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It is axiomatic in most psychoanalytic thinking on depersonalization that the mechanism involved is a splitting of the ego. With the exception of a few modern writers, such as Speigel,26 who discusses depersonalization from a perceptual point of view, and Bird,3 who thinks of it essentially as an hysterical phenomenon deriving from libidinal cathexis and inhibition of the system consciousness, practically all modern writers have based their explanation of depersonalization on some interpretation of the concept of splitting. The term “splitting,” however, has been used in such a variety of ways that one author's use of the term often has borne little essential relation to another's except in name, and it is questionable that our understanding of depersonalization has been advanced by recourse to this seemingly illdefined concept.
It is my purpose in this paper to review briefly the development of the concept of splitting of the ego and the ways in which it has been used in explanation of depersonalization, and to discuss an alternative hypothesis, i.e., that the regressive alteration of the sense of self, pathognomonic of depersonalization, is facilitated primarily by an isolation of affect.
Depersonalization was first described in 1872 and named in 18984 At that time it was explained as a neuropathological phenomenon. Early psychoanalytic interpretations of depersonalization approached the problem from the point of view of shifts of libidinal cathexis, primarily a withdrawal of object libido in response to narcissistic wounds occasioned by real or threatened object loss.6, 19, 25 This point of view followed the emphasis of the time on the quantitative or economic factor with which Freud8 explained Schreber's world-destruction