Splitting and the Use of the Object

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune, the Titanic sails at dawn.
Everybody’s shouting, “Which side are you on?!” Bob Dylan (1965), “Desolation Row”

I will make three major points, only one that is original. Together they suggest that splitting is best understood as a cluster phenomenon that gets at a few very distinct and overlapping psychic processes.

Most theories of splitting in the 1980s assumed a modicum of personality integration to begin with. I think of psychological integration as a kind of institutionalized fantasy on the part of psychoanalysis, an epiphenomenal illusion of sorts (Cooper, 2019, 2023). In contrast, Winnicott (1968, 1988, p. 117) had it right when he said that each of us are a collection of “our bits and pieces”), an idea that Bromberg developed well in his later writing as did Davies and Frawley (1992) and Joan Didion in hers about the ubiquity of dissociation of everyday life.

Winnicott believed, and I agree, that we are never all whole. Traditional definitions of defensive splitting rely on a view that we are at some point integrated and then use elements of splitting to titrate or manage anxiety, a radical psychical step indeed. In the mid-1980s, I objected to Stolorow and Lachmann’s (1980) formulation that splitting is actually a result of a developmental deficiency in the trajectory toward integration of a whole object (e.g., of good and bad feelings, anger and love, etc.). I was working with patients who clearly had developed levels of integration but used splitting as a way to manage overwhelming degrees of anger or love (e.g., Kernberg, 1975). Now I see that the disagreements between Kernberg and Stolorow and Lachman were couched as theoretical debates but, in my view, they were actually also describing very different types of patients (Cooper, 1989; Perry & Cooper, 1986).

Splitting and the Use of the Object

The most original point that I wish to make is that sometimes what appears to be splitting i