a fragmented way,thus hampering individuation of one's "true self" on one hand or fosteringa too-"compliant" or "false" self vis-à-vis the found universe on the other--or both. As Klein formulates subsequent development of the psyche, the maturingego engages in projective identification with the objects of experience,displacing its feelings of love, aggressiveness, fear, and rage on theobject, predicated of gratification and frustration and the experience oflove from the object. . This line of thought isconsistent with, though not in complete agreement with, the Freudianstructural hypothesis, with the ego feeling either gratified or frustratedby an internal object, and constantly in an ambivalent position ofmediating between gratification and frustration. Weaning positions thechild as aggressor cruelly and greedily aiming at satisfaction of alldesire for the breast (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983); as raging and fearfulbecause the mother who owns the breast is persecuting the child bywithdrawing it; and as anxious, fearful, and/or remorseful because of thefantasy that the object has been destroyed or, more, that the child hasbeen the destroyer of the object. The concept of ego-defenses has been connected to psychoanalyticaltheory almost from the earliest days of the discipline. Ifthe mother is "good enough," then she functions as a "transitional object"for both displacement and safety in the sometimes ambiguous "transitionalexperience" of discovery of individuation and the place of self-in-the-world (Mitchell & Black, 1995). 47), "the ego cannot reallykeep its good and bad objects apart." Ideally, the response of the maturingego will be to resolve the confusion, such that "some of the cruelty of thebad objects and of the id becomes related to the good objects and this thenagain increases the severity of their demands" (1986, p. Mitchell and Black refer to the "radical split," or"internal division" between the true and compliant self that maternalfailure fosters; what is wanted is a truly integrated, or consolidated,self that incorporates both subjectivity and a realistic picture of one'ssubjective place in the world. Theindividual begins life in an undifferentiated, or "unintegrated," situationin which the mother accedes to every need, a state of affairs thatWinnicott (1986, p. The mother constructs afacilitative, or "holding environment" that is the context for increasinglydifferentiated experience, including the individual's eventual realizationthat the mother, not the infant alone, has power to facilitate the infant'sexperience of objective reality (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983, p. P. Edith Jacobson. Then there is a further split, between the part of the ego boundto the parent as "exciting object," full of promise and allure and love,and the ego bound to the "rejecting object," who frustrates the objectivesof the individual. Structural derivatives of object relationships.Essential Papers on Object Relations. Thisfeature of splitting ought to preserve or foster the feature of love forthe ego while suppressing hatred for the bad internal objects offrustration, and redirecting any experience of depression because of asense of incapacity for loving and protecting the loved internal object: The attempts to save the loved object, to repair and restore it, attempts which in the state of depression are coupled with despair, since the ego doubts its capacity to achieve this restoration, are determining factors for all sublimations and the whole of the ego- development (Klein, 1986, p. What Fairbairn insists on is that the nature of thebonding between infant and parent is duplicated in--or projected onto--allsubsequent relationships. Obviously no parental objects are perfect in fact. In theprocess of analysis, the transference, in which the patient makes theanalyst the object of any of a series of projective identifications,positions the analyst as parent figure who, over time, does the work ofmediating and organizing that were experienced as lacking in the originalarticle. subject to disturbances[,] and the boundaries of the egoare not constant" (Freud, 1961, p. Winnicott, W.D. P. New York: New York University Press. 115). Like Winnicott, Fairbairn focuses on the decisiverole of maternal care in the shape that the healthy psychologicalpersonality assumes. Buckley (Ed.). P. 233-53. 182) suggest Balint's view ofdevelopment to be that the individual more or less spends his entire lifeseeking to reconnect with the original position of being unconditionallyloved vis-à-vis the "primary love object." This does not mean that one spends life looking for one's mother.Rather, the search is for the experience of unconditional love, a form ofso-called benign regression, aiming for "the fulfillment of primaryrelational needs" (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983, p. With the environment a given of individual experience,the conditions for a split of experience, hence of psyche, are established.Thus the satisfaction from the good (gratifying) and dissatisfaction withthe bad (frustrating) mother becomes a trope for all attitudes towardencountered objects, for all subsequent internal object relations(Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983). The child therefore is going to bondwith, indeed identify with, a parent, whether good or not (more exactlywhether perceived as good or not), and the forms that the bonding assumes"become lifelong patterns of attachment and connection to others" (p. . Buckley (Ed.). The character thatpsychological drives assume throughout life derives from these needs. Such attacks appear to originate, in Bion's opinion, in the failure ofparental mediation and facilitating organization of infant fears. . Klein, M. Buckley (Ed.). 124). For example, ina discussion of the transference phenomenon in analysis of depressedpatients, Jacobson (1986) explains that the subject displaces need forgratification on the therapist as both maternal object and superego proxybut may also develop both hopelessness vis-à-vis getting out of thedepression and demands on the analyst's commitment to helping relieve thedepression. 135-6).According to Balint, the infant begins life with an entirely passivepsyche, generally gratified by an undifferentiated, unconditional love.However, even as the psyche becomes increasingly active, the motherdeprives the infant of gratification. New York:New York University Press. 71-1 1. The problem for the developing psyche is that itturns out that the integrated mother is the object of cruelty and fear andlove, setting up a psychic confusion. The researchwill set forth the background for the object-relations treatment of thesplitting defense and then discuss the views of each theorist in turn. Wilfred Bion. 3 8-9).This means that the Freudian concept of drives is revised from an emphasison instinct to an emphasis on how they grow from subjective experience ofinternal objects. Essential Papers on Object Relations. Freud, S. Michael Balint. At the core of Klein's elaboration of splitting as anego defense is the introduction of a concept she calls internal objects, aconcept that leads to discussion of psychological development that differsfrom Freud's structural hypothesis and the role of instinctual drives.These objects are the developing mind's internalization of what it takes tobe the realities of found experience. The concept of splitting, which is held to originatewith the infant-maternal relationship that dominates the infant'sexperience of his environment, is described differently than Klein does it.Balint sees the origin of splitting as a consequence of a "rupture in thisearly relationship" that: creates . This research examines the manner in which six theorists of objectrelations conceptualize the ego defense known as splitting. That is because Fairbairn, who does not see Freudiandrives as fundamental to development, takes the view that the infant comesinto the world seeking relationships with objects, "as an end in itself"(Mitchell & Black, 1995, p. . Buckley (Ed.). Kernberg (1986, p. Buckley (Ed.). 49).Whether the ego is successful at managing the split or not, according toKlein, the manner in which the ego works out this split (of does not)determines the whole of personality development. 13). D.W. 52), features of the ego structure, notably libido andaggression are "operationalized" by Jacobson in a way that shows how sheconceptualizes the ego split and reintegration (separation andindividuation). In other words, how the developing individual experiences theemergence of the self determines whether subjectivity can be integratedwith the real world. P. which did not influence each other." The Freudiannotion of splitting is also connected to the Freudian structuralhypothesis, or designation of the ego as the conscious mediator between theid (unconscious drives) and superego (social/parental regulator of life).While the Freudian conception of the ego has not been strictly adhered toby subsequent generations of psychology theorists, the notion that egofunctions are more process than constant entity and entail the whole rangeof psychological conflicts, has survived. Freud, S. W.R.D. Essential Papers on ObjectRelations. (1983). (1986b).
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