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Defenses

Splitting of Self-Image

Splitting of self-image is seeing yourself as all good or all bad, with nothing in between. At one moment you feel capable, even exceptional; at another, worthless. Each view feels like the whole truth while it lasts. What’s missing is the ordinary mixed picture: good at some things, poor at others, and still the same person.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, splitting means dealing with emotional conflicts or stress “by viewing himself or herself or others as all good or all bad, failing to integrate the positive and negative qualities of the self and others into cohesive images” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). Turned on the self, the person “cannot experience himself as a more realistic mixture of both positive and negative attributes.”

According to the DMRS, this spares the person an anxious task: squaring their self-image with how unpredictable people will actually see and treat them. Once a view is in place, it holds “no matter how others see him and treat him.” The price is a self-image that doesn’t bend to reality and can flip from good to bad without warning, leaving the person less able to notice steadier, more rewarding relationships.

Where It Sits

Splitting of self-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, so that self and others appear either “all good, powerful, and invulnerable or all bad, unworthy, powerless, and vulnerable.” The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale also placed splitting at a major image-distorting level, alongside projective identification.

Among the immature defenses, splitting of self-image is grouped with the depressive defenses. Distress isn’t resolved. When the all-bad view takes over, it lands squarely on the self.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

Common signs, adapted from the items raters use to identify splitting of self-image:

Examples

Hero or mud

The narrator of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, a fictional former government official, looks back on himself at twenty-four. He would spend months in grand daydreams in which he “suddenly became a hero,” while living, by his own account, in the lowest place. “Either to be a hero or to grovel in the mud—there was nothing between.” In the mud, he adds, he comforted himself that at other times he was a hero. This is a vivid literary portrait of splitting of self-image, though Dostoyevsky used no such term.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground (1864; trans. Constance Garnett), Part II, ch. 2

The carefree self and the flawed self

Researchers at Penn State described Mr. D, a man aged 25 to 30 in transference-focused psychotherapy, whose sense of self was “largely vacillating between an idealized care-free, excitable self and a deeply loathed incapable and flawed self.” Being responsible felt dangerous, because it risked exposing incompetence and bringing shame. Later in treatment the swings persisted, but he could reflect on them and was “beginning to hold, although sometimes briefly, a more integrated view of his identity.” The authors frame this in terms of identity rather than the DMRS label, but it is a clear example of splitting of self-image, and of how it can soften.

Chloe F. Bliton, Lia K. Rosenstein, and Aaron L. Pincus, Trading Patients (2022)

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Devaluation of self-image
In devaluation of self-image, a person exaggerates their own flaws, often with a sarcastic or self-deprecating edge, to soften disappointment. The picture is tilted, but not split. In splitting, the all-bad view alternates with an equally unrealistic all-good one, and neither is allowed to touch the other.
Idealization of self-image
Idealization of self-image props up self-esteem by inflating one’s good qualities. It is steadier and less sweeping. In splitting, the inflated self is only one pole, and the opposite pole is never far away.
Splitting of other’s image
The same all-or-nothing seeing, aimed at other people. The two often travel together. The DMRS suggests both are learned “in response to the unpredictability of one’s early significant others.” See splitting of other’s image.
Dissociation and “split personality”
One older meaning of splitting involves whole parts of the personality being split off, closer to dissociation. Splitting of self-image is different: there is one continuous person who knows who they are. What changes is the verdict on that person.

In Personality Styles

These personality styles count splitting of self-image among their characteristic defenses:

History

“Splitting” has carried several meanings in psychoanalysis. In Studies in Hysteria, Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud argued that “the splitting of consciousness, so striking in the familiar classical cases of double consciousness, exists rudimentarily in every hysteria.” That sense is closer to what is now called dissociation. Rachel Blass (2015) distinguishes four conceptions of splitting, from splitting off whole personalities to splitting the object into good and bad, and traces all four to Freud’s writing.

The sense used here grew out of object-relations theory. Otto Kernberg built it into his model of borderline personality organization, in which, as one summary puts it, “excessive use of splitting leads to the lack of integration and sense of identity of the individual” (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, whose Q-sort version scores splitting of self-image and of other’s image as separate defenses.

Gould, Prentice, and Ainslie (1996) built the Splitting Index, a questionnaire with separate subscales for splitting of self, family, and others’ images. Scores tracked measures of borderline and narcissistic personality, self-image stability, self-esteem, and depression, and were unrelated to two of three measures of cognitive complexity, suggesting splitting is more than a black-and-white thinking style. Using the observer-rated DMRS, Kramer, de Roten, Perry, and Despland (2013) found that patients with borderline personality disorder used more major image-distorting defenses, including splitting of self and other’s images, than healthy controls, though, as their title says, the picture went well “beyond splitting.”

Sources