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reminded of Freud’s description of the Rat-Man, a description that seems apt for Freud himself: “[H]e had, as it were, disintegrated into three personalities.”109 Presumably that part of Freud that identified with the Devil was mostly unconscious, was associated with his early sexual abuse, and represented the frightening aspects of his father-image initiated by the threat of castration.
That Freud’s involvement with the demonic was something like this allows me to agree wholeheartedly with Shengold, a psychoanalyst, who, after summarizing Freud’s struggle with Jung, proposes: “Freud discovered that he was Mephistopheles as well as Faust; the devils were not without but within.”110 Freud’s Personality: Splitting and Object Relations TheoryIn recent years, Freud’s early theory on the nature of splitting has been augmented, and to some extent replaced, by a different interpretation based on object relations theory.111 This theory of splitting is really a set of related interpretations proposed by such psychoanalysts as Mahler, Winnicott, Fairbairn,112 Kernberg,113 and others. A common assumption by these writers is that splitting derives from the mother, rather than the father, and that it is a consequence of inadequate or traumatic mothering in the pre-Oedipal period (i.e., prior to the age of three). In this earlier period, especially from one and a half or two years of age to three, the child is involved in separating from the mother and developing an individual identity. If the mother is seriously inadequate, if she is absent for a prolonged period, or if she otherwise traumatizes or abuses the child, then splitting of the child’s ego will often occur, and the process of separation and individuation will be incomplete. The child’s internalized representation of the mother is split into “good mother” and “bad mother” components. Since this image is an important part of the child’s own ego, the child therefore suffers from splitting. Some object relations theorists, especially Melanie Klein, claim that the mother’s behavior is only a secondary source of the bad mother.114 She proposes that the child is born with large amounts of innate rage and anger (a kind of death instinct theory), and that this is projected onto the mother by the child. Although I lean toward the more environmentally determined origin of Freud’s pre-Oedipal object relations problems, a Kleinian interpretation can also account for Freud’s early psychology. For present purposes, since both theories can be used to interpret Freud’s pre-Oedipal problems, there is no need to choose between them. In the case of Freud, an object relations interpretation predicts that the negative aspects of his functional mother, the nanny, would have split or partially split to form a separate part of his ego. This “bad mother” or |