ABSTRACT
Roussillon says, "it has to be possible to remove the concept of the splitting of the ego from the simple clinical concept of the fetish, it will thus be given a higher theoretical status". This statement is based on psychoanalytic research into borderline states, which was also intensely carried out by Green, who lays emphasis on the structural value of the psychic operation known as "splitting" or "cleavage". Actually, primitive defence mechanisms described by the English school—schizoid mechanisms—have a structuring value, but they are presented from a psychopathological perspective, as occurs in the mechanism of disavowal associated with splitting and trauma. For cognitive psychology, it would be the cognitive unconscious and the space of subsymbolic processes, and, for the neurosciences in general, the area of implicit memories with their different neural networks. The splitting may also be defensive and may imply the non-repressive dismantling of the ideo-affective structure expressed, for example, in the notion of alexithymia.
