ABSTRACT
The problem that splitting creates for psychoanalytic ethics is greater than that caused by repression. With repression, there is a conflict between the conscious and the unconscious. Usually–though not always–the positive intent, or consent, is conscious, and the resistance is unconscious. With splitting, the process of autonomous choice and consent within the transference relationship is rendered more uncertain and more confused, since it becomes a conflict between patient and analyst. Freud always counselled patients not to make major life decisions during the course of their psychoanalysis. He believed that just this kind of decision was in danger of being made as a result of a resistance to psychoanalytic exploration. The author presents an example of the "projection of an internal object" into an external one, and thus implies important shades of difference, for psychoanalysts, from projection of parts of the self.
