ABSTRACT
After Klein had formulated the concept of the depressive position, she distinguished between splitting of the object and an ambivalent attitude towards it. Dissociation differs from splitting mainly in quantitative terms. The former is associated with a major rent in the individual in which putatively separate selves emerge. Splintering and/or fragmentation characterize the psychotic state in which the capacity for mental coherence is lost and a formless mind takes its place. Freud's psychoanalytic enterprise fundamentally depends on the understanding that even under normal circumstances the self is divided into: the topographic divisions of Systems Ucs, Cs, and Pcs, and the psychic apparatus: ego, superego, and id. He also separates the analysand's experiencing and the observing aspects, a division that he also applies to the analyst. Freud also conceived of repression as a form of lateral splitting of the ego and object.
