Splitting of ego

The term "splitting" has some long-established uses in psychiatry and goes back to the general concept of a capacity for psychic splitting in the human being. These usages are precursors of the concept of splitting as defined by Freud. They are found in the nineteenth century in relation to hysteria and hypnosis (splitting of the personality, multiple personalities, dissociation) and in Pierre Janet's work, in which the concept of a deficiency of psychological synthesis plays an important role. Freud and Breuer return to the concept of splitting in relation to "splitting of consciousness" and from 1894 ("The Psycho-Neuroses of Defence"), Freud provides a causality for this process: "For these patients whom I analysed had enjoyed good mental health until the moment at which an occurrence of incompatibility took place in their ideational lifehat is to say, until their ego was faced with such an experience, an idea or a feeling which aroused such a distressing affect that the subject decided to forget about it because he had no confidence in his power to resolve the contradiction between that incompatible idea and his ego by means of thought-activity" 1

However, the splitting mentioned here goes back to neurotic repression. Now, Freud, writes, "There is, however, a much more energetic and successful kind of defence. Here, the ego rejects the incompatible idea together with its affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the ego at all" (1894a, p. 58). This describes another form of splitting, that which Jacques Lacan later translates as foreclosure (forclusionerwerfung), which is characteristic of the psychoses and results in the foreclosed element returning in the real in the form of a hallucination. With the concept of "denial of reality," Freud introduces another form of splitting that demonstrates the proximity of the mechanisms of perversion to psychotic mechanisms without actually conflating them, as is evident from the creation of a substitute