Concepts
Health psychology/Defence mechanisms · Immature
Splitting
What it means
Inability to integrate positive and negative qualities; people are seen as all-good or all-bad, often alternating.
Worked example
A patient idealises one nurse as perfect and condemns another as cruel, then swaps them.
In the exam
On the ward, a patient praises one nurse as the only one who understands her while denouncing another as heartless — and reverses this within days.
What settles it
Splitting polarises whole people into all-good/all-bad. It is characteristic of borderline personality organisation; idealisation is one half of the split.
Classically confused with
Idealisation
Source: AMBOSS; classic in EUPD