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How Narcissists Love You Then Hate You
How can someone feel both love and hate in the same week or even hour or be devoted for years and then cut off all good memories? This happens easily to people with narcissistic or borderline personality disorders and is called splitting, first coined by Freud.
It starts in infancy. To separate from our mother (or earliest caretaker), we must make sense of contradictory feelings of love and anger toward her to develop a cohesive view (“object constancy”) of her and ourselves, meaning that we internalize steady images of our mother and ourselves. When mothering isn’t sufficiently nurturing and consistent, we’re unable to integrate good and bad feelings about her. To cope, we mentally split the good and bad mother into two contrary representations.[1] Splitting keeps the “good” and loved aspects of our mother separate from the “bad” and hated aspects of her.
Hyde Becomes Jekyll and Jekyll Becomes Hyde
Splitting affects us internally and confuses us. It impairs our ability to see ourselves and others as whole persons. When we don’t fully develop object constancy, our ability to become autonomous is compromised. It creates turmoil in close relationships and is associated with an anxious attachment style and fears of abandonment.[2] Splitting impairs our ability to remember that we love our partner when…
