Splitting is one of the earliest and most
primitive psychic defence mechanisms
and really it’s
about splitting the world and the self into
either all good or all bad, so the objects
are
perceived as either all good or all bad.
It’s one of the defence mechanisms that we employ
in
the earliest days of lives really,
to cope with a kind of very uncertain environment.
Whenever we think of people in not complex,
not nuanced ways,
but as one thing or another, good or bad, then we’re doing splitting.
It’s not something that’s just confined
to infants,
splitting is a psychic mechanism,
kind of
carries on throughout of our lives really.
The concept of splitting is really helpful
in social research because you can often see
that
people idealise one group of people or one person
and denigrate others, and for what
seems
not necessarily good reasons.
So that the concept of splitting can give you one way of
accounting for what’s going on.
Projection is a psychic defence mechanism
that’s useful
in defending us from difficult
knowledge that we’d rather really not know
about ourselves.
And those might be kind of thoughts or feelings or attributes
of the
self that set up conflicts.
And here I’m referring to
things like hatred or envy, greed,
weakness or dependence or incompetence,
stupidity,
or unacceptable desires.
In order to unconsciously
defend ourselves against the anxiety that
that knowledge about the self could produce,
we can project, literally expel those parts
of the self into an object that’s kind of over there.
Now that object could be a person, but it could just as easily be a thing
or a place
or even a political party
or an ethnic group, a racial
group, or a whole country.
When they’re placed out
of our way then we can punish them
and revile them safely, because now they belong to somebody else.
It is actually also possible to project
nice qualities into people.
Some people cannot
take
notions of themselves being really good at
something or
nice qualities, they can’t stand praise
for example.
And they might project those
qualities also into other people and see other
people as ideal.
But it’s quite common to project very bad qualities into other people.
And for social psychoanalytic research we need to
be aware of the concept
so that we can see when
people’s accounts
are not straight forward because they frequently aren’t,
but are
affected for example,
by these twin processes of splitting
and projection.
