While you're waiting for your book to arrive- there are a few wikis that have a generalized view of splitting. Amazingly (for wikipedia) they have a few things right:
Splitting and Relationships:
"The borderline personality is not able to integrate the good and bad images of both self and others, so that people who suffer from borderline personality disorder have a bad representation which dominates the good representation. This makes them experience love and sexuality in perverse and violent qualities which they cannot integrate with the tender, intimate side of relationships. These people can suffer from intense fusion anxieties in intimate relationships, because the boundaries between self and other are not firm. A tender moment between self and other could mean the disappearance of the self into the other. This triggers intense anxiety. To overcome the anxiety, the other is made into a very bad person; this can be done, because the other is made responsible for this anxiety. However, if the other is viewed as a bad person, the self must be bad as well. Viewing the self as all bad cannot be endured, so the switch is made to the other side: the self is good, which means the other must be good too. If the other is all good and the self is all good, the distinction at which the self begins and ends is not clear. Intense anxiety is the result and so the cycle repeats itself.
People who are diagnosed with a narcissistic personality disorder also use splitting as a central defense mechanism. They do this to preserve their self-esteem, by seeing the self as purely good and the others as purely bad. The use of splitting also implies the use of other defense mechanisms, namely devaluation, idealization and denial.
Splitting creates instability in relationships, because one person can be viewed as either all good or all bad at different times, depending on whether he or she gratifies needs or frustrates them. This, and similar oscillations in the experience of the self, lead to chaotic and unstable relationship patterns, identity diffusion and mood swings. Consequently, the therapeutic process can be greatly impeded by these oscillations, because the therapist too can become victim of splitting. To overcome the negative effects on treatment outcome, constant interpretations by the therapist are needed.
Splitting and Transference:
It has been suggested that interpretation of the transference 'becomes effective through a sort of splitting of the ego into a reasonable, judging portion and an experiencing portion, the former recognizing the latter as not appropriate in the present and as coming from the past. Clearly, in this sense, splitting, so far from being a pathological phenomenon, is a manifestation of self-awareness. Nevertheless, 'it remains to be investigated how this desirable "splitting of the ego" and "self-observation" are to be differentiated from the pathological cleavage... .directed at preserving isolations."
Both of these statements have arisen from Melanie Klein's theory of object relations and were further theorized by Otto Kernberg.
Object Relations:
In her object relations theory, Klein argues that 'the earliest experiences of the infant are split between wholly good ones with "good" objects and wholly bad experiences with "bad" objects, as children struggle to integrate the two primary drives, love and hate, into constructive social interaction. An important step in childhood development is the gradual depolarization of these two drives.
At what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position, there is stark separation of the things the child loves (good, gratifying objects) and the things the child hates (bad, frustrating objects), 'because everything is polarized into extremes of love and hate, just like what the baby seems to experience and young children are still very close to.
Klein refers to the good breast and the bad breast as split mental entities, resulting from the way 'these primitive states tend to deconstruct objects into "good" and "bad" bits (called "part-objects" The child sees the breasts as opposite in nature at different times, although they actually are the same, belonging to the same mother.
As the child learns that people and objects can be good and bad at the same time, he or she progresses to the next phase, the depressive position, which 'entails a steady, though painful, approximation towards the reality of oneself and others: integrating the splits and 'being able to balance [them] out... .These are tasks that continue into early childhood and indeed are never completely finished.
Note: (The depressive position was never accomplished because the child clung to the reunion fantasy of the good breast returning and not understanding that the bad breast came with it)
Splitting and Otto Kernberg's theory:
In the developmental model of Otto Kernberg, the overcoming of splitting is also an important developmental task. The child has to learn to integrate feelings of love and hate. Kernberg distinguishes three different stages in the development of a child with respect to splitting:
* First stage: the child does not experience the self and the object, nor the good and the bad as different entities.
* Second stage: good and bad are viewed as different. Because the boundaries between the self and the other are not stable yet, the other as a person is viewed as either all good or all bad, depending on their actions. This also means that thinking about another person as bad implies that the self is bad as well, so it’s better to think about the caregiver as a good person, so the self is viewed as good too. 'Bringing together extremely opposite loving and hateful images of the self and of significant others would trigger unbearable anxiety and guilt.
* Third stage: Splitting - 'the division of external objects into "all good" ones and "all bad" - begins to be resolved and the self and the other can be seen as possessing both good and bad qualities. Having hateful thoughts about the other doesn’t mean that the self is all hateful and doesn’t mean that the other person is all hateful either.
If a person fails to accomplish this developmental task satisfactorily, borderline pathology can emerge. 'In the borderline personality organization', Kernberg found -dissociated ego states- that result from the use of "splitting" defenses."
Splitting be seen as a developmental stage and also as a defense mechanism to protect the ego.
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)
