A Black-and-White World: What is Ego Splitting and Why We Divide People into "Angels" and "Demons"

Are you familiar with the situation where a new person in your life initially seems like an absolute ideal, but after a single mistake instantly turns into your worst enemy? Or when there is a clear feeling in a team that "our department consists of bright minds, while the management is pure evil"?

In psychology, this powerful perceptual mechanism is called splitting. It is an interpersonal process and a form of psychological defense that compels us to see the world in radical black-and-white terms, without any halftones or nuances.

The origins of splitting are believed to lie in the preverbal period of our development. Imagine an infant: their psyche is not yet capable of grasping the fact that their caregivers can possess both good and bad qualities simultaneously.

Until a child develops object constancy (the understanding that an object remains the same regardless of current emotions), they are unable to experience ambivalence—that is, complex, contradictory feelings toward a single person.

A Childhood Example: To a two-year-old child, a mother giving them candy is the "absolutely good mother." But that same mother, who an hour later forbids them from jumping in a puddle, becomes the "absolutely bad mother" in a moment of frustration. The child cannot yet integrate these two images into one real, living person. They assign a 100% positive or 100% negative valence to everything around them just to structure their experience and understand the world by dividing it into Big/Small and Good/Bad.

In adulthood, splitting remains a highly attractive tool for making sense of complex or threatening experiences. When a situation is ambiguous, the brain tries to reduce anxiety and protect self-esteem by putting everything into distinct, separate baskets.

Political scientists and sociologists know perfectly well how splitting works on a societal scale. Any group going through a crisis is strongly drawn to the idea of finding a specific villain against whom the "good us" must unite.

Mythology and mass culture actively exploit this mechanism. We love stories about the clash between absolute Good and Evil: God and the devil, a knight and a dragon, a lone seeker of justice and a corrupt system. The classic post-war study "The Authoritarian Personality" (Adorno et al., 1950) demonstrated how mental inflexibility and the search for an external enemy affect society, noting that such tendencies are inherent in both right-wing and left-wing political movements.

The greatest danger of splitting is that it always entails a distortion of reality. This is most evident in psychotherapeutic practice, particularly in work with patients diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).

When a patient resorts to splitting, they adopt a rigid, non-ambivalent position and perceive opposite qualities as something completely unrelated.

An Example from the Therapist's Office: A woman with borderline personality organization might genuinely consider her therapist to be the "only saint on earth" who understands her, while simultaneously fiercely hating the clinic's administrators, calling them "hostile, indifferent bureaucrats." However, the following week, the therapist might say something that causes discomfort. An instant switch occurs: the therapist now becomes the embodiment of evil and incompetence. If the patient is confronted with this inconsistency, she will genuinely fail to see the problem in her "savior" turning into an "executioner" in a split second.

This mechanism is so strong that patients are capable (via projective identification) of creating splitting not only within themselves but also among the people around them.

An Example from a Psychiatric Ward: It is a well-known phenomenon that a single borderline patient can split a medical team in half. One half of the doctors and nurses begins to feel intense sympathy for the patient, wanting to rescue them and make exceptions to the rules. The other half begins to feel intense antipathy and irritation, insisting on strict boundaries. Staff members begin to argue with one another, defending their "black" or "white" positions.

This is exactly why splitting as a psychological defense rarely garners enthusiasm from professionals—people who use it as their habitual way of organizing experience quickly exhaust the patience and resources of those trying to help them.

Splitting is a natural stage of psychological development that can be triggered in any of us during moments of severe stress. However, the hallmark of psychological maturity and emotional literacy is the capacity to tolerate ambivalence. Understanding that the world is not divided into black and white, and that a loved one can make you angry while still remaining loved and valued, is a step toward a real, albeit more complex, but infinitely richer and more interesting life.

Insight from MriyaRun: Black-and-white thinking is our psyche's attempt to hide from complex feelings. But true emotional literacy begins with the ability to tolerate ambivalence. Allow another person to be imperfect, and allow yourself the right to feel angry at someone you genuinely love. Wholeness is born not in idealization, but in embracing every shade of our emotions.