Why Black-and-White Thinking Develops

The experience of the good and the bad has occupied human thought for centuries. Long before psychology and psychoanalysis attempted to provide formal explanations, people understood life through experiences of pleasure and displeasure, satisfaction and frustration, safety and threat, closeness and absence. During the last two hundred years, these fundamental distinctions became increasingly important within psychological and psychoanalytic thinking because they are connected with the way human beings begin to organise experience from the earliest stages of life.

When we speak about black-and-white thinking, we are describing a tendency to experience something as entirely good or entirely bad, entirely pleasurable or entirely painful, satisfactory or unsatisfactory. In psychoanalytic language, when this division becomes pronounced, persistent and psychologically necessary, we frequently speak about splitting.

Splitting is not automatically pathological. Human beings naturally discriminate between what they like and what they dislike. We all prefer some experiences to others, feel comfortable with certain people and uncomfortable with others, and occasionally move towards strong positive or negative judgements. The important distinction is between an ordinary temporary division and a psychological organisation in which the person increasingly struggles to integrate contradictory qualities within the same experience, situation or human being.

In order to understand how this develops, it is useful to go back to the beginning of life.

Human beings do not enter the world with identical biological sensitivities. From infancy there are differences in temperament, sensitivity, tolerance of discomfort, responsiveness to stimulation and the ability to settle after frustration. Some infants tolerate hunger or waiting more easily than others. Some react strongly to heat, cold, pain, noise or physical discomfort. Some are easily soothed, while others remain agitated for much longer. These differences form part of the biological foundation upon which later psychological development takes place.

This means that even very early experiences of pleasure and displeasure will not be identical from one infant to another.

Feeding is perhaps one of the clearest examples. One infant may want the mother’s breast almost continuously and experience feeding as deeply pleasurable and soothing. Another appears to know when enough has been taken and disengages more easily. Another may experience aspects of feeding as overwhelming or uncomfortable and resist it. These responses cannot be reduced to one simple psychological explanation. Biology, sensory sensitivity, bodily state, the feeding relationship and the wider environment all interact.

Yet from these repeated sensory experiences, psychological representations begin to form.

Before language exists, the infant has bodily and pictorial experience. Warmth, nourishment, smell, touch, closeness and relief from hunger become associated with pleasurable experience. Absence, coldness, hunger, frustration or waiting become associated with displeasure. The infant does not yet conceptualise these experiences in words, but patterns are nevertheless being established.

Freud was centrally concerned with pleasure and unpleasure as organising forces in early mental life. Melanie Klein later developed a much more detailed account of how the infant may psychologically organise gratifying and frustrating experiences in relation to the mother and particularly the breast.

Klein described the infant’s early experience in terms of the good breast and the bad breast. This should not be understood literally as two different breasts or as an accusation against the mother. It refers to the infant’s psychological experience. When feeding, warmth and relief are available, the object is experienced as good. When the breast is absent, unavailable or frustrating, it may be experienced as bad.

At this early stage, the infant does not necessarily possess the capacity to integrate the two experiences and understand that the gratifying mother and the frustrating mother are the same person.

This is one of the earliest psychoanalytic formulations of splitting.

The difficulty lies in integrating the entire experience: mother can be warm, loving, caring and available, but she can also be absent, tired, temporarily unavailable, frustrated or experienced as emotionally distant. An infant who is able gradually to tolerate these fluctuations develops an increasing capacity to retain the good experience even during periods of frustration.

Another infant may find this considerably more difficult.

The gratifying experience becomes something that is wanted continuously, while absence is experienced as a serious interruption. The infant may become intensely dependent upon the good experience and particularly intolerant of its disappearance.

The psychological formulation becomes very basic:

I want the good. I do not want the bad.

The problem is not simply preference. Everyone prefers pleasure to pain. The difficulty is what happens when the mind cannot tolerate the coexistence of the two.

Mother feeds and everything feels safe.

Mother moves away and the pleasurable experience disappears.

For an adult, this may represent an ordinary absence of several minutes. For the infant there is no mature understanding of duration. The infant does not know whether the absence will last seconds, hours or indefinitely. What is experienced is the disappearance of something upon which the infant is completely dependent.

This introduces one of the most important elements in the development of severe splitting: fear of loss.

