Personality and Mood Disorders Q 67
A client with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder has negative feelings toward the other clients on the unit and considers them all to be “bad.” The nurse understands this defense is known as:
A. Splitting
B. Ambivalence
C. Passive aggression
D. Reaction formation
Correct Answer: A. Splitting
Splitting is the compartmentalization of opposite-affect states and failure to integrate the positive and negative aspects of self or others. Splitting is a term used in psychiatry to describe the inability to hold opposing thoughts, feelings, or beliefs. Some might say that a person who splits sees the world in terms of black or white—all or nothing. It’s a distorted way of thinking in which the positive or negative attributes of a person or event are neither weighed nor cohesive.
Option B: The simultaneous existence of contradictory feelings and attitudes, such as pleasantness and unpleasantness or friendliness and hostility, toward the same person, object, event, or situation. Eugen Bleuler, who first defined ambivalence in a psychological sense and referred to it as affective ambivalence, regarded extreme ambivalence, such as an individual expressing great love for his or her mother while also asking how to kill her, as a major symptom of schizophrenia.
Option C: Passive-aggressive behaviors are those that involve acting indirectly aggressive rather than directly aggressive. Passive-aggressive people regularly exhibit resistance to requests or demands from family and other individuals often by procrastinating, expressing sullenness, or acting stubborn.
Option D: Reaction formation is a psychological defense mechanism in which a person goes beyond denial and behaves in the opposite way to which he or she thinks or feels. Conscious behaviors are adopted to overcompensate for the anxiety a person feels regarding their socially unacceptable unconscious thoughts or emotions. Usually, a reaction formation is marked by exaggerated behavior, such as showiness and compulsiveness.