Splitting (psychology) - Janet and Freud

Janet and Freud

Splitting was first described by Pierre Janet, who coined the term in his book L'Automatisme psychologique. Sigmund Freud acknowledged Janet's priority, stating that "we followed his example when we took splitting of the mind and dissociation of the personality as the centre of our position." However he also differentiated "between our view and Janet's. We do not derive the psychical splitting from an innate incapacity for synthesis...we explain it dynamically, from the conflict of opposing mental forces...repression."

With the development of the idea of repression, splitting moved to the background of Freud's thought for some years, being largely reserved for cases of double personality: "The cases described as splitting of consciousness...might better be denoted as shifting of consciousness, – that function – or whatever it may be – oscillating between two different psychical complexes which become conscious and unconscious in turn."

Increasingly, however, Freud returned to an interest in how it was "possible for the ego to avoid a rupture...by effecting a cleavage or division of itself." His unfinished paper of 1938, "Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence," took up the same theme, and in his Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940a )... extends the application of the idea of a splitting of the ego beyond the cases of fetishism and of the psychoses to neuroses in general'.

The concept had meanwhile been further defined by his daughter Anna Freud; while Fenichel summarised the previous half-century of work to the effect that 'a split of the ego into a superficial part that knows the truth and a deeper part that denies it may...be observed in every neurotic'.

Kohut would then systematize the Freudian view with his contrast between "such 'horizontal splits' as those brought about on a deeper level by repression and on a higher level by negation," and "a 'vertical split in the psyche'...the side-by-side, conscious existence of otherwise incompatible psychological attitudes."