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As reflected in the traditional marital vows, spouses have struggled for centuries to accept each other for better or worse. For partners whose psychic equilibrium is centered on the defense mechanism of splitting, the extreme oscillations that permeate the relationship create specific problems that must be addressed in treatment. These include erraticism and instability due to the rapid reversals in how the spouse and the relationship are viewed, and specific communication problems exacerbated by the way past incidents are remembered and described. If unaddressed, splitting will also affect the therapy in adverse ways, including the creation of unrealistic expectations and intense reactions to setbacks. This paper will consider the application of defensive splitting to the assessment and treatment of couples. Specific treatment issues will be presented and demonstrated in a case that illustrates analytic, systemic, and cognitive responses.
Splitting is a rich analytic concept that has acquired different meanings over the years (Akhtar and Byrne, 1983). Freud initially suggested its function as allowing contradictory or unacceptable attitudes to coexist (Freud, 1940; Fenichel, 1945). Grostein (1981) further defined the process in which internal psychic phenomena are distinguished from each other, elaborating on the theories of