At the earliest stages of life, human beings are helpless and dependent upon another person for survival. This is not unique to humans; dependency upon caregivers exists across many species. But in human psychological development, prolonged dependency creates a particularly rich internal relationship with the people who provide protection, warmth and nourishment.

Development gradually introduces increasing independence. The child learns to move independently, communicate, regulate bodily functions, tolerate separation and eventually think more autonomously. Bodily development, including increasing control over basic functions such as toileting, is part of this wider developmental movement towards autonomy, although no single milestone determines the later personality.

Early development is fundamental, but it is never the whole story.

A child who receives highly attentive care is not guaranteed a psychologically uncomplicated adulthood. Equally, an infant or child who experiences major adversity is not condemned to later pathology. Human beings are shaped continuously through biology, early relationships, later family experiences, education, friendships, losses, successes, failures, trauma and the larger social environment.

This is one of the mysteries of human development. The same experience can produce very different psychological consequences in different people.

What we can say is that early experiences contribute to the way the person begins organising relationships with themselves, with other people and with the surrounding world.

As the child develops, one of the most important achievements is the growing ability to recognise that the same person can contain both pleasurable and frustrating qualities.

Mother can be loving and unavailable.

Father can be kind and angry.

A sibling can be adored and irritating.

A friend can be enjoyable and disappointing.

The self can be caring and selfish, capable and frightened, generous and envious.

Klein described the movement towards this greater integration through the depressive position, in which the child gradually becomes capable of recognising the whole object rather than keeping good and bad experiences psychologically separated. Love and aggression can increasingly be understood as belonging to a relationship with the same person.

This capacity is fundamental to later human relationships.

The person begins to develop what might be described as stronger psychological or psychic muscles: the capacity to digest disappointment, tolerate frustration, survive absence and maintain emotional connection when another person behaves in a way that is not entirely gratifying.

Where that integration develops sufficiently, black-and-white reactions may occur occasionally without defining the person’s life.

Where integration remains much more difficult, splitting can become increasingly important.

From Ordinary Black-and-White Thinking to Pathological Splitting

It is essential to distinguish ordinary black-and-white perception from pathology.

Most people occasionally describe situations in absolute terms. Somebody has an argument and temporarily thinks that the other person is impossible. Something goes wrong at work and the whole day feels disastrous. A relationship becomes strained and, for a short period, the person sees little that is positive.

This is part and parcel of ordinary human functioning.

The distinction is whether the person can later think again.

Can they recognise that the situation contained more than one element?

Can they tolerate the fact that somebody who disappointed them also possesses qualities they value?

Can they retain independence of thought?

Can they continue functioning?

Can relationships survive?

When these capacities remain intact, occasional polarisation does not necessarily indicate pathology.

The situation becomes very different when the person’s existence is increasingly defined by the division between all good and all bad.

People become psychologically organised into categories.

Experiences are either gratifying or threatening.

Relationships are either perfect or intolerable.

There is little ability to remain psychologically connected to something that contains both.

This is where the experience can become pathological.

One of the central difficulties is the inability to tolerate the possibility of losing what is experienced as good.

The fear may involve actual loss, but it can also involve perceived or anticipated loss.

Actual loss is relatively clear: death, separation, abandonment, permanent departure.

Perceived loss is very different. Nothing irreversible may have happened, yet the person experiences the threat as though permanent loss were imminent.

A partner becomes less attentive for a period.

A friend appears more distant.

Somebody is late.

A loved one becomes tired, preoccupied or less emotionally available.

The person who struggles with severe splitting may not experience this as an ordinary fluctuation in another human being. They may experience it as evidence that the good object is disappearing.

Fear then becomes the guiding emotion.

The greater the emotional bond, the greater the potential fear.

The person who previously appeared loving, caring, attentive and dependable may suddenly be experienced in exactly the opposite way. They become distant, uncaring, ugly, ignorant, hostile or brutal.

Nothing necessarily happened that would justify such a complete reversal.

What has changed is the internal representation.

The person can no longer retain the earlier good image alongside the present frustration.

This movement can become particularly important in narcissistic functioning.

The subject may look for another person who corresponds with a preconceived idealised picture. That picture may resemble an idealised version of the self or an idealised parent or caregiver. Sometimes aspects of the two become merged.

