Who’s Splitting Who? Cultural change and the clinical management of aggression

Clinicians of a certain age may feel, at times, like the cultural conditions that grounded our concepts of treatment have shifted under our feet. One such concept is the treatment of splitting: there is a traditional clinical dogma that split-off aggression is an indicator and a cause of personality pathology, and, therefore, aggression needs to be addressed, and survived, in a two-person relationship in order for psychic growth to occur. But contemporary life does not support this activity. In many contemporary settings and institutions, an older clinician might see split-off aggression being allowed or encouraged as people, especially younger people, have come to expect that they are entitled to feel “safe.” The current paper attempts to operate from a position of neutrality: maybe our young people are being encouraged in unhealthy splitting…or maybe our theories of personality pathology are outmoded. Or neither. Or both.

David Anderegg PhD did his pre-doctoral training at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital and post-doctoral training at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, MA. He has held faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School, Tufts University, and Smith College School of Social Work, and recently retired after 22 years of teaching psychology at Bennington College. He maintains a private practice of psychodynamic psychotherapy of children and adults in Lenox, MA., and teaches and supervises in the psychiatry residency program at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, MA. He has served for many years on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Psychology and has published on the topics of play and creativity in psychotherapy. He is also the author of two popular-press books on developmental psychology topics, Worried All the Time and Nerds, and has published on the op-ed pages of major metropolitan dailies including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times.

Russell Merritt (Moderator)

Russell Merritt, LCSW, Faculty & Senior Supervisor,

Postgraduate Psychoanalytic Society and Institute

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