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Defenses

Splitting of Other’s Image

Splitting of other’s image is seeing another person as all good or all bad. Someone is wonderful until they disappoint you, and then they are useless or cruel, the good that came before somehow erased. People get sorted into camps, allies and enemies, and can switch camps overnight.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, splitting means dealing with stress by viewing oneself or others “as all good or all bad, failing to integrate the positive and negative qualities of the self and others into cohesive images; often the same individual will be alternately idealized and devalued” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). Applied to others, the person “can only see one emotional aspect or side of the object at a time.”

The DMRS describes splitting as a defense “against the anxiety of ruining the good images of people by allowing bad aspects of them to intrude upon the good.” It also spares the person the hard work of predicting how others will behave; judgments come fast, from small cues (“he frowned when I spoke, so he hates me”). The cost is that the person “wins some friends and makes some enemies, but not in a realistic way.”

Where It Sits

Splitting of other’s image belongs to Level 2, the Major Image-Distorting Defense Level, within the Immature Defensive Category. Defenses at this level guard against intolerable anxiety when conflicting images of self or others are stirred up, by keeping good and bad images apart and treating people in line with whichever is active. But oversimplifying others “produces the negative consequent that others withdraw or react negatively.” The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale also placed splitting at a major image-distorting level.

Among the immature defenses, splitting of other’s image is grouped with the depressive defenses. Distress isn’t resolved; it is carried into relationships, which swing between rescue and betrayal.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

Common signs, adapted from the items raters use to identify splitting of other’s image:

Examples

The best and the worst

In a teaching article, Tennyson Lee and Richard Hersh describe Nina, a fictitious 34-year-old woman based on their clinical experience. Her relationship with her partner, Eddy, is intense and unstable, “alternately seeing him as the best and then the worst of partners.” Seeing a new psychiatrist for the first time, she begins “very tearful and eager to please,” but grows angry and demanding, then tells the doctor, “You don’t know anything and you’re a waste of time.” The authors point to defenses “of a splitting nature” in her presentation. The hoped-for helper at the start of the hour is worthless by the end of it.

Tennyson Lee and Richard G. Hersh, Managing the Clinical Encounter with Patients with Borderline Personality Disorder in a General Psychiatry Setting (2019), pp. 231–233

“My sometime daughter”

At the start of Shakespeare’s King Lear, the old king asks his three daughters which of them loves him most. Goneril and Regan answer with lavish flattery and are rewarded. Cordelia answers plainly, “Nothing, my lord,” and in a few lines she is disowned: “Here I disclaim all my paternal care.” She becomes “my sometime daughter,” though moments later Lear admits, “I lov’d her most.” Soon afterward, when Goneril crosses him, she too flips from favored child to “Detested kite.” Lear is a fictional but clear picture of splitting of other’s image: one disappointing moment, and a lifetime of love disappears from view.

William Shakespeare, King Lear (written c. 1605–1606), Act 1, scenes 1 and 4

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Idealization or devaluation of other’s image
In idealization or devaluation of other’s image, someone’s good or bad qualities are exaggerated, but the picture stays fairly stable and still has room for the other side. In splitting, the opposite side is shut out of emotional awareness, and the whole image can reverse.
Projective identification
Both involve distorted images of others. In projective identification, the distortion starts with one’s own unacceptable feeling, which is attributed to the other person and often provoked in them. Splitting doesn’t require that: it sorts people into good and bad without the person handing their own feelings over.
Splitting of self-image
The same all-or-nothing seeing, turned on oneself. The DMRS notes that the two often occur together. See splitting of self-image.
“Splitting” in schizophrenia
In an older psychiatric sense associated with Bleuler, “splitting” described a fragmenting of the links between ideas in schizophrenia. Pec, Bob, and Raboch (2014) conclude that the two are different processes: in borderline personality disorder splitting shows up as instability, while in schizophrenia it shows up as a splitting of associations.

In Personality Styles

These personality styles count splitting of other’s image among their characteristic defenses:

History

The idea of splitting people into good and bad comes mainly from object-relations theory. Melanie Klein’s 1946 paper “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” placed splitting at the start of mental life. As Joona Taipale (2026) notes, Klein argued that in this early phase “splitting, denial and omnipotence play a rôle similar to that of repression at a later stage of ego-development.” Rachel Blass (2015) identifies two distinct ways analysts have since understood splitting the object into good and bad.

Otto Kernberg made splitting a core feature of what he called borderline personality organization. In Kernberg’s theory, splitting keeps apart positive and negative “object relations”: an image of the self and an image of another person, bound together by a positive or negative feeling (Gagnon et al., 2022). One clinical summary calls the result “a radical separation of good and bad feelings, of good and bad objects” (Lee & Hersh, 2019).

Splitting was included in the DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) and in J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales. Its Q-sort version scores splitting of other’s image and splitting of self-image as separate defenses.

Zanarini, Weingeroff, and Frankenburg (2009) compared 290 patients with borderline personality disorder to 72 patients with other personality disorders on a self-report questionnaire; the borderline group scored higher on splitting and projective identification, though other defenses distinguished the groups best. Pec, Bob, and Raboch (2014) found higher Splitting Index scores in borderline personality disorder than in schizophrenia. And in a study of 60 young adults, Gagnon and colleagues (2022) linked splitting to an unsteady ability to keep negative images of others out of working memory, a finding they read as consistent with Kernberg’s view of splitting as an active process.

Sources