This paper examined two ways in which the terms 'split' and 'splitting' are used in psychoanalytic discourse. First, they are used as descriptive nouns and adjectives to designate the co-existence of organizations of attitudes, ego states, and self and object representations that are contradictory to each other. Freud and others have shown that such contradictory attitudes (or ego splits) are brought about by denial and repression. When used in this descriptive way, splitting words do not refer to a defence or to any other psychic action or process. Secondly, 'split' and 'splitting' are also used as active,

transitive verbs to denote a defensive activity in which the subject splits various psychic contents such as affects and representations. Published formulations of the splitting defence have committed the error of reification, because it is logically impossible to literally split psychic contents.