ABSTRACT
Human thought leads to wonder about the origin and nature of things. In Freud's early writings, he and Breuer describe "splitting of consciousness", in which there was a separation of mental contents from the dominant mass of ideas. It was a precursor to the "cornerstone" concept of repression. Splitting of the ego came to be seen as an alternative defence to repression and a form of psychological damage control to possibly stave off total disintegration, "by deforming itself … and even by affecting the cleavage or division of itself. Perhaps the best way to illustrate the history of the concept of splitting of the ego and to elucidate this missing link is through a clinical report in which appreciation of the nature of the division of a patient's mind evolved and deepened over two decades of analytic therapy.