The other person is therefore not initially experienced fully as an independent human being. They are experienced through selected characteristics that fit what the subject needs them to be.

This is closely connected with the psychoanalytic concept of part-object relating.

Only particular parts of the person are psychologically taken in.

Their attractiveness.

Their intelligence.

Their attentiveness.

Their status.

Their emotional availability.

Their strength.

Their creativity.

Their resemblance to something already idealised internally.

The other qualities are not genuinely integrated because they interfere with the picture.

A whole human being is inevitably contradictory. Somebody can be energetic and tired, communicative and silent, caring and irritable, strong and vulnerable, intelligent and occasionally foolish.

The person relying heavily upon splitting cannot comfortably integrate this.

Instead, idealisation develops.

The other person becomes beautifulised.

Their desirable qualities are magnified, while ordinary limitations are excluded.

This creates a relationship not merely with the person, but with an internal ideal that has been placed upon them.

The difficulty inevitably appears when reality intervenes.

The person who was idealised becomes tired.

They disagree.

They fail.

They become unavailable.

They do not provide exactly what was expected.

They display something that does not fit the projected image.

For somebody with sufficient psychological flexibility, this is disappointing but tolerable.

For somebody relying heavily upon splitting, it can represent a collapse of the entire good object.

Idealisation then begins moving towards denigration, devaluation and eventually dehumanisation.

The person who was admired is increasingly stripped of value.

What previously appeared beautiful becomes ugly.

What appeared intelligent becomes stupid.

What appeared caring becomes manipulative.

What appeared dependable becomes useless.

The entire person can be psychologically reconstructed.

Eventually the individual may be discarded.

The subject then begins looking for a replacement who appears to fit the original idealised image more perfectly.

This replacement may initially seem extraordinary precisely because there has not yet been enough time for ordinary human contradictions to emerge.

The cycle can then begin again.

Kernberg devoted considerable attention to precisely these movements in severe narcissistic and borderline personality organisation. Splitting, primitive idealisation, devaluation and projective identification become ways of maintaining contradictory internal representations separately rather than integrating them into a more stable experience of self and others.

Fairbairn approached the problem somewhat differently but also emphasised the internalisation of split relationships. His model was particularly concerned with how difficult or rejecting relational experiences become organised internally and continue to influence later relationships.

Winnicott, from another direction, emphasised the importance of integration and the development of a sufficiently stable self capable of tolerating dependence, frustration and separateness without psychological collapse.

The theoretical languages differ, but clinically they converge on an important problem: the person struggles to experience another human being as whole.

Envy, Idealisation and the Attack on What Is Valued

A further development occurs when idealisation becomes connected with envy.

Some people experience themselves as inadequate, incapable or deficient in comparison with somebody they perceive as exceptionally able.

They may become attracted towards successful, highly creative, talented or productive people.

This could become a developmental relationship. The person could learn, identify, acquire knowledge or develop skills of their own.

But in more pathological functioning, the opposite can happen.

The other person’s abilities become intolerable.

The very quality that initially attracted the subject becomes the quality that later needs to be attacked.

The talented person becomes the recipient of persistent interference.

The creative person’s working environment is disrupted.

Somebody attempting to concentrate is repeatedly interrupted.

The relationship becomes intrusive rather than supportive.

The subject may continually interfere with the other person’s work, time, concentration or emotional stability.

The point is not merely that the person dislikes the other individual’s success. The admired capacity itself becomes psychologically painful because it constantly reminds the subject of something they feel they lack.

Klein wrote extensively about envy as an attack upon something experienced as good.

Rosenfeld later developed these ideas in his work on pathological narcissism, describing ways in which valued qualities in another person can become objects of envy and destructive attack when dependence upon the valuable object becomes intolerable.

The sequence can again begin with idealisation.

The other person appears fantastically able, beautiful, successful or creative.

But this admiration cannot be maintained.

The admired quality becomes a source of pain.

It is denigrated and then attacked.

Bion’s concept of attacks on linking is particularly useful here. Bion was interested in situations where the capacity to create psychological links—to think, understand, connect one experience with another, and establish emotional relationships—comes under attack.

In interpersonal life, we may see something comparable when another person’s capacity to think, work, create or maintain meaningful connections repeatedly becomes interfered with.

The attack is not always consciously organised.

