By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

This essay is Part 2 of How Narcissism Works, a five-part series by Jill Szoo Wilson.

Splitting allows a person with a narcissistic personality organization to keep idealized and devalued versions of a partner separate in the mind. Daniel and Lena show us what happens when one version takes the place of the other.

At two in the morning, Lena stood in her kitchen with a duffel bag open on the counter and one thought filling the room: he is dangerous, and I have to go. An hour earlier, Daniel had blocked the doorway when she tried to end an argument. He eventually stepped aside, though she could still hear the certainty in his voice when he told her she was staying.

While she packed, Lena thought about the night Daniel drove through a snowstorm because she had mentioned missing a particular soup from a restaurant near her old apartment. She remembered a voicemail from the week they met, when he laughed so hard at his own joke that he had to start the message again. The memories arrived at an inconvenient time, as tender memories often do.

Lena still saw Daniel as a whole person. She could hold his kindness in mind while recognizing that his behavior had become frightening. The blocked doorway gave her a reason to leave, and the soup remained a loving gesture from an earlier time. She understood that both belonged to the same man.

Psychologists call that ability integration. A person with an integrated view can feel angry with someone she loves and can revise her opinion as new experiences accumulate. Splitting keeps the idealized version separate from the one organized around anger and disappointment.

You may recognize Daniel and Lena from the earlier essay in this series about introjects. Daniel had formed an internal version of Lena after meeting her at a dinner party, and that version gradually became more important to him than the woman herself. Splitting explains what happened when the living Lena moved outside the role he had given her.

The Two Lenas

Daniel admired Lena’s independence during the first months of their relationship. He liked the way she could spend an afternoon alone with a book and return with something interesting to say. Her private inner life made her seem thoughtful and self-contained. Earning her attention felt especially meaningful because she gave it by choice.

Then Lena asked for a quiet weekend by herself. Daniel experienced the request as rejection, and the quality he had admired became evidence against her. Independence turned into selfishness. Her need for time alone meant that she enjoyed withholding affection.

The change happened inside Daniel. Lena remained the same woman who liked people and also needed solitude, though Daniel had lost access to that whole picture. His idealized version centered on a woman who understood him completely and wanted the same closeness he wanted. Her request for a weekend alone brought forward a withholding woman who punished him and kept secrets.

Splitting keeps these two versions apart. Whichever one is active feels like the whole truth to Daniel. The other falls out of reach, and that gives him a powerful sense of certainty (American Psychological Association, 2018).

The splitting at work in Daniel is persistent. It organizes his intimate relationships and protects a fragile sense of self. Disappointment can become part of a larger history with a person. Splitting reorganizes the history so that the current version appears to have been true all along.

Where the Division Begins

Melanie Klein placed the beginnings of splitting in early infancy. In her theory, the baby experiences comfort through a good object and frustration through a bad one. Over time, the child develops the capacity to recognize both experiences as coming through the same caregiver (Klein, 1946).

Klein called the earlier mental arrangement the paranoid-schizoid position. The name sounds severe. Klein used it to describe a mind that keeps goodness and badness separated because bringing them together creates anxiety. Emotional development allows a child to form a fuller picture of the caregiver and eventually of other people (Bott Spillius et al., 2011).

The developmental history helps explain the defense. In an adult with a narcissistic personality organization, splitting remains a central way of managing important relationships. Here, narcissistic personality organization refers to a stable personality structure shaped by grandiosity and fragile self-worth (Roche et al., 2013; Weinberg & Ronningstam, 2022).

Otto Kernberg wrote extensively about this structure and the role splitting plays within it. The idealized partner helps the narcissistic person feel exceptional and emotionally secure. A request for distance can disturb that security, so the mind moves the partner into a devalued category organized around injury and anger (Kernberg, 1970; Kernberg, 2014).

