COMPLEX SPLITTING OF SELF-REPRESENTATIONS IN SEXUALLY ABUSED ADOLESCENT GIRLS

Recent work on psychopathology supports a connection between repeated childhood maltreatment and disturbances in self-definition and -regula tion. This study tested the hypothesis that chronic childhood sexual a buse is associated with developmentally complex affective splitting of representations of self-with-others, including both a negativity bias in evaluating core self and a high degree of affective splitting of s cripts for self-in-relationships. Sixteen inpatient adolescent girls w ith affective disorders participated in the Self-in-Relationships Inte rview to produce and analyze a self-diagram; seven had been victims of prolonged sexual abuse, and nine had not. The results supported the h ypothesis, showing two powerful differences in splitting between the g roups. (a) The abused girls placed negative characteristics as central to their core self and also produced an unusually large overall numbe r of negatives. The nonabused girls regarded negative characteristics as mostly peripheral in their self-diagram and produced fewer negative s. (b) The abused girls showed a form of complex dissociative coordina tion called polarized affective splitting, which was not produced by t he nonabused group. They also showed slightly higher developmental lev els in general than the nonabused group, thus contradicting the tradit ional view that maltreatment produces splitting through developmental fixation or regression. Psychopathology from abuse arises along a comp lex, distinctive developmental pathway, not as a result of a delay or failure of development.