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Personality / Capacities

Capacity for Adaptation and Resilience

Life keeps changing the terms. Jobs end, bodies age, people leave, plans collapse. The capacity for adaptation and resilience is the ability to adjust to the unexpected and to cope effectively, even creatively, with uncertainty, loss, and stress. The PDM-3 distinguishes the two halves: adaptation is coping with changing and uncertain circumstances, while resilience is the ability to endure and even thrive in the face of adverse, potentially traumatic events (Lingiardi, Muzi, & Bornstein, 2026, pp. 713, 727).

Two clarifications in the manual keep this capacity from becoming a measure of conformity. Adapting well does not mean adjusting uncritically to social expectations; it can involve unusual and creative responses. And accepting what cannot be changed is not the same as giving up. PDM-3’s example is a person with a terminal diagnosis who accepts the reality while focusing on what can still be done, such as strengthening family ties, combining hope with realistic resignation (p. 727).

This is the tenth of the 13 M-Axis capacities and closes the Defense and Coping domain. (PDM-3 uses both “resiliency” and “resilience” for it.) It reflects the manual’s view that mental health is more than the absence of symptoms: it includes well-being, using one’s abilities productively, and contributing to a community. It can also include specific strengths, such as sensitivity to others’ feelings, the ability to see other viewpoints, and appropriate assertiveness, and at its best it turns setbacks into opportunities for growth (p. 727). Resilience is not a fixed trait that someone has or lacks; it depends on circumstances, supports, and the size of the blow.

Across the Range

PDM-3 rates the capacity from 5 (healthy) to 1 (severely impaired), describing levels 5, 3, and 1. Paraphrased (Lingiardi et al., 2026, pp. 727–728):

5: Well-being that bends without breaking
The person has a sense of well-being, manages both pleasant and painful feelings, and uses their talents even in hard times. They can feel deep sadness or anxiety without frantic or performative reactions, think clearly in frightening situations, and take in information that challenges cherished beliefs about themselves.
3: Adequate until strained
Well-being and flexibility are generally present, but stress brings a noticeable drop in thinking, relationships, and the ability to use one’s strengths. The person struggles to accept that adversity is part of life and may become defiant, pessimistic, passive, or angry.
1: Overwhelmed
Complex or uncertain situations cannot be managed. Emotions swing out of control, disrupting thought and relationships. Even without stress, the person lacks a sense of well-being and may feel hopeless, empty, and disorganized, with little ability to learn from painful experience.

Among the measures PDM-3 suggests is the cluster of Shedler–Westen Assessment Procedure items describing psychological health, such as appearing to have come to terms with painful past experiences and having found meaning in and grown from them (p. 733).

How It Develops

PDM-3’s adolescent chapter frames resilience as an interaction among risk factors and protective mechanisms that can redirect the effects of even adverse events, with protective factors working at different times and on different trajectories across life (Tanzilli & Malberg, 2026, p. 441). Young adolescents tend to experience events as wholly outside their control, cope with little flexibility, and may withdraw defensively; by late adolescence many meet developmental challenges with openness, curiosity, and self-reflection (p. 442). The capacity generally grows as other capacities mature.

Developmental research supports a hopeful picture. Emmy Werner’s Kauai Longitudinal Study followed every child born on a Hawaiian island in 1955 into adulthood and found that most of those exposed to perinatal stress, chronic poverty, and family discord nonetheless became competent and caring adults, supported by identifiable clusters of protective factors (Werner, 1993). Michael Rutter (1987) described four protective processes: reducing the impact of risk, reducing negative chain reactions, building self-esteem and self-efficacy, and opening up opportunities. Ann Masten (2001) concluded that resilience is surprisingly ordinary, usually arising from normal human adaptive systems; the greatest threats are those that damage these systems.

Later life brings its own tests: loss, moves, awareness of limited time, and physical decline. PDM-3’s older-adult chapter notes that “resilient response” covers many patterns, from keeping one’s balance under small, frequent stresses to functioning reasonably well, if at a lower level, after a major one (Del Corno & Plotkin, 2026, p. 914). Entering a care facility is a special challenge; quoting Ilardo, the chapter observes that our environment is our territory, so losing familiar reference points naturally produces anxiety and anger (p. 914). In parents, PDM-3 notes that part of this capacity is accepting the imperfections of one’s own parenting while keeping an overall positive self-evaluation (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 751).

How It Shows Up in Personality

Flexibility is the thread connecting this capacity to personality. At the healthy level of organization, people may have favored ways of coping but enough flexibility to accommodate challenging realities, though not necessarily severe trauma, which can damage even previously resilient people (McWilliams & Shedler, 2026, p. 657). The neurotic level is marked by relative rigidity, a restricted range of responses to certain stresses (p. 657). The PDC-3 describes “fair resiliency” as typical of the neurotic level and “poor resiliency” of the borderline level (Gordon & Bornstein, 2025). One paper by Fonagy’s group, cited in PDM-3, goes further and reframes borderline personality disorder itself as a limitation of resilience (Fonagy, Luyten, Allison, & Campbell, 2017).

