Tag: Splitting

What is Cognitive Distortion?

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Introduction

A cognitive distortion is an exaggerated or irrational thought pattern involved in the onset or perpetuation of psychopathological states, such as depression and anxiety.

Cognitive distortions are thoughts that cause individuals to perceive reality inaccurately. According to Aaron Beck’s cognitive model, a negative outlook on reality, sometimes called negative schemas (or schemata), is a factor in symptoms of emotional dysfunction and poorer subjective well-being. Specifically, negative thinking patterns reinforce negative emotions and thoughts. During difficult circumstances, these distorted thoughts can contribute to an overall negative outlook on the world and a depressive or anxious mental state. According to hopelessness theory and Beck’s theory, the meaning or interpretation that people give to their experience importantly influences whether they will become depressed and whether they will suffer severe, repeated, or long-duration episodes of depression.

Challenging and changing cognitive distortions is a key element of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).

Brief History

In 1957, American psychologist Albert Ellis, though he did not know it yet, would aid cognitive therapy in correcting cognitive distortions and indirectly helping David D. Burns in writing The Feeling Good Handbook. Ellis created what he called the ABC Technique of rational beliefs. The ABC stands for the activating event, beliefs that are irrational, and the consequences that come from the belief. Ellis wanted to prove that the activating event is not what caused the emotional behaviour or the consequences, but the beliefs and how the person irrationally perceive the events that aids the consequences. With this model, Ellis attempted to use rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT) with his patients, in order to help them “reframe” or reinterpret the experience in a more rational manner. In this model Ellis explains it all for his clients, while Beck helps his clients figure this out on their own. Beck first started to notice these automatic distorted thought processes when practicing psychoanalysis, while his patients followed the rule of saying anything that comes to mind. Aaron realized that his patients had irrational fears, thoughts, and perceptions that were automatic. Beck began noticing his automatic thought processes that he knew his patients had but did not report. Most of the time the thoughts were biased against themselves and very erroneous.

Beck believed that the negative schemas developed and manifested themselves in the perspective and behaviour. The distorted thought processes lead to focusing on degrading the self, amplifying minor external setbacks, experiencing other’s harmless comments as ill-intended, while simultaneously seeing self as inferior. Inevitably cognitions are reflected in their behaviour with a reduced desire to care for oneself, to seek pleasure, and give up. These exaggerated perceptions, due to cognition, feel real and accurate because the schemas, after being reinforced through the behaviour, tend to become automatic and do not allow time for reflection. This cycle is also known as Beck’s cognitive triad, focused on the theory that the person’s negative schema applied to the self, the future, and the environment.

In 1972, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and cognitive therapy scholar Aaron T. Beck published Depression: Causes and Treatment. He was dissatisfied with the conventional Freudian treatment of depression, because there was no empirical evidence for the success of Freudian psychoanalysis. Beck’s book provided a comprehensive and empirically-supported theoretical model for depression – its potential causes, symptoms, and treatments. In Chapter 2, titled “Symptomatology of Depression”, he described “cognitive manifestations” of depression, including low self-evaluation, negative expectations, self-blame and self-criticism, indecisiveness, and distortion of the body image.

Beck’s student David D. Burns continued research on the topic. In his book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, Burns described personal and professional anecdotes related to cognitive distortions and their elimination. When Burns published Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, it made Beck’s approach to distorted thinking widely known and popularised. Burns sold over four million copies of the book in the United States alone. It was a book commonly “prescribed” for patients who have cognitive distortions that have led to depression. Beck approved of the book, saying that it would help others alter their depressed moods by simplifying the extensive study and research that had taken place since shortly after Beck had started as a student and practitioner of psychoanalytic psychiatry. Nine years later, The Feeling Good Handbook was published, which was also built on Beck’s work and includes a list of ten specific cognitive distortions that will be discussed throughout this article.

Definition

Cognitive comes from the Medieval Latin cognitīvus, equivalent to Latin cognit(us), ‘known’. Distortion means the act of twisting or altering something out of its true, natural, or original state.

Main Types

John C. Gibbs and Granville Bud Potter propose four categories for cognitive distortions:

  • Self-centred;
  • Blaming others;
  • Minimising-mislabelling; and
  • Assuming the worst.

