20: Splitting

Splitting is a very common ego defense that consists of dividing the world into a small number of categories, typically two. "You're with us or you're against us" is a splitting declaration.

Religion and mythology often draw such extreme distinctions: good and evil, hero and villain, angel and demon, saint and sinner, and the like. As such it is a culturally accepted, and even promoted, dysfunction.

Aside of the intellectual laziness of such a practice, splitting enables a person to justify a choice based not on its merits, but on its being the opposite of and only alternative to something undesirable.

In effect, splitting decrease our anxiety and frustration at the inability to grasp the nuances and complexities of reality and instead escape into an artificial construction where things are easily understood to be one or another with no other option.

A person who engages in splitting simplifies their decisions by declaring others to be friends or enemies - but then complicates things for himself when the distinction becomes clear, such that another person can "change" from friend to enemy if they step across a very hazy and arbitrary border.

Splitting is very common in patients with borderline personality disorder (called thus because it is on the border between anxiety disorders and panic disorders). Because his world-view is so polarized, the borderline individual has a pattern of intense but unstable emotions, swinging between uncertainty and fear as the world he perceives shifts from one extreme to another with no gradation between.

Splitting is also leveraged by those who wish to define groups - declaring those who meet the norms to be "in" and those who do not to be "out" of the group. Cohesion among a group generally depends on common acceptance of these splits, though in cases of a strong charismatic leader the members of the group may merely accept the leaders' declarations without considering the schema that defines in/out assessments.