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To begin my discussion of Judith Siegel's very helpful and provocative paper, I will quote the opening lines of Paul Pruyser's earlier landmark paper, written in 1975 entitled, “What Splits in ‘Splitting’?” “From time to time in the sciences and humanities certain words emerge which are destined to have an explosive career. Like a shooting star, they begin by seeming to illuminate a great deal, are quickly made pertinent to the very fate of man, then flicker irregularly for a while, and peter out. … I would like to take a critical look at a ‘star word’ in psychoanalysis and psychiatry that first flickered for a while and has lately become quite luminous, with just that striking intensity of glow which may spell the beginning of the end. That word is splitting” (p. 1). Here we are now, twenty-one years later, and splitting as a word and a concept is still very much with us, and in spite of Pruyser's prediction, it has maintained its starlike status.
Whether it is a good word for the psychic events it is supposed to define is another question. Pruyser thought splitting to be an ambiguous, misleading term, “a tricky, hyperactive word … loaded with aggressive fantasies and thoughts of disaster” (p. 43) that “should be banned from the psychological vocabulary” (p. 44). I agree with him that splitting is a bad term, in fact, all bad, and should be driven from our theory.
The concept of splitting has been around for quite a while in many guises to explain various psychic events, going all the way back to the theories of hysteria developed by Freud, Janet, Breuer, and Charcot in the 1880s and 1890s. Originally, the term was used synonomously with a kind of repression or dissociation to describe the hysteric's “splitting of the content of consciousness” (Freud, 1940-1941,