The cognitive distortions listed below are categories of automatic thinking, and are to be distinguished from logical fallacies.

All-or-Nothing Thinking

Refer to Splitting (Psychology).

The “all-or-nothing thinking distortion” is also referred to as “splitting,” “black-and-white thinking,” and “polarised thinking.” Someone with the all-or-nothing thinking distortion looks at life in black and white categories. Either they are a success or a failure; either they are good or bad; there is no in-between. According to one article, “Because there is always someone who is willing to criticise, this tends to collapse into a tendency for polarized people to view themselves as a total failure. Polarized thinkers have difficulty with the notion of being ‘good enough’ or a partial success.”

  • Example (from The Feeling Good Handbook): A woman eats a spoonful of ice cream. She thinks she is a complete failure for breaking her diet. She becomes so depressed that she ends up eating the whole quart of ice cream.

This example captures the polarised nature of this distortion – the person believes they are totally inadequate if they fall short of perfection. In order to combat this distortion, Burns suggests thinking of the world in terms of shades of gray. Rather than viewing herself as a complete failure for eating a spoonful of ice cream, the woman in the example could still recognise her overall effort to diet as at least a partial success.

This distortion is commonly found in perfectionists.

Jumping to conclusions

Reaching preliminary conclusions (usually negative) with little (if any) evidence. Two specific subtypes are identified:

  • Mind reading:
    • Inferring a person’s possible or probable (usually negative) thoughts from their behaviour and nonverbal communication; taking precautions against the worst suspected case without asking the person.
      • Example 1: A student assumes that the readers of their paper have already made up their minds concerning its topic, and, therefore, writing the paper is a pointless exercise.
      • Example 2: Kevin assumes that because he sits alone at lunch, everyone else must think he is a loser. (This can encourage self-fulfilling prophecy; Kevin may not initiate social contact because of his fear that those around him already perceive him negatively).
  • Fortune-telling:
    • Predicting outcomes (usually negative) of events.
      • Example: A depressed person tells themselves they will never improve; they will continue to be depressed for their whole life.
    • One way to combat this distortion is to ask, “If this is true, does it say more about me or them?”

Emotional Reasoning

In the emotional reasoning distortion, it is assumed that feelings expose the true nature of things and experience reality as a reflection of emotionally linked thoughts; something is believed true solely based on a feeling.

  • Examples: “I feel stupid, therefore I must be stupid”. Feeling fear of flying in planes, and then concluding that planes must be a dangerous way to travel. Feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of cleaning one’s house, therefore concluding that it is hopeless to even start cleaning.

Should/Should Not and Must/Must Not Statements

Making “must” or “should” statements was included by Albert Ellis in his rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT), an early form of CBT; he termed it “musturbation”. Michael C. Graham called it “expecting the world to be different than it is”. It can be seen as demanding particular achievements or behaviours regardless of the realistic circumstances of the situation.

  • Example: After a performance, a concert pianist believes he or she should not have made so many mistakes.
  • In Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, David Burns clearly distinguished between pathological “should statements”, moral imperatives, and social norms.

A related cognitive distortion, also present in Ellis’ REBT, is a tendency to “awfulise”; to say a future scenario will be awful, rather than to realistically appraise the various negative and positive characteristics of that scenario. According to Burns, “must” and “should” statements are negative because they cause the person to feel guilty and upset at themselves. Some people also direct this distortion at other people, which can cause feelings of anger and frustration when that other person does not do what they should have done. He also mentions how this type of thinking can lead to rebellious thoughts. In other words, trying to whip oneself into doing something with “shoulds” may cause one to desire just the opposite.

Gratitude Traps

A gratitude trap is a type of cognitive distortion that typically arises from misunderstandings regarding the nature or practice of gratitude. The term can refer to one of two related but distinct thought patterns:

  • A self-oriented thought process involving feelings of guilt, shame, or frustration related to one’s expectations of how things “should” be.
  • An “elusive ugliness in many relationships, a deceptive ‘kindness,’ the main purpose of which is to make others feel indebted,” as defined by psychologist Ellen Kenner.

Blaming Others

Personalisation and Blaming

Personalisation is assigning personal blame disproportionate to the level of control a person realistically has in a given situation.