The subject may not consciously decide to destroy somebody’s concentration or abilities.

The process is often substantially unconscious.

But the behavioural consequence can still be destructive.

The relationship increasingly revolves around interference, dominance and the attempt to control something that originally aroused admiration or envy.

Here it becomes important to distinguish devaluation from simple criticism.

Criticism recognises that somebody has done something poorly.

Devaluation attempts to remove worth.

Denigration attacks status or value.

Dehumanisation goes further because the other person’s complexity and emotional reality are increasingly disregarded.

Once another human being is no longer experienced as fully human, their vulnerabilities become easier to attack.

This is where pathological splitting can become seriously destructive.

Fear of Dependence, Loss and Rejection

The fear of loss remains central throughout these processes.

An emotionally significant person matters because there is dependence upon them.

That dependence may be emotional, practical, sexual, intellectual or psychological.

Once the bond becomes important, the possibility of losing it becomes threatening.

In some people, this creates an internal sequence in which fear rapidly becomes aggression.

The person experiences closeness as pleasurable.

Pleasure creates dependence.

Dependence creates the possibility of loss.

The possibility of loss creates fear.

Fear then becomes organised around the expectation of rejection or abandonment.

The person may become convinced that the significant other will eventually turn away, lose interest, become disappointed or decide that the subject is not good enough.

The response then becomes defensive.

Rather than risk being rejected, the person rejects first.

Rather than risk being discarded, the person discards first.

Rather than wait for the other person to withdraw, the subject attacks or destroys the relationship before that can happen.

There is a psychological logic to it.

The feared experience has been reversed.

Instead of being abandoned, the person becomes the one who abandons.

Instead of becoming helpless, they regain control.

The cost is that the very relationship they feared losing has now been damaged by the defence against losing it.

This mechanism can repeat through many important relationships.

The strongest reactions will frequently occur not with strangers but with the people carrying the greatest emotional significance.

A partner.

A parent.

A close friend.

A psychotherapist.

The more emotionally invested the person becomes, the greater the potential activation of dependence, fear and splitting.

Steiner’s work on pathological organisations and psychic retreats is useful in understanding how elaborate defensive structures can protect the person from experiences of dependence, vulnerability, shame and loss while simultaneously restricting psychological development and genuine contact with other people.

Kohut approached some of the same clinical territory differently. His work emphasised the importance of relationships that regulate the cohesion and stability of the self. Where the person is heavily dependent upon idealised or mirroring figures, failures in responsiveness can be experienced as profound narcissistic injuries rather than ordinary disappointment.

Rosenfeld and Kernberg placed considerably greater emphasis upon aggression, envy and destructive narcissistic processes.

These theoretical distinctions matter, but what the clinician observes in practice is the individual’s difficulty in remaining connected to another person once that person ceases to be perfectly gratifying.

Ordinary Difficulty, Pathology and Severe Pathology

There needs to be a clear distinction between three different levels of functioning.

The first is ordinary human black-and-white thinking.

A person may occasionally react strongly, idealise, become angry, exaggerate or temporarily divide experience into good and bad. This does not substantially interfere with independence, thinking or relationships. The person eventually reconsiders, adapts and returns to a more integrated position.

The second involves more established pathology.

Here the splitting becomes repetitive.

Relationships repeatedly move from idealisation to devaluation.

Fear of loss becomes a major organising force.

Dependency becomes difficult.

Envy becomes destructive.

The person struggles to integrate contradictory qualities in themselves and in others.

The mechanisms are no longer occasional responses. They become part of the way the personality operates.

Relationships begin suffering significantly.

Work, education and social functioning may also become affected.

The third level involves much more severe disturbance, where splitting, projective identification, aggression and other primitive defences become entrenched and profoundly interfere with reality testing, everyday functioning and the capacity to maintain relationships.

Kernberg’s work is particularly important here. He described severe splitting and related defensive mechanisms as central features in borderline personality organisation. In borderline personality disorder, idealisation and devaluation can become especially unstable and intense, although no single defence should ever be used as a diagnosis on its own.

With other psychiatric disorders, the picture requires much greater diagnostic care.

Acute psychosis can involve severe distortions of reality, persecutory experience and very primitive defensive functioning.

