Introduction

In her watershed 1946 article, Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms, Melanie Klein elaborated the notion of splitting as an early defense mechanism deployed by the developing ego to cope with a barrage of warring positive and negative biologically based experiences which were personified as loving or hateful internal objects. Unable to integrate good and bad, the infant psyche separated or split the object and the ego. Since Klein’s formulation (which expanded Freud’s designation of splitting as a defense), a range of theorists have taken up this construct, including Kernberg in his description of borderline personality functioning, Fairbairn in his work on the compensatory development of endopsychic structure, and relationalists who have emphasized dissociation and splitting in response to unbearable experiences. In the contemporary analytic conversation, the concept of splitting has augmented our understanding of othering, whiteness, racism, and an ever-expanding spectrum of socio-cultural divides. In this historical moment, characterized by the rise of fascism, horrific war and destruction, and proliferating hatred, we are focusing this Snapshot series on splitting broadly construed. We have invited a range of psychoanalytic thinkers to reflect on their use of this concept clinically, personally, and as a means of understanding the searing ruptures erupting in the world around us and in our professional communities. In the following collection we present a wide and diverse range of psychoanalytic musings on this seminal concept.

Amy Schwartz Cooney, Ph.D., Jack Foehl, Ph.D., Stephen Hartman, Ph.D. and Lauren Levine, Ph.D.

Joint Editors-in-Chief, Psychoanalytic Dialogues