On Splitting

Five-year-old John is brought to therapy because of the return of night terrors which first emerged following the birth of his brother when he was two years old. He awakens each night in a state of fright, screaming out his deepest anxieties, “I don’t want to die!” His parents comfort him and put him back to sleep. When he awakens the next morning, he has no recollection of the experience.

In an early session, John tells me about a “very, very scary dream”:

First, my dad and mom, and my brother were found where there was a giant place with giant things. We sat at a giant table. We heard the door open a little bit. Out came a WITCH. She tried to eat us but could not. She blew slime and smoke on me and my family. We ran and ran. We found a bigger size Empire State Building. We were so strong that we lifted it up. The witch was coming closer, so we trapped her, and she fell under a bridge, into the water.

The dream contains many elements that were to emerge in John’s treatment: the intensity of his anxiety, manifested in the magnified dream imagery; the imago of an evil, devouring maternal figure in conflict with a loving, protective one; the omnipotent phantasy of being able to make the dreaded figure disappear under water, at the same time splitting off the aggressive part of himself that wishes to harm his loved objects (mother, brother, mother with father); the sense of guilt and fear of punishment from the terrifying witch-mother.

In her early child analyses, Melanie Klein discovered that small children feel a tremendous amount of anxiety and guilt, especially in relation to their destructive wishes and phantasies (Klein, 1926/1975). Klein’s first mention of splitting occurred during the analysis of six-year-old Erna, a depressed, obsessional girl who exhibited a “cleavage of personality into ‘devil and angel,’ ‘good and wicked princess’” (Frank, 2018, p. 172). Unable to tolerate the “evil principle” within herself, Erna split her awareness, projecting her sadism int