Bipolar disorder, particularly during severe manic or mixed states, can involve marked irritability, aggression, impulsivity and extreme shifts in judgement, although these should not simply be equated with psychoanalytic splitting.

Similarly, autism should not be conceptualised as a disorder of pathological splitting. An autistic person may prefer predictability, explicit categories or certainty, but this is not equivalent to the psychoanalytic process of idealisation and devaluation.

The same outward appearance can therefore arise from very different psychological and psychiatric processes.

This is one of the reasons experienced assessment matters.

The clinician needs to look not merely at what the person says but at the entire pattern of functioning.

How much does it interfere with independent life?

How much does it interfere with thought?

How much does it affect relationships?

Can the person reflect afterwards?

Can they reconsider?

Can they tolerate contradiction?

Is reality testing intact?

Are the reactions temporary or entrenched?

Do they appear only during periods of acute psychiatric illness, or have they existed since adolescence or childhood?

These distinctions determine whether we are looking at an ordinary human response, an established personality difficulty or a much more severe psychiatric condition.

There is no benefit in pathologising every instance of black-and-white thinking.

Equally, there is no benefit in minimising patterns that repeatedly destroy people’s lives.

How Splitting Appears in Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy provides a particularly important setting in which these mechanisms can be observed directly.

The patient does not merely describe their relationships outside treatment.

Eventually they begin relating to the psychotherapist through the same internal mechanisms.

A patient with little previous experience of psychotherapy may initially experience the psychotherapist in an intensely idealised fashion.

The psychotherapist becomes the beautifulised side of the self.

The patient may project onto the psychotherapist qualities associated with an idealised version of themselves: intelligence, competence, beauty, strength, attentiveness or emotional superiority.

This can be especially important in narcissistic functioning, where the psychotherapist may become an extension of an idealised self-representation.

In another patient, the psychotherapist may instead represent the desired parent.

The patient may never have experienced the parental figure they wished for, and the psychotherapist begins carrying that internal picture.

They become the perfectly caring parent.

The perfectly nourishing parent.

The endlessly attentive parent.

The person who always understands.

The person who never disappoints.

All the good attributes become located in the psychotherapist.

At the beginning of treatment, this can appear extremely positive.

The patient is engaged.

They attend.

They speak warmly of the psychotherapist.

They feel understood.

But if psychotherapy genuinely proceeds in depth, the psychotherapist cannot remain purely gratifying.

Work in the transference involves bringing attention to what is happening between the psychotherapist and the patient in the here and now.

The psychotherapist may recognise a behaviour, defence or relational pattern that the patient has not yet been able to acknowledge.

The observation does not need to be confrontational.

But it introduces something that does not fit the idealised picture.

The psychotherapist is no longer simply nourishing and affirming.

They have become psychologically separate.

At that point the patient’s experience can swing dramatically.

The psychotherapist who was previously experienced as entirely good may become unhelpful, distant, angry, aggressive, insensitive or incapable.

The idealised object has become the bad object.

The clinical importance lies in the speed and extremity of the transformation.

The psychotherapist has not suddenly become another person.

The patient’s internal representation has changed.

This is where splitting becomes visible in the transference.

The patient is struggling to maintain the psychotherapist as somebody who can be helpful and at the same time frustrating, caring and at the same time capable of saying something difficult, attentive and yet psychologically separate.

The inability to hold those aspects together creates the split.

With patients whose pathology is more established, the change can become increasingly aggressive.

The psychotherapist begins exposing—not aggressively confronting, but gradually exposing—patterns of thinking or relating that the patient has previously kept outside awareness.

The patient may experience this as an attack.

The psychotherapist’s knowledge, competence, experience and ability can then become targets.

The attack may be particularly severe where envy is present.

The patient has come to somebody because they believe that person possesses knowledge or psychological capacity that may help them.

But dependence upon that capacity can become intolerable.

The valuable quality must then be diminished.

The psychotherapist becomes incapable.

Uneducated.

Unskilled.

Inexperienced.

Worthless.

The attack protects the patient from having to recognise dependence upon something valuable in another person.

Rosenfeld’s writing on pathological narcissism is especially relevant here, as is Kernberg’s work on devaluation and projective identification.

Bion is important when the therapeutic attempt to think itself becomes the target.

The psychotherapist makes a meaningful connection between two experiences.

