Psychic splits occupy a foundational position in depth psychology, threading through clinical, mythological, and philosophical registers with remarkable consistency across the corpus. The concept designates the rupture of psychic unity into discrete, often antagonistic sub-systems — a phenomenon theorized variously as defensive dissociation, structural splitting, complex formation, and archetypal polarization. Kalsched provides the most sustained clinical elaboration, demonstrating how traumatic overwhelm compels the psyche to sever its own linking function, producing a survival-oriented self-care system that persists as a dissociative circuit-breaker long after the originating danger has passed. This mechanism necessarily splits spirit from instinct, mind from body, and the personal self from its own animating principle. Jung’s broader framework situates such splits within the tension of opposites — consciousness perpetually severed from its unconscious counterpart, shadow from persona, and, at the collective level, rationalist civilization from its instinctual depths. Bleuler’s psychiatric lineage identifies splitting as the cardinal feature of schizophrenic associative loosening, while Melanie Klein (cited by Greene and Sasportas) grounds it developmentally in the infant’s bifurcation of the mother into good and bad objects. Najavits extends the clinical application to PTSD and addiction, where split states constitute discrete, alternating identities. Across these positions, the central tension concerns whether splitting is pathological deficit or paradoxically necessary differentiation — a question that defines the therapeutic stakes of any integrative project.