Speaking of nutters, FWIW,
In the course of looking for more insight into some of the more "interesting" thought processes I've observed on this thread, I came across the following definition under the general umbrella of cognitive disfunction:
Splitting--People are complex creatures with good and bad characteristics. Our appreciation of this complexity is something that grows over time. When we are children, we are unable to grasp complexity and tend to see individuals as "all good" or "all bad", all black or all white. As we grow, most of us learn to allow for "partially good persons" or "good persons with a few bad characteristics"; our representation of others gets increasingly complex and we learn to see people in shades of gray. For a variety of reasons, some persons do not successfully learn how to see others in these more complex ways, but rather remain viewing people in very black and white ways well into adulthood. The term splitting is often used to describe how such a black and white thinking adult will characterize others. For instance, a person who uses splitting as a defense mechanism may view one person as "all good" (perfect, wonderful, pure), and other people as "all bad" (foul, corrupt, hostile and evil). This separation of good from bad is thought to occur so as to allow the person who is doing the splitting to have a safe sense of there being good in the world at all - the good needs to be protected and cannot be allowed to be corrupted because the world is such a dangerous place. Because splitting produces unrealistic impressions of others, a splitters' views of others' goodness and badness are fairly unstable. Someone can be good on one day, but then the next day be very evil all because that person failed to please the splitter in some difficult to appreciate way. The splitting concept comes out of the psychodynamic literature. It is most associated with personality disordered persons, in particular persons diagnosed with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders.
mentalhelp.net
Karen |