The patient cannot tolerate the link.

The connection is immediately destroyed, confused, rejected or attacked.

The capacity for thinking and linking is under pressure because the meaning being approached is emotionally intolerable.

This can become particularly difficult in patients with more severe disturbance, because the response may be rapid and instinctive.

There may be very little reflective space.

The underlying experience can be fear: fear of rejection, loss, humiliation, abandonment, dependency or annihilation.

The patient experiences danger and reacts before thinking.

The internal position becomes approximately:

If you are going to reject me, I will reject you first.

This is the second of the few direct formulations that is useful because it captures a recurring clinical mechanism.

In psychotherapy, this can lead to premature endings.

The treatment becomes emotionally significant.

The psychotherapist has become important.

Dependency becomes increasingly visible.

The patient begins fearing what will happen if the psychotherapist becomes unavailable, disappointed or rejecting.

Instead of remaining long enough for this to be explored, the patient leaves.

Sometimes the ending is abrupt.

Contact stops.

The psychotherapist is devalued.

The entire treatment is dismissed.

The patient may repeat the same sequence with another psychotherapist later.

What appears from the outside as simply dropping out of therapy may therefore, in some cases, belong to the same relational pattern that occurs elsewhere.

The patient fears abandonment and produces the abandonment themselves.

The patient fears rejection and rejects.

The patient fears dependence and destroys the relationship upon which they have become dependent.

This cannot be understood merely as non-compliance.

It needs to be understood within the therapeutic relationship.

The Psychotherapist’s Position

Working successfully with splitting requires experience because the psychotherapist is placed under considerable emotional pressure.

Idealisation can be seductive.

Being experienced as extraordinarily good, capable and understanding can make the psychotherapist feel unusually competent.

If the psychotherapist begins identifying with that idealised position, the later devaluation can become especially difficult.

The patient who previously admired them may begin attacking them.

The psychotherapist may feel angry, humiliated, defensive or tempted to retaliate.

These countertransference reactions are clinically important.

They need to be recognised rather than enacted.

The psychotherapist should never retaliate against the patient for destroying an idealised image.

Nor should the psychotherapist attempt to restore the idealisation because it feels more comfortable.

The treatment requires something much more difficult: remaining sufficiently stable while the patient’s perception moves between extremes and gradually helping the patient recognise that both experiences belong to the same therapeutic relationship.

The work needs to happen gradually in the here and now.

The patient needs to become able to experience the psychotherapist as somebody who may be helpful and frustrating, knowledgeable and imperfect, emotionally available but not continuously available, caring but separate.

The psychotherapist must also recognise genuine mistakes.

Psychoanalytic theory cannot become a defence for the clinician.

Reality must always remain central.

The therapeutic task is to distinguish what genuinely happened from the intensity and organisation of the patient’s internal response.

With more severely disturbed patients, this work may require considerably more containment.

The aggression can be powerful.

Projective identification may become pronounced.

Risk may increase.

The patient’s ability to think may temporarily deteriorate.

In these situations, psychotherapy may need to operate together with psychiatric treatment, medication, multidisciplinary involvement or, when necessary, inpatient care.

Psychotherapy and psychiatry should not be divided simplistically into people who can and cannot be treated by talking.

Many people receiving psychiatric care can benefit enormously from psychotherapy.

The distinction lies in the degree of disturbance and the amount of additional containment required.

A patient with predominantly neurotic difficulties may remain capable of reflecting even when distressed.

A patient with entrenched personality pathology may require much longer work around splitting, dependence, envy and projective processes.

A patient in an acute psychotic or severe affective state may temporarily require medical and psychiatric stabilisation before certain kinds of interpretative psychotherapy can be used safely or meaningfully.

The treatment must always correspond to the level of functioning.

Developing the Capacity to Integrate

The purpose of psychotherapy is not to remove every distinction between good and bad.

There are things in life that genuinely are damaging.

There are relationships that need to end.

There are people whose behaviour is destructive.

Psychological integration does not require pretending that everything is acceptable.

The difficulty we are concerned with is the inability to experience complexity.

A human being can be loving and frustrating.

A parent can have cared deeply and still have caused damage.

A partner can possess many admirable qualities and still behave badly.

A psychotherapist can help enormously and still make mistakes.

