(Accepted for publication 17 December 2014)

With respect to theorisations of psychical splitting, this paper explores the psychical mechanisms that underlie different forms of social splitting. The paper first outlines Freud's and Klein's different theorisations of the psychical mechanisms of splitting, where the good is split from the bad, the inside split from the outside, and the painful disavowed. I then consider the psychical mechanisms of splitting that underlie ideological supports of certain social systems, specifically that of National Socialist Germany, East Germany during the Cold War period, and neoliberal capitalism. Here, I consider ideological splits between good and evil, the relation between external and internal splits, the relation between geographical, social and internal splitting, as well as splitting as disavowal of the other.