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Personality / Capacities

Capacity for Agency and Purpose

Agency is the felt sense that your life is yours: that you initiate your actions, that your choices matter, and that you can steer, even when circumstances limit you. Purpose is the sense that your life adds up to something, that it has direction and meaning. The PDM-3 joins them in its final M-Axis capacity, describing it as the experience of mastering one’s own actions, feelings, and thoughts and constructing a narrative that gives cohesion and meaning to one’s choices. It implies a feeling of personal “authorship,” internal control, and self-efficacy (Lingiardi, Muzi, & Bornstein, 2026, pp. 713, 731).

The manual distinguishes two layers. Implicit agency is the prereflective feeling of starting and controlling one’s own actions; explicit agency is the conscious recognition that “that was me,” including intending, choosing, and initiating (p. 731). The capacity also includes a sense of separateness from others, concern for future generations, the capacity for psychological growth, and spirituality or other systems of ideals, not necessarily religious, that give life direction. People who function well here have a coherent personal philosophy that guides decisions, are comfortable with their choices even when outcomes are unexpected, stay open to other viewpoints, can see the bigger picture, and show curiosity, wonder, and freshness of perspective (p. 731).

This capacity is not a measure of success or productivity. A person can have a strong sense of authorship over a quiet life, and someone with every outward achievement can feel like a passenger. PDM-3’s older-adult chapter makes the point directly: in late life, agency gives meaning to the present stage independent of evaluations based solely on efficiency and productivity (Del Corno & Plotkin, 2026a, p. 916).

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. 731–732):

5: Authored and meaningful
The person has an integrated, intrinsic sense of agency and a steady sense of purpose. They can look beyond themselves and their immediate situation, value their own and others’ inner lives, approach new situations openly and creatively, and may find meaning in belonging to and contributing to a community. They have woven both pleasant and painful experiences into a life story of growth.
3: Present but effortful
Agency and self-efficacy are generally present but falter under stress, pain, or conflict. There is some sense of purpose alongside periods of doubt. Looking beyond the self takes effort, and connection to wider communities is limited.
1: Adrift
The person lacks direction and purpose, experiences the past as disconnected events, and struggles to tell a coherent life story. They may be unable to articulate a personal philosophy or goals. In the most severe cases, inner thoughts and actions feel controlled by outside events. Whether or not they notice the lack, they live with isolation, meaninglessness, and alienation.

The manual names two distortions at the low end: mistaking outside events for one’s own doing (illusory self-agency) and attributing one’s own actions to outside causes (illusory other-agency). It also notes that some people find meaning only by adhering to fundamentalist belief systems or cults, which supply purpose from outside (p. 731).

How It Develops

The roots of agency appear early. In Erikson’s scheme, as McWilliams (2011, pp. 24–25) summarizes it, the toddler’s stage of autonomy (versus shame and doubt) involves learning self-control, and the later stage of “initiative versus guilt” is a critical time for developing a sense of basic efficacy.

PDM-3’s adolescent chapter describes this capacity as closely tied to identity construction and moral development. During adolescence, the ability to see oneself as the author of one’s behavior and to assert decisions grows markedly, supported by the reorganization of attachment, growing autonomy, abstract thinking, and self-regulation (Tanzilli & Malberg, 2026, pp. 446–447). Young teens still look to adults for meaning; mid-teens explore interests and reevaluate goals; late adolescents organize past and present into a sense of personal mastery and begin to find meaning in broader life philosophies (p. 447). Delayed maturation of the capacity, the chapter notes, is associated with inhibition, self-sabotage, or uncritical adherence to ideologies absorbed from parents or peers (p. 447).

Later life reshapes the capacity again. PDM-3 describes it in older adults as “engagement”: belonging and participating in family and community, accepting change, and adapting old projects or creating new ones (Del Corno & Plotkin, 2026a, p. 916). Older adults functioning well might take up new interests, form new relationships, share knowledge with younger people, and contemplate the future of loved ones after their own death (p. 917). For parents, the capacity appears as the ability to make intentional, informed decisions about a child’s upbringing and to adjust as the child grows (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 752).

