  A scheme for generating Schr\"{o}dinger cat-like states of a single-mode
optical field by means of conditional measurement is proposed. Feeding into a
beam splitter a squeezed vacuum and counting the photons in one of the output
channels, the conditional states in the other output channel exhibit a number
of properties that are very similar to those of superpositions of two coherent
states with opposite phases. We present analytical and numerical results for
the photon-number and quadrature-component distributions of the conditional
states and their Wigner and Husimi functions. Further, we discuss the effect of
realistic photocounting on the states.