  • Example 1: A foster child assumes that he/she has not been adopted because he/she is not “loveable enough.”
  • Example 2: A child has bad grades. His/her mother believes it is because she is not a good enough parent.

Blaming is the opposite of personalisation. In the blaming distortion, the disproportionate level of blame is placed upon other people, rather than oneself. In this way, the person avoids taking personal responsibility, making way for a “victim mentality.”

  • Example: Placing blame for marital problems entirely on one’s spouse.

Always Being Right

In this cognitive distortion, being wrong is unthinkable. This distortion is characterised by actively trying to prove one’s actions or thoughts to be correct, and sometimes prioritising self-interest over the feelings of another person. In this cognitive distortion, the facts that oneself has about their surroundings are always right while other people’s opinions and perspectives are wrongly seen.

Fallacy of Change

Relying on social control to obtain cooperative actions from another person. The underlying assumption of this thinking style is that one’s happiness depends on the actions of others. The fallacy of change also assumes that other people should change to suit one’s own interests automatically and/or that it is fair to pressure them to change. It may be present in most abusive relationships in which partners’ “visions” of each other are tied into the belief that happiness, love, trust, and perfection would just occur once they or the other person change aspects of their beings.

Minimising-Mislabelling

Magnification and Minimisation

Giving proportionally greater weight to a perceived failure, weakness or threat, or lesser weight to a perceived success, strength or opportunity, so that the weight differs from that assigned by others, such as “making a mountain out of a molehill”. In depressed clients, often the positive characteristics of other people are exaggerated and their negative characteristics are understated.

  • Catastrophising – Giving greater weight to the worst possible outcome, however unlikely, or experiencing a situation as unbearable or impossible when it is just uncomfortable.

Labelling and Mislabelling

A form of overgeneralisation; attributing a person’s actions to their character instead of to an attribute. Rather than assuming the behaviour to be accidental or otherwise extrinsic, one assigns a label to someone or something that is based on the inferred character of that person or thing.

Assuming the Worst

Overgeneralising

Someone who overgeneralises makes faulty generalisations from insufficient evidence. Such as seeing a “single negative event” as a “never-ending pattern of defeat,” and as such drawing a very broad conclusion from a single incident or a single piece of evidence. Even if something bad happens only once, it is expected to happen over and over again.

  • Example 1: A young woman is asked out on a first date, but not a second one. She is distraught as she tells her friend, “This always happens to me! I’ll never find love!”
  • Example 2: A woman is lonely and often spends most of her time at home. Her friends sometimes ask her to dinner and to meet new people. She feels it is useless to even try. No one really could like her. And anyway, all people are the same; petty and selfish.

One suggestion to combat this distortion is to “examine the evidence” by performing an accurate analysis of one’s situation. This aids in avoiding exaggerating one’s circumstances.

Disqualifying the Positive

Disqualifying the positive refers to rejecting positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. Negative belief is maintained despite contradiction by everyday experiences. Disqualifying the positive may be the most common fallacy in the cognitive distortion range; it is often analysed with “always being right”, a type of distortion where a person is in an all-or-nothing self-judgment. People in this situation show signs of depression. Examples include:

  • “I will never be as good as Jane”.
  • “Anyone could have done as well”.
  • “They are just congratulating me to be nice”.

Mental Filtering

Filtering distortions occur when an individual dwells only on the negative details of a situation and filters out the positive aspects.

  • Example: Andy gets mostly compliments and positive feedback about a presentation he has done at work, but he also has received a small piece of criticism. For several days following his presentation, Andy dwells on this one negative reaction, forgetting all of the positive reactions that he had also been given.

The Feeling Good Handbook notes that filtering is like a “drop of ink that discolours a beaker of water.” One suggestion to combat filtering is a cost–benefit analysis. A person with this distortion may find it helpful to sit down and assess whether filtering out the positive and focusing on the negative is helping or hurting them in the long run.

Conceptualisation

In a series of publications, philosopher Paul Franceschi has proposed a unified conceptual framework for cognitive distortions designed to clarify their relationships and define new ones. This conceptual framework is based on three notions:

  1. The reference class (a set of phenomena or objects, e.g. events in the patient’s life);
  2. Dualities (positive/negative, qualitative/quantitative, …); and
  3. The taxon system (degrees allowing to attribute properties according to a given duality to the elements of a reference class).