The self can contain generosity and envy, strength and vulnerability, love and aggression.

Being able to integrate these experiences creates a more realistic internal world.

The person no longer requires the good to remain completely pure.

They no longer need to destroy the entire object when disappointment appears.

They can survive frustration without treating it as abandonment.

They can depend upon somebody without assuming that dependence will inevitably result in annihilation.

They can admire another person’s ability without needing to attack it.

They can recognise envy without destroying what is envied.

They can experience anger without transforming the loved person into an enemy.

They can be disappointed and remain emotionally connected.

This is not an intellectual exercise in learning to “see shades of grey.”

It is a deeper psychological development.

The person develops greater stamina for emotional experience.

Their psychic muscles become stronger.

Pleasure and displeasure can coexist.

Closeness and temporary absence can coexist.

Love and anger can coexist.

Admiration and criticism can coexist.

Dependence and independence can coexist.

The other person increasingly becomes a whole human being rather than an idealised or persecutory part-object.

This is where the distinction between ordinary black-and-white thinking, pathology and severe pathology becomes critical.

Occasional splitting belongs to human life.

Persistent splitting can seriously interfere with thinking, independence and relationships.

Severe splitting, accompanied by destructive projective processes, intense aggression and major impairment in reality testing or functioning, belongs to a much more serious clinical territory.

The experienced psychotherapist therefore does not diagnose pathology simply because somebody sees a situation in absolute terms.

The clinician looks at the whole person.

How do they think?

How independently do they function?

Can they maintain relationships?

Can they reconsider an emotional judgement?

Can they survive disappointment without destroying the relationship?

Can they recognise that somebody important may simultaneously contain qualities they love and qualities they dislike?

These are far more meaningful questions than whether somebody occasionally thinks in black and white.

The psychoanalytic thinkers who developed these ideas over many decades—Freud, Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Bion, Rosenfeld, Kernberg, Kohut, Steiner and others—used different theoretical languages and did not always agree with one another. Their concepts evolved over generations and were repeatedly revised through clinical practice.

What remains particularly valuable is their attempt to understand why some people can gradually integrate contradictory human experience while others remain dependent upon severe divisions between the good and the bad.

In everyday living, that distinction may determine whether disappointment can be tolerated.

In intimate relationships, it may determine whether closeness survives frustration.

In psychotherapy, it may determine whether the patient can remain with the psychotherapist long enough to work through dependence, fear, anger and loss.

And in more severe psychiatric disturbance, it may determine how much psychological, medical and environmental containment is required before integration can begin.

The central difficulty is therefore not simply seeing the world in black and white.

It is being unable to retain the good when something bad appears, being unable to tolerate the bad without destroying everything that was previously good, and being unable to experience another human being as a whole person whose qualities inevitably contain contradiction.

That capacity develops gradually.

When it does, relationships become less dependent upon perfection, less vulnerable to sudden destruction and much more capable of surviving the ordinary frustrations of human life.

Discussion Points

Why do human beings naturally begin by distinguishing between pleasurable and unpleasant experiences?

How might differences in biological sensitivity and tolerance influence the way people respond to frustration from an early age?

Why is the early relationship between the infant and the mother important in psychoanalytic theories of splitting?

What does Melanie Klein’s distinction between the good and bad object help us understand about later emotional development?

Why is the ability to recognise both positive and negative qualities in the same person an important psychological achievement?

When does ordinary black-and-white thinking begin to move towards pathological splitting?

How can fear of loss or abandonment make it more difficult to maintain a balanced view of another person?

Why can somebody who is initially idealised later become intensely criticised, denigrated or rejected?

What role can part-object relating play when a person values only selected qualities in another individual while disregarding the rest?

How can envy turn admiration for another person’s abilities, success or creativity into an attack on those same qualities?

Why are emotionally significant relationships often the ones in which splitting, idealisation and devaluation become most intense?

How can black-and-white thinking differ between ordinary psychological functioning, established personality pathology and severe psychiatric disturbance?

How might idealisation and subsequent devaluation of the psychotherapist become visible through transference?

Why can the fear of being rejected lead some patients to reject the psychotherapist or leave psychotherapy first?

How can psychotherapy help the patient gradually tolerate disappointment, dependence, anger and contradiction without needing to experience another person as entirely good or entirely bad?

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