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(a) German Edition:
1940 Die Ichspaltung Im Abwehrvorgang Int. Z. Psychoanal. Imago, 25 (3/4), 241-4.
1941 Die Ichspaltung Im Abwehrvorgang G.W., 17, 59-62.
(b) English Translation:
‘Splitting of the Ego in the Defensive Process’ 1941 Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 22 (1), 65-8. (Tr. James Strachey.)
‘Splitting of the Ego in the Defensive Process’ 1950 C.P., 5, 372-5. (Reprint of above.)
The present translation, with a changed title, is a considerably corrected version of that published in 1950.
The manuscript of this important unfinished paper, published posthumously, is dated January 2, 1938, and, according to Ernest Jones (1957, 255), it was ‘written at Christmas, 1937’.
The paper carries further than before the investigation of the ego and its behaviour in difficult circumstances. Two interrelated topics are involved, both of which had latterly been occupying Freud's mind: the notion of the act of ‘disavowal’ (‘Verleugnung’) and the notion of that act's resulting in a ‘splitting’ of the ego. ‘Disavowal’ was usually discussed by Freud, as it is here, in connection with the castration complex. It emerged, for instance, in the paper on ‘The Infantile Genital Organization’ (1923e), Standard Ed., 19, 143, where an Editor's footnote gives a number of references to other appearances of the term. One of these is in the short study of ‘Fetishism’ (1927e), Standard Ed., 21, 155-6, to which the paper before us may be regarded as a sequel. For in that study the splitting of the ego consequent on disavowal was emphasized. (It had been hinted at already in ‘Neurosis and Psychosis’ (1924b), Standard Ed., 19, 152-3.)
Though the present paper was, for some unexplained reason, left unfinished by Freud, he took its subject up again a little later, in the last two or three pages of Chapter VIII of his