The Splitting Defense

The concept of ego-defenses has been connected to psychoanalytical theory almost from the earliest days of the discipline. Freud cites the psychopathology implicit when "the boundary lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly . . . subject to disturbances[,] and the boundaries of the ego are not constant" (Freud, 1961, p. 13). Kernberg (1986, p. 352) refers to Freud's link of ego splitting to pathology, as well as his definition of ego splitting as "the co-existence of two contradictory dispositions throughout life . . . which did not influence each other." The Freudian notion of splitting is also connected to the Freudian structural hypothesis, or designation of the ego as the conscious mediator between the id (unconscious drives) and superego (social/parental regulator of life). While the Freudian conception of the ego has not been strictly adhered to by subsequent generations of psychology theorists, the notion that ego functions are more process than constant entity and entail the whole range of psychological conflicts, has survived. In object-relations psychology, a common thread of theoretical discussion is the quality and co

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n of being unconditionally loved vis-à-vis the "primary love object." This does not mean that one spends life looking for one's mother. Rather, the search is for the experience of unconditional love, a form of so-called benign regression, aiming for "the fulfillment of primary relational needs" (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983, p. 183). The character that psychological drives assume throughout life derives from these needs. Thus relationships that the individual has toward all objects are in some manner an attribute of the tendency toward the objective of reconstituting in one's psychological environment the presplit, predeprivation condition of unconditional love. Edith Jacobson. In focusing on the individual's self-conscious "experience of himself in his environment" (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983, p. 305), Jacobson provides the basis for the subject's life as a series of object relations. With the environment a given of individual experience, the conditions for a split of experience, hence of psyche, are established. Thus the satisfaction from the good (gratifying) and dissatisfaction with the bad (frustrating) mother becomes a trope for all attitudes toward encountered objects, for all subsequent internal object relations (Greenberg
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Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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