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The author maintains that contradictory attitudes (or ego splits) are brought about by denial and repression. It is neither necessary nor even logically defensible, in Dorpat's opinion, to refer to splitting as a “defense.” Denial may affect both self-representations and object representations. Severely disappointing encounters with an ordinarily loved parent or relative may, in childhood, unleash a tendency, thenceforth, to keep the old good impressions — and the new bad impressions of the other person — in mental “compartments” that, unless the walls are broken down by therapy, have no access to one another. The author reviewed a number of case studies (by Kernberg, Mahler, Masterson, Volkan, and others) purporting to prove the validity of the concept that splitting can be an active defense (to ward off anxiety) rather than a mere epiphenomenon of some other mental activity. But he was unable to find any examples where the so-called “splitting defense” could not be better understood as a manifestation of contradictory attitudes derived from antecedant denial. For this reason, and because of the general confusion surrounding the terms, Dorpat has recommended that “split” and “splitting” be dropped from psychoanalytic discourse.