In this model, “dichotomous reasoning”, “minimisation”, “maximisation” and “arbitrary focus” constitute general cognitive distortions (applying to any duality), whereas “disqualification of the positive” and “catastrophism” are specific cognitive distortions, applying to the positive/negative duality. This conceptual framework posits two additional cognitive distortion classifications: the “omission of the neutral” and the “requalification in the other pole”.

Cognitive Restructuring

Cognitive restructuring (CR) is a popular form of therapy used to identify and reject maladaptive cognitive distortions, and is typically used with individuals diagnosed with depression. In CR, the therapist and client first examine a stressful event or situation reported by the client. For example, a depressed male college student who experiences difficulty in dating might believe that his “worthlessness” causes women to reject him. Together, therapist and client might then create a more realistic cognition, e.g. “It is within my control to ask girls on dates. However, even though there are some things I can do to influence their decisions, whether or not they say yes is largely out of my control. Thus, I am not responsible if they decline my invitation.” CR therapies are designed to eliminate “automatic thoughts” that include clients’ dysfunctional or negative views. According to Beck, doing so reduces feelings of worthlessness, anxiety, and anhedonia that are symptomatic of several forms of mental illness. CR is the main component of Beck’s and Burns’s CBT.

Narcissistic Defence

Refer to Narcissistic Defences.

Those diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder tend, unrealistically, to view themselves as superior, overemphasizing their strengths and understating their weaknesses. Narcissists use exaggeration and minimisation this way to shield themselves against psychological pain.

Decatastrophising

In cognitive therapy, decatastrophising or decatastrophisation is a cognitive restructuring technique that may be used to treat cognitive distortions, such as magnification and catastrophising, commonly seen in psychological disorders like anxiety and psychosis. Major features of these disorders are the subjective report of being overwhelmed by life circumstances and the incapability of affecting them.

The goal of CR is to help the client change their perceptions to render the felt experience as less significant.

Criticism

Common criticisms of the diagnosis of cognitive distortion relate to epistemology and the theoretical basis. If the perceptions of the patient differ from those of the therapist, it may not be because of intellectual malfunctions but because the patient has different experiences. In some cases, depressed subjects appear to be “sadder but wiser”.

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What is Paranoid Anxiety?

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Introduction

Paranoid anxiety is a term used in object relations theory, particularity in discussions about the Paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions.

The term was frequently used by Melanie Klein, especially to refer to a pre-depressive and persecutory sense of anxiety characterised by the psychological splitting of objects.

Further Developments

Donald Meltzer saw paranoid anxiety as linked not only to a loss of trust in the goodness of objects, but also to a confusion between feeling and thought.

For the extreme forms of such anxiety, he coined the term ‘terror’, to convey something of the qualitatively different intensity of their nature.

External Sources

Sigmund Freud considered that there was generally a small kernel of truth hidden in the exaggerated anxiety of the paranoid – what Hanns Sachs described as an amoeba about to become monster.

The anti-psychiatrist David Cooper argued indeed that “The therapist in working with people might far more often have to confirm the reality of paranoid fears than in any sense disconfirm or attempt to modify them”, but most family therapists would probably agree that this is an extreme and one-sided position.

Defensive Functions

Idealisation (as in the transference) can be used as a defence against deeper paranoid anxieties about the actual presence of a destructive, denigrating object.

Conversely, paranoid fears, especially when systematised, may themselves serve as a defence against a deeper, chaotic disintegration of the personality.

Persecutory Anxiety State (Panic Attack) and Persecutory Delusion

Paranoid anxiety may reach the level of a persecutory anxiety state (a form of panic attack), including various levels of persecutory delusions (the preferred term to paranoid delusions).

Heavy drinking is said to sometimes precipitate acute paranoid panic – the protagonist’s unconscious hostile impulses being projected onto all those around.

Literary Examples

Hamm in Endgame by Samuel Beckett has been singled out as a character driven by paranoid anxiety.

Noboru in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima is shown to have persecutory anxiety.

