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This short essay, dating from January 1938, was published after [[Freud]]'s [[death]]. In this [[work ]] Freud returned to an issue that he had previously discussed in "[[Fetishism]]" (1927e) and that he was to take up again in An [[Outline ]] of [[Psychoanalysis ]] (1940a [1938]).

The [[subject ]] of ego [[splitting ]] surfaced also in [[other ]] much earlier [[texts]], particularly those concerned with [[psychosis]], which is why Freud hesitated between "whether what I have to say should be regarded as something long familiar and obvious or as something entirely new and puzzling" (1940e [1938], p. 275).

In the paper, Freud described as "cunning" (p. 277) the solution found by the [[child ]] simultaneously to [[satisfy ]] his [[instincts ]] and respect [[reality]]. (It is surprising here that what Freud called a "[[real]]" [[danger ]] was just the fact that the child had been threatened with [[castration]].) Through the [[mechanism ]] of splitting, the child "takes over the [[fear ]] of that danger as a pathological [[symptom ]] and tries subsequently to divest himself of the fear" (p. 275). The [[displacement ]] of confrontation [[anxiety ]] (onto a [[phobia]], for example) allows for a [[particular ]] solution, namely the creation of a [[fetish]].

Freud goes on to describe how the "reality" of the [[threat ]] is confused with the reality of the [[absence ]] of a [[penis ]] in the [[woman]], falsely [[interpreted ]] as a castration. Displacing the [[absent ]] penis onto an [[object ]] chosen as a fetish allows the child to disbelieve the threat of castration, since a [[substitute ]] for the penis [[exists]]. However, this is only possible at the price of "a turning away from reality" (p. 277), an erroneous conception of [[female ]] anatomy. Demarcating this mechanism from [[psychotic ]] functioning is the fact that the substitute is not hallucinated but chosen in a [[regressive ]] manner—that is, from a [[pregenital ]] perspective. "Success," Freud wrote, "is achieved at the price of a rift in the ego which never heals but which increases as [[time ]] goes on" (p. 276).

This [[text ]] has been much discussed, notably for its innovation in [[seeing ]] the [[splitting of the ego ]] as a [[process ]] involved not only in fetishism and [[psychoses]], but also in [[neuroses]]. Freud further developed this [[idea ]] of [[ego splitting ]] in [[An Outline of Psychoanalysis ]] (1940a [1938]), where he described the splitting of the ego as "a [[universal ]] characteristic of neuroses that there are [[present ]] in the subject's [[mental ]] [[life]], as regards some particular [[behaviour]], two different attitudes, contrary to each other and independent of each other" (p. 204).

[[Bibliography]]