ABSTRACT
According to his biographer Ernest Jones (1957), Sigmund Freud began writing the article "Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence" during Christmas 1937, but he left it unfinished and unpublished. It was only published in 1940, just over a year after his death. The German term Spaltung, in the sense of a division of the mind, had already been used in psychiatry since the end of the nineteenth century, as pointed out by Laplanche and Pontalis. In the work of Freud, Strachey includes the phenomenon of splitting in the broader theme of what the creator of psychoanalysis called "ego alteration", always generated by the defensive processes. The issue of ego splitting in neuroses is not discussed very extensively in this writing. Freud had already supplied an illustration in 1927, with the case of the young man who, due to the disavowal of his father's death during his childhood, showed a splitting responsible for his obsessive neurosis.
