Chapter 2 Splitting and Projective Identification

Freud’s original concept of Spaltung, or splitting, related to the ‘splitting of consciousness’ – the active process by which the unconscious was separated off by the mechanism of repression. However, as Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) point out:

For Freud, splitting is the result of the conflict; thus in his view the notion has a descriptive value but no intrinsic explanatory one … In the actual development of his work, however, ‘Spaltung’ is only used from time to time, and it never becomes a conceptual tool. When Freud does employ it, it is primarily in order to evoke the fact that the psychical apparatus is separated into systems (Unconscious, Preconscious-Conscious) or agencies (id, ego, superego); or else the fact that the ego comprises a part that observes and a part that is observed.

Freud later developed the concept of the splitting of the ego, particularly in relation to the clinical phenomena encountered in fetishism and the psychoses. He used this concept to denote the coexistence of two psychical attitudes towards external reality, when this interferes with an instinctual demand. He argued that in these circumstances, the ego found a solution by simultaneously taking reality into consideration, and disavowing it and replacing it by a product of desire.

Klein, with her particular interest in the evolution of internal and external object relations from early infancy, regarded the mechanism by which the object comes to be split as one of the earliest defensive operations of the immature ego. This mechanism is called into play in an effort to cope with the intense anxieties to which the early

ego is subjected. She believed that, from very early on, the infant was capable of some form of phantasy, and that one of the characteristics of these phantasies was that they were related to objects. Thus the infant's early experiences of pleasure were essentially linked to a notion of an object that was the source of pleasure, and conv