Daniel gives this pattern a face. His movement between the two Lenas grows from the way his personality is organized. The argument activates a pattern that already shaped his intimate relationships. Splitting protects his view of himself by keeping admiration in one compartment and injury in another.

It also gives him somewhere to place the cruelty. Once the devalued Lena carries it inside his mind, Daniel can feel like the loving partner who has been wronged. Her badness supports his innocence.

What Splitting Does to Memory

Before the weekend request, Daniel described Lena’s independence as part of her brilliance. Afterward, he remembered the same quality as secretiveness and began treating her quiet afternoons as proof that she had always held something back from him.

The soup changed too. Daniel could now remember driving through the snow as evidence of everything he had sacrificed for an ungrateful woman. The event stayed in his memory, though its meaning shifted to support the devalued version of Lena.

This helps explain why conversation becomes so difficult during devaluation. Lena can remind Daniel of her affection and explain her need for rest, but her words enter a story that already has a conclusion. Her explanation becomes manipulation, and her tears add more evidence to the picture he already believes.

The living woman has less influence than the version inside his mind. Daniel feels that he has finally seen the truth about Lena, though his certainty comes from the internal arrangement that protects him. He may sincerely believe that she changed because the idealized version feels like the original woman he met.

Research has found splitting in several forms of personality pathology, with different patterns across diagnoses. Perry and his colleagues found the strongest association between borderline pathology and splitting images of the self and others. In their study of narcissistic pathology, devaluation appeared alongside splitting of self-images (Perry, Presniak, & Olson, 2013). Kernberg’s work helps explain how idealization and devaluation function inside narcissistic relationships.

Holding the Whole Person in View

When Lena finally told her two closest friends what had happened, one of them arrived with a car. By four o’clock, they were carrying boxes down the front steps. A week later, Lena sat with both friends over coffee and talked about Daniel’s generosity alongside the fear he had created.

Her memories had grown easier to carry because she felt safe. She could say that Daniel once made her feel deeply understood and that he later tried to control her. Remembering the earlier tenderness gave her a more accurate history of the relationship while leaving her boundary firmly in place.

Integration allows that kind of judgment. It gives every event its proper weight and leaves the living person intact, even when the relationship ends. Lena can remember the soup as kindness because the full account of Daniel’s behavior already gives her reason to leave.

Six months after that night, she still let his calls go unanswered. The soup and the blocked doorway now belonged to one history, and that history supported her decision.

Daniel continued relating to versions of Lena. The woman who understood him remained separate from the woman who betrayed him. His emotional needs determined which one he saw, and each version protected his view of himself.

By then, Lena understood that the soup and the doorway belonged in the same relationship. She carried that full history with her when she left.

Daniel and Lena are fictional, continued from an earlier piece in this series.

Previous: Introjects: The Version of You That Lives in Someone Else’s Mind

Continue to Part 3: Triangulation: When a Narcissist Brings Someone Else Into the Relationship

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Sources and Further Reading

American Psychological Association. (2018). “Splitting.” APA Dictionary of Psychology.

Bott Spillius, E., Milton, J., Garvey, P., Couve, C., & Steiner, D. (2011). The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. Routledge.

Kernberg, O. F. (1970). “Factors in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 18(1), 51–85.

Kernberg, O. F. (2014). “An Overview of the Treatment of Severe Narcissistic Pathology.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 95(5), 865–888.

Klein, M. (1946). “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.

Perry, J. C., Presniak, M. D., & Olson, T. R. (2013). “Defense Mechanisms in Schizotypal, Borderline, Antisocial, and Narcissistic Personality Disorders.” Psychiatry, 76(1), 32–52.

Roche, M. J., Pincus, A. L., Conroy, D. E., Hyde, A. L., & Ram, N. (2013). “Pathological Narcissism and Interpersonal Behavior in Daily Life.” Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, 4(4), 315–323.

Weinberg, I., & Ronningstam, E. (2022). “Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Progress in Understanding and Treatment.” Focus, 20(4), 368–377.