What is Splitting (Psychology)?

Published on by Andrew Marshall7 Comments

Introduction

Splitting (also called black-and-white thinking or all-or-nothing thinking) is the failure in a person’s thinking to bring together the dichotomy of both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole.

It is a common defence mechanism. The individual tends to think in extremes (i.e. an individual’s actions and motivations are all good or all bad with no middle ground).

Splitting was first described by Ronald Fairbairn in his formulation of object relations theory; it begins as the inability of the infant to combine the fulfilling aspects of the parents (the good object) and their unresponsive aspects (the unsatisfying object) into the same individuals, instead seeing the good and bad as separate. In psychoanalytic theory this functions as a defence mechanism.

Refer to Emotional Conflict and Psychological Projection.

Relationships

Splitting creates instability in relationships because one person can be viewed as either personified virtue or personified vice at different times, depending on whether they gratify the subject’s needs or frustrate them. This, along with similar oscillations in the experience and appraisal of the self, leads to chaotic and unstable relationship patterns, identity diffusion, and mood swings. The therapeutic process can be greatly impeded by these oscillations, because the therapist too can come to be seen as all good or all bad. To attempt to overcome the negative effects on treatment outcome, constant interpretations by the therapist are needed.

Splitting contributes to unstable relationships and intense emotional experiences. Splitting is common during adolescence, but is regarded as transient. Splitting has been noted especially with persons diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Treatment strategies have been developed for individuals and groups based on dialectical behaviour therapy, and for couples. There are also self-help books on related topics such as mindfulness and emotional regulation that claim to be helpful for individuals who struggle with the consequences of splitting.

Borderline Personality Disorder

Refer to Borderline Personality Disorder.

Splitting is a relatively common defence mechanism for people with borderline personality disorder. One of the DSM IV-TR criteria for this disorder is a description of splitting: “a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation”. In psychoanalytic theory, people with borderline personality disorder are not able to integrate the good and bad images of both self and others, resulting in a bad representation which dominates the good representation.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Refer to Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

People matching the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder also use splitting as a central defence mechanism. Most often narcissists do this as an attempt to stabilise their sense of self-positivity in order to preserve their self-esteem, by perceiving themselves as purely upright or admirable and others who do not conform to their will or values as purely wicked or contemptible.

The cognitive habit of splitting also implies the use of other related defence mechanisms, namely idealisation and devaluation, which are preventive attitudes or reactions to narcissistic rage and narcissistic injury.

Depression

In depression, exaggerated all-or-nothing thinking can form a self-reinforcing cycle: these thoughts might be called emotional amplifiers because, as they go around and around, they become more intense. Typical all-or-nothing thoughts:

  • My efforts are either a success or they are an abject failure.
  • Other people are either all good or all bad.
  • I am either all good or all bad.
  • If you’re not with us, you’re against us.

Janet, Bleuler and Freud

Refer to Pierre Janet, Eugen Bleuler, and Sigmund Freud.

Splitting of consciousness (“normal self” vs. “secondary self”) was first described by Pierre Janet in De l’automatisme psychologique (1889). His ideas were extended by Bleuler (who in 1908 coined the word schizofrenia from the Ancient Greek skhízō [σχῐ́ζω, “to split”] and phrḗn [φρήν, “mind”]) and Freud to explain the splitting (German: Spaltung) of consciousness – not (with Janet) as the product of innate weakness, but as the result of inner conflict. With the development of the idea of repression, splitting moved to the background of Freud’s thought for some years, being largely reserved for cases of double personality. However, his late work saw a renewed interest in how it was “possible for the ego to avoid a rupture… by effecting a cleavage or division of itself”, a theme which was extended in his Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940a [1938]) beyond fetishism to the neurotic in general.

His daughter Anna Freud explored how, in healthy childhood development, a splitting of loving and aggressive instincts could be avoided.

Melanie Klein

Refer to Melanie Klein.

There was, however, from early on, another use of the term “splitting” in Freud, referring rather to resolving ambivalence “by splitting the contradictory feelings so that one person is only loved, another one only hated … the good mother and the wicked stepmother in fairy tales”. Or, with opposing feelings of love and hate, perhaps “the two opposites should have been split apart and one of them, usually the hatred, has been repressed”. Such splitting was closely linked to the defence of “isolation … The division of objects into congenial and uncongenial ones … making ‘disconnections’.”

