In all the years I’ve worked in psychiatric facilities one of the most difficult patients to work with has been the patient with Borderline Personality Disorder.  The diagnosis was originally called Pseudoneurotic Schizophrenia among other terms and only in DSM III (1980) was psychiatric thinking organized into the BPD diagnosis.

Clinicians frequently joke about having to deal with BPD because it is so difficult to treat.  As is true in the case of cliche in all the joking there is always a bit of truth.  One of those “truths” is the concept of so called “splitting” of staff or of fellow inpatients.  Splitting in this case is a situation when the person with BPD sets two individuals or groups against each other.  Such as telling one “I’m so glad you are my therapist because that psychiatrist just doesn’t understand me and will discharge me before I’m ready.  Can’t you get him to understand that I need to be here longer.”  In this case, the neophyte or unsophisticated therapist just might “do battle” with the psychiatrist to get the patient a longer length of stay.  Splitting is a technique used to manipulate.  Pure and simple manipulation.

And while one cannot diagnose a whole “organization” such as the current White House crew as having a “Borderline” disorder, one can note that the manipulation is in the case of the White House and Fox News, is quite obvious to all but the most unsophisticated observer.  It is designed to “split” one news organization (Fox News) as “bad” while engaging the others (CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, CNN and PBS) in support of marginalizing the bad guys.

In residential or inpatient treatment programs, there is always at least someone who is wise to the splitting and says something to the effect of “Wait a minute, can’t you see the manipulation.”  This is almost always the case when the splitter commits a really egregious act of manipulation.  Such was the case when the White House attempted to exclude Fox News from the pool of interviewers of the “pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg.  The other members of the pool, perhaps recognizing the manipulation (or perhaps they would have gone ahead had the WH offered individual interviews rather than a pool interview scenario) backed off and in essence said “All of us or none of us.”

I would hope that broadcast, print and blogging journalists would recognize this, but it is obvious that they don’t. And they really should, because as David Axelrod said:

“This is a discussion that probably had to be had about their approach to things … Our concern is other media not follow their lead.” [emphasis added]

Can you say “Splitting?”

Update:  Fausta has much more and some links too!

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Tags: Fox News, Obama, Political Psychology, White House

This entry was posted by GM Roper on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at 9:38 AM and is filed under Obama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.