What If Splitting Is Dissociation? A New Way to Understand Narcissism

In this episode, Dr. Ettensohn offers a groundbreaking perspective on one of the most misunderstood features of pathological narcissism: splitting.

Drawing from the work of Philip Bromberg and his own clinical practice, Dr. Ettensohn reframes splitting not as black-and-white thinking, but as a dissociative process rooted in early relational trauma.

Rather than treating splitting as a rigid symptom, this episode explores how dissociated self-states form when conflicting emotional truths, such as shame, longing, idealization, and rage, cannot safely coexist. What looks like instability or contradiction is actually a protective adaptation.

Dr. Ettensohn shows how these self-states develop as compartmentalized responses to unmanageable experience, and how they survive into adulthood, shaping identity, memory, and relationships.

Through clear explanation and compassionate framing, he illustrates how healing involves standing in the spaces between self-states, without collapsing into any one of them.

Whether you live with these experiences yourself or work with people who do, this video offers a radically humanizing and clinically grounded way to understand dissociation, narcissism, and the divided self.

 

References: Bromberg, P. M. (1996). Standing in the spaces: The multiplicity of self and the psychoanalytic relationship. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 32(4), 509–535.

 

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