It was the latter sense of the term that was predominantly adopted and exploited by Melanie Klein. After Freud, “the most important contribution has come from Melanie Klein, whose work enlightens the idea of ‘splitting of the object’ (Objektspaltung) (in terms of ‘good/bad’ objects)”. In her object relations theory, Klein argues that “the earliest experiences of the infant are split between wholly good ones with ‘good’ objects and wholly bad experiences with ‘bad’ objects”, as children struggle to integrate the two primary drives, love and hate, into constructive social interaction. An important step in childhood development is the gradual depolarization of these two drives.

At what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position, there is a stark separation of the things the child loves (good, gratifying objects) and the things the child hates (bad, frustrating objects), “because everything is polarised into extremes of love and hate, just like what the baby seems to experience and young children are still very close to.” Klein refers to the good breast and the bad breast as split mental entities, resulting from the way “these primitive states tend to deconstruct objects into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bits (called ‘part-objects’)”. The child sees the breasts as opposite in nature at different times, although they actually are the same, belonging to the same mother. As the child learns that people and objects can be good and bad at the same time, he or she progresses to the next phase, the depressive position, which “entails a steady, though painful, approximation towards the reality of oneself and others”: integrating the splits and “being able to balance [them] out … are tasks that continue into early childhood and indeed are never completely finished.”

However, Kleinians also utilize Freud’s first conception of splitting, to explain the way “In a related process of splitting, the person divides his own self. This is called ‘splitting of the ego’.” Indeed, Klein herself maintained that “the ego is incapable of splitting the object—internal or external—without a corresponding splitting taking place within the ego”. Arguably at least, by this point “the idea of splitting does not carry the same meaning for Freud and for Klein”: for the former, “the ego finds itself ‘passively’ split, as it were. For Klein and the post-Kleinians, on the other hand, splitting is an ‘active’ defence mechanism”. As a result, by the close of the century “four kinds of splitting can be clearly identified, among many other possibilities” for post-Kleinians: “a coherent split in the object, a coherent split in the ego, a fragmentation of the object, and a fragmentation of the ego.”

Otto Kernberg

Refer to Otto Kernberg.

In the developmental model of Otto Kernberg, the overcoming of splitting is also an important developmental task. The child has to learn to integrate feelings of love and hate. Kernberg distinguishes three different stages in the development of a child with respect to splitting:

  • The child does not experience the self and the object, nor the good and the bad as different entities.
  • Good and bad are viewed as different. Because the boundaries between the self and the other are not stable yet, the other as a person is viewed as either all good or all bad, depending on their actions. This also means that thinking about another person as bad implies that the self is bad as well, so it’s better to think about the caregiver as a good person, so the self is viewed as good too. “Bringing together extremely opposite loving and hateful images of the self and of significant others would trigger unbearable anxiety and guilt.”
  • Splitting – “the division of external objects into ‘all good’ or ‘all bad'” – begins to be resolved when the self and the other can be seen as possessing both good and bad qualities. Having hateful thoughts about the other does not mean that the self is all hateful and does not mean that the other person is all hateful either.

If a person fails to accomplish this developmental task satisfactorily, borderline pathology can emerge. “In the borderline personality organization”, Kernberg found ‘dissociated ego states that result from the use of “splitting” defences’. His therapeutic work then aimed at “the analysis of the repeated and oscillating projections of unwanted self and object representations onto the therapist” so as to produce “something more durable, complex and encompassing than the initial, split-off and polarized state of affairs”.

Horizontal and Vertical

Heinz Kohut has emphasized in his self psychology the distinction between horizontal and vertical forms of splitting. Traditional psychoanalysis saw repression as forming a horizontal barrier between different levels of the mind – so that for example an unpleasant truth might be accepted superficially but denied in a deeper part of the psyche. Kohut contrasted with this vertical fractures of the mind into two parts with incompatible attitudes separated by mutual disavowal.

Transference

Refer to Transference.

