Splitting Now

A Palestinian colleague and friend, with whom I worked on a long-term Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative some years ago, has severed contact with me after the October 7^th violence. When I told her about firsthand reports of the violent acts of Hamas she claimed I was purposefully spreading conspiracy theories about the Palestinians. I was bewildered, how did such a chasm open between us? Who have I become to her? The wildfire extremist positions we have witnessed in the past two months have surprised us all; “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free - of Jews!” “Death to Arabs! may your villages burn!”

Does psychoanalysis have anything to say here?

Splitting, what in pop culture is referred to as black and white thinking, is perhaps our most useful psychoanalytic offering. In its Kleinian origin it helps us understand basic ways of organizing one’s interior world - artificially keeping bad experiences apart from good ones - which helps people understand their volatile shifts in mood and perception. And by the way, the basic mechanism underlying dissociation. Supposedly we split rather than contend with the complex and turbulent experience of both/and; we split to avoid intra-psychic conflict.

When extended to the interpersonal realm splitting gets interesting, as it takes the form of projective identification. The concept has significant explanatory power when it comes to destructive breakdowns. We recruit others to house those split off aspects of self, holding onto pure and idealized images of self and projecting worthlessness and evil into others (or vice versa). We thus set in motion the kind of operations that can end up in mutual hatred. This is most obvious between couples. Acts that in good times could be experienced as benign or idiosyncratic, under the spell of a PS state of mind will be interpreted as exploitative and dangerous, provoking those ready-made, intensely scary narratives we all seem wired to produce. This can easily lead to a cycle of