Ratings vary within and across styles. In the PDM-3 supplement, Martin, whose anxious–avoidant and obsessive–compulsive patterns led him to withdraw from much of life under stress, was rated 2 on this capacity, while Emilia, whose depressive style left her prone to self-blame, was rated 4 (Lingiardi & McWilliams, 2026b, pp. 30–36, 38–43). McWilliams (2011, p. 29) notes that ego psychology came to see the habitual use of one defense for every stress as less healthy than a varied repertoire, an idea Wilhelm Reich expressed as “character armor.”

The capacity is closely linked to defensive functioning, since mature defenses such as anticipation, humor, and sublimation are the workhorses of resilience, and to affect regulation and agency and purpose.

How Different Thinkers See It

Heinz Hartmann and ego psychology

In Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (German 1939; English 1958), Hartmann emphasized adapting to an “average expectable environment” as a function of the ego, and described a “conflict-free sphere of the ego” where capacities develop independently of inner conflict (Moses, n.d.). PDM-3 still uses his phrase when describing healthy development in children (Speranza, Malberg, & Fortunato, 2026, p. 257). Later analysts called the capacity to cope despite adversity “ego strength” (McWilliams, 1999, p. 21).

George Vaillant

Vaillant lists resilience as one of seven ways of conceptualizing positive mental health (Vaillant, 2012) and has proposed the DSM-IV Defensive Functioning Scale as a possible metric of positive mental health, linking the mature defenses at its top, such as altruism, suppression, humor, anticipation, and sublimation, to positive psychology (Vaillant, 2000). In this view, resilience is partly the work of unconscious adaptive mechanisms rather than only conscious coping.

Developmental resilience research

Werner, Rutter, and Masten shifted attention from damage to protective processes. Masten’s phrase “ordinary magic” captures their shared conclusion that resilience is common and built from normal developmental systems (Masten, 2001). Their emphasis on processes and circumstances, rather than invulnerable individuals, aligns with PDM-3’s treatment of resilience as an interaction among internal, interpersonal, and contextual factors.

George Bonanno

Bonanno (2004) challenged the assumption, drawn largely from people who sought treatment, that resilience after loss or trauma is rare or even pathological. He argued that resilience is a distinct trajectory from recovery, more common than believed, and reachable by multiple, sometimes unexpected, pathways. PDM-3 cites his work.

Viktor Frankl and the existential tradition

McWilliams (1999, p. 164) notes Frankl’s observation, drawn from the concentration camps, that the attributes that served adaptation in the prewar world were not necessarily those that allowed people to transcend extreme circumstances, and that psychic survival had more to do with sustaining self-esteem than with managing sexuality and aggression.

Personality research

The personality construct of ego-resiliency, studied by Jack Block and colleagues, describes a similar capacity in trait terms. In one study, people high in ego-resiliency, independent of intelligence, were more competent and comfortable in the “fuzzier” interpersonal world (Block & Kremen, 1996).

Examples

Emilia at 86

Emilia, the 84-year-old in the PDM-3 supplement’s older-adult case, had grieved the closing of the bookshop she founded, finding some comfort in neighbors who introduced her to their children as the bookseller of their own childhoods. After brief therapy, she accepted a caregiver while keeping her independence. Two years later a stroke took away much of her speech and movement, but not her smile and sense of humor, and she insisted on returning home. The case summary credits her persistence, strength of mind, and hope, and notes that therapy strengthened her flexibility and adaptation. Her chart rated this capacity at 4.

Lingiardi & McWilliams (Eds.), PDM-3 Online Supplement (2026), pp. 38–43

From fragility to resourcefulness

Nancy McWilliams describes a patient who, at the start of a 15-year therapy, withdrew into a delusional paranoid state whenever she was even mildly stressed. By its end she coped so well that she was a bastion of resourcefulness through her husband’s disability, a threat to her income, and a terminal diagnosis in her daughter. Her vulnerabilities had not vanished, but she now handled them with effective, self-protecting strategies, and a neighbor who admired her resilience later sought treatment herself.

Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Case Formulation (1999), p. 22

History

Adaptation became a psychoanalytic topic through ego psychology, especially Hartmann’s 1939 monograph, which stressed the ego’s role in adapting to an average expectable environment and described capacities that develop outside of conflict (Moses, n.d.). Mid-century analysts emphasized the capacity to cope realistically with life’s difficulties, under the name ego strength (McWilliams, 1999, pp. 20–21).

The word “resilience” came largely from developmental psychology. Werner’s Kauai study, begun with children born in 1955, Rutter’s work on protective mechanisms, and Masten’s synthesis moved the field from studying how adversity damages children to studying how many of them do well anyway (Werner, 1993; Rutter, 1987; Masten, 2001). Bonanno (2004) extended the argument to adults facing loss and trauma.

The PDM tradition brings these strands together in one rating. PDM-3’s definition draws on both: the ego-psychological stress on adaptation and the developmental emphasis on thriving after adversity. It asks clinicians to keep social and cultural differences in mind when rating this capacity (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 727) and adds a life-span perspective in its adolescent and older-adult chapters.

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