It has been suggested that interpretation of the transference “becomes effective through a sort of splitting of the ego into a reasonable, judging portion and an experiencing portion, the former recognizing the latter as not appropriate in the present and as coming from the past”. Clearly, “in this sense, splitting, so far from being a pathological phenomenon, is a manifestation of self-awareness”. Nevertheless, “it remains to be investigated how this desirable ‘splitting of the ego’ and ‘self-observation’ are to be differentiated from the pathological cleavage … directed at preserving isolations”.

What is Emotional Conflict?

Published on by Andrew Marshall3 Comments

Introduction

Emotional conflict is the presence of different and opposing emotions relating to a situation that has recently taken place or is in the process of being unfolded.

They may be accompanied at times by a physical discomfort, especially when a functional disturbance has become associated with an emotional conflict in childhood, and in particular by tension headaches “expressing a state of inner tension…[or] caused by an unconscious conflict”.

For C.G. Jung, “emotional conflicts and the intervention of the unconscious are the classical features of…medical psychology”. Equally, “Freud’s concept of emotional conflict as amplified by Anna Freud…Erikson and others is central in contemporary theories of mental disorder in children, particularly with respect to the development of psychoneurosis”.

In Childhood Development

“The early stages of emotional development are full of potential conflict and disruption”. Infancy and childhood are a time when “everything is polarised into extremes of love and hate” and when “totally opposite, extreme feelings about them must be getting put together too. Which must be pretty confusing and painful. It’s very difficult to discover you hate someone you love”. Development involves integrating such primitive emotional conflicts, so that “in the process of integration, impulses to attack and destroy, and impulses to give and share are related, the one lessening the effect of the other”, until the point is reached at which “the child may have made a satisfactory fusion of the idea of destroying the object with the fact of loving the same object”.

Once such primitive relations to the mother or motherer have been at least partially resolved, “in the age period two to five or seven, each normal infant is experiencing the most intense conflicts” relating to wider relationships: “ideas of love are followed by ideas of hate, by jealousy and painful emotional conflict and by personal suffering; and where conflict is too great there follows loss of full capacity, inhibitions…symptom formation”.

Defences

Defences against emotional conflict include “splitting and projection. They deal with intrapsychic conflict not by addressing it, but by sidestepping it”. Displacement too can help resolve such conflicts: “If an individual no longer feels threatened by his father but by a horse, he can avoid hating his father; here the distortion way a way out of the conflict of ambivalence. The father, who had been hated and loved simultaneously, is loved only, and the hatred is displaced onto the bad horse”.

Physical Symptoms

Inner emotional conflicts can result in physical discomfort or pain, often in the form of tension headaches, which can be episodic or chronic, and may last from a few minutes or hours, to days – associated pain being mild, moderate, or severe.

“The physiology of nervous headaches still presents many unsolved problems”, as in general do all such “physical alterations…rooted in unconscious instinctual conflicts”. However physical discomfort or pain without apparent cause may be the way our body is telling us of an underlying emotional turmoil and anxiety, triggered by some recent event. Thus for example a woman “may be busy in her office, apparently in good health and spirits. A moment later she develops a blinding headache and shows other signs of distress. Without consciously noticing it, she has heard the foghorn of a distant ship, and this has unconsciously reminded her of an unhappy parting”.

While it is not easy, by relaxing, calming down, and trying to become aware of what recent experience or event could have been the cause of the inner conflict, and then rationally looking at and dealing with the conflicting desires and needs, a gradual dissipation and relief of the pain may be possible.

In the Workplace

With respect to the post-industrial age, “LaBier writes of ‘modern madness’, the hidden link between work and emotional conflict…feelings of self-betrayal, stress and burnout”. His “idea, which gains momentum in the post-yuppie late eighties…concludes that real professional success without regret of emotional conflict requires insanity of one kind or another”.

Cultural Examples

  • Advice on fiction writing emphasises the “necessity of creating powerful, emotional conflicts” in one’s characters: “characters create the emotional conflict and the action emerges from the characters”.
  • Shakespeare’s sonnets have been described as “implying an awareness of the possible range of human feelings, of the existence of complex and even contradictory attitudes to a single emotion”.
  • For Picasso “the presence of death is always coincident with the taste for life…the superb violence of these emotional transports have led some people to call his work expressionist”.