Division (psychology)
As fission or splitting defenses is called a psychological defense mechanism , which consists in a reactivation of an early childhood mental state in which the individual is no integration of the positive and negative aspects of one's self and it has developed surrounding objects.
In specific stressful or conflict situations, defense against splitting ensures that unbearable ideas of the self or objects are kept apart, with the result that the self or objects are perceived as either “only good” or “only bad”. For example, instead of experiencing negative feelings towards someone who is actually loved (which could represent a specific burden due to an early childhood trauma that was not overcome), the image of this person is split into a “good” and a “bad” part. This split protects the “good” part of the object from its own aggressions , which in the next moment can be safely and excessively acted out against the “bad” part of the object or at least projectively ascribed to it. In addition, the defense against splitting protects the positive self-aspects from overwhelming negative ideas of the self, until these are expressed elsewhere in an unadorned way, in the form of self-doubt and self-hatred up to self-harming behavior .
The split is thus an unfavorable compromise in which the ego is forced to continually swing back and forth between the poles of two affective states without being able to perceive their different colors at the same time. This mechanism is often supported by other immature defense mechanisms such as denial , projection , devaluation and idealization, or projective identification . In people whose preferred defense mechanism is split, the emotional states alternate in a noticeably abrupt way. Objects that were just loved are now suddenly hated, sadness spontaneously turns into joy, trust is apparently suddenly replaced by mistrust and violent fears destroy justified confidence. All of this is based on the inability to endure the ambivalence of feelings.
Overcoming the developmental stage of predominantly using the defense against division in early childhood is tantamount to gaining the ability to recognize good within evil and to accept the negative side of all good. The consequence of a pathological fixation on the mechanism of division is the maintenance of distorted and unrealistic ideas of one's own self-image as well as of the object world and the representations of relationships. Clinically , one speaks here of “private logic” or “reduced relation to reality”.
Emergence
In the first few months, a person's psychological development is determined by a close symbiotic bond with the primary caregiver , usually the mother. However, the infant does not yet perceive this primary caregiver as a complex individual with needs of his own . Rather, he is in an exclusive relationship (partial object relationships) to the individual functions that the mother assumes for the satisfaction of his needs. The mother feeds, offers protection or comforts. When hungry, this carer “means” “feeding object”, when fearful “protective object” and when sad “comforting object”. In the immature psyche of the infant there are individual relationships to partial functions of the primary reference object, while their individual traits or peculiarities cannot yet be recognized as such in this phase of development. It is the same with the self. Ideas of their own size and omnipotence about the sub-objects that are constantly available on request alternate between feelings of despair and helplessness if the child's needs are not (immediately) satisfied by the caregiver.
After six to nine months, these previously perceived self and object aspects are gradually integrated into consistent ideas. Holistic self and object representations , ideas of the self and the other, which are complex and ambivalent, arise . The mother is now increasingly recognized as an independently existent being, separate from her own self, with a will of her own that is not unreservedly available to satisfy her own needs. This developmental process is called early individuation .
The infant's perception of separation from the mother causes fear of abandonment on the one hand and anger towards this “renegade” primary object on the other. Both the fear of abandonment and the anger signal to the infant's psychological apparatus a threat of destruction and loss of the caring and protective caregiver that appears real to him and must be endured and processed. At this early stage of development, however , the child's psyche does not yet have access to the more mature coping variant of repression , which only develops as the cognitive and emotional psychological structure matures. Instead, the immature ego employs more primitive defense mechanisms to cope with such threatening emotional states. The fear of abandonment is countered with an intense desire to merge, whereby the mother is perceived as an “exclusively good” object. On the other hand, the anger towards the mother, who reveals herself to be an independent individual, is projected onto the mother . This represents a compromise in that it is the less threatening alternative that the mother is angry with the infant than that the infant remains driven by anger, since the latter is still the process of separating oneself from the mother's primary object, which is already perceived as threatening would speed up. The result of this projection of one's own anger on the mother is an idea of her as an “exclusively evil” object. This leads to archaic fears of persecution.
The primitive feelings of the desire to merge and the fear of persecution that arose in this way represent the components of the so-called individuation conflict of early childhood development . The infant's inner world has thus experienced a division into “good” and “bad”. Melanie Klein speaks of a “divided world”. This stage of development is susceptible to harmful influences, especially since the infant's feeling of an independent self, which is still fragile in this phase, is dependent on its perception of its primary caregiver; the infant does not yet have any ideas about objects that are independent of its perception ( object permanence ).
Both phenomena , the division of the world and the lack of object permanence, can only be dealt with through reliable and constant attention from the primary caregiver. The handling of the infant should be empathetic and patient. In particular, the child's changing ego states can trigger feelings of hurt or fear of abandonment in the mother. Your job, then, is not these feelings live out , but to integrate them and to provide the child in such a processed form of identification is available. In this way, the child learns that his own negative affects (fear, anger) do not have a real threatening quality, but at most generate tolerable ambivalence. At the end of this constantly recurring process of projective identification of the competing feelings arising from the individuation conflict, in the ideal case there is the ability to accept that objects combine both positive and negative parts, as well as the certainty that the objects do not have an individuality independent of their own self Poses a threat to one's relationship with them and to one's very existence .
If this processing of the individuation conflict fails, for example due to the mother's unpredictable, negative, unempathetic, offensive or impatient behavior, the fear of abandonment and persecution of the early childhood cannot be overcome. The recognition of the contradictions and ambivalence of the self and the objects thus remains permanently fragile and is lost again under specific stresses due to the division into “good” and “bad”. The caregivers are then only perceived in adolescence and adulthood with regard to “good” and “bad” functions for the self and the self-image is subject to constant fluctuations between overwhelming greatness and complete worthlessness. In the absence of important caregivers, it is sometimes difficult to maintain a sense of self (object dependency), which manifests itself in feelings of inner emptiness and even fear of annihilation. These feelings can already arise with a merely fantasized loss of a protective object.
literature
- Heinz Müller-Pozzi: Psychoanalytic Thinking. An introduction. 3rd expanded edition, reprint. Hans Huber, Bern et al. 2004, ISBN 3-456-83877-8 .
- Michael Ermann : Psychotherapeutic and psychosomatic medicine. A guide on a psychodynamic basis. 2nd, revised and expanded edition. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart et al. 1997, ISBN 3-17-014506-1 .
- Otto F. Kernberg : Severe personality disorders. Theory, diagnosis, treatment strategies. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-608-95417-1 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Michael Ermann: Psychotherapeutic and psychosomatic medicine. 2nd Edition. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, 1997, p. 69.