How It Shows Up in Personality

McWilliams (1999, p. 15) observes that most people come to therapists because something is compromising their sense of agency: they are being controlled by depression, anxiety, dissociation, obsession, compulsion, phobia, or paranoia, and have lost the sense of being master of their own ship. Seen this way, many styles have their own ways of diminishing agency:

Level of organization matters as well. McWilliams (2011, p. 58) notes that people at the neurotic level usually seek therapy not because of problems in essential security or agency, but because they keep running into conflicts between what they want and obstacles they suspect are of their own making. In our reading, PDM-3’s lowest anchor, where thoughts and actions feel externally controlled, describes experiences more typical of the psychotic level. The capacity draws on internal standards and ideals, which supply direction, and on differentiation and integration, which supplies a coherent self to be the author.

How Different Thinkers See It

Sigmund Freud

McWilliams (2004, p. 16) reads Freud’s method as an effort to foster a sense of agency: by making unconscious conflicts conscious, analysis tried to substitute knowledge and agency for symptoms, replacing an automatic, unformulated process with a mindful, reality-oriented one.

Erik Erikson

Erikson’s psychosocial theory places “generativity versus stagnation” at the center of middle adulthood (Ehlman & Ligon, 2012). Generativity, a concern to establish and guide future generations, has since been studied empirically (Faßbender, Wiebe, & Bates, 2019). PDM-3’s inclusion of “concern for succeeding generations” in this capacity (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 731) echoes the idea, and its older-adult personality chapter invokes Erikson’s late-life task of integrity versus despair (Del Corno & Plotkin, 2026b, p. 927).

Viktor Frankl

Frankl’s logotherapy holds that people are essentially motivated by a search for meaning that is personal and specific to their circumstances, and treats consciousness, freedom, and responsibility as the most important human traits (García-Alandete, 2024). Frankl described meaning as found through different kinds of values, including what he called creative and attitudinal values (García-Alandete, 2024). His account of the concentration camps, known in English as Man’s Search for Meaning, first appeared in German in 1946 (García-Alandete, 2024).

Roy Schafer

Schafer (1976) recommended “action language,” favoring verbs over abstract nouns: “You’re feeling pretty guilty” rather than “Your superego is attacking you” (McWilliams, 2004, p. 142). The person, rather than a mental structure, becomes the one doing the feeling. Not everyone was persuaded: W. W. Meissner (1979) criticized the action-language program from a more traditional, process-oriented psychoanalytic perspective, challenging its treatment of drives, affects, internalization, and the self.

D. W. Winnicott

Winnicott tied the feeling of being real to creativity. As quoted by Fischman (2022), he wrote that “It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living,” and contrasted it with compliance, which brings a sense of futility. Fischman also notes that Winnicott described the true self as the source of the “spontaneous gesture,” which suggests a picture of agency as spontaneous self-expression rather than control.

Self-determination theory and narrative research

Ryan and Deci (2000) propose three innate psychological needs, competence, autonomy, and relatedness, which when satisfied enhance self-motivation and mental health. Narrative identity research, cited in PDM-3, adds that the stories people tell about their lives can change: in a study of adults in psychotherapy, themes of agency in their personal narratives increased over treatment, and those increases were related to improvements in mental health (Adler, 2012).

Examples

Grace becomes the subject

Grace, a 48-year-old in the PDM-3 supplement, came to therapy devastated by a breakup and worried about never finding love. She had been waiting to be chosen by confident men who showed little interest in her as a person. In therapy she realized she could take the initiative herself, and began recalling her childhood boldness: she had once climbed the town hall tower. By the end of six months, her sense of purpose and self-direction had grown, and she began choosing partners instead of waiting to be chosen. The case summary puts it this way: rather than an object in other people’s lives, she experienced herself as the subject in her own. Her chart rated this capacity at 3.

Lingiardi & McWilliams (Eds.), PDM-3 Online Supplement (2026), pp. 47–53

Molly’s own judgment

In treating Molly, a nurse raised to put others first, McWilliams tried to follow her lead on practical arrangements, judging that respecting and promoting Molly’s sense of agency outweighed other considerations. When Molly brought in her husband’s interpretations of her and asked McWilliams to confirm or refute them, McWilliams generally asked instead what Molly herself thought and felt, sustaining the conviction that Molly was the only one who could judge how she really felt.

Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (2004), pp. 206, 209

History

Agency was implicit in psychoanalysis from the start, in Freud’s aim of replacing symptoms with conscious choice (McWilliams, 2004, p. 16). Mid-century, humanistic “third force” psychologists such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, and existential analysts such as Frankl and Rollo May, put the sense of self and self-esteem at the center (McWilliams, 1999, p. 164). Erikson extended development across the whole life span, Schafer reworked psychoanalytic language around the person as actor (Schafer, 1976), and research traditions from self-determination theory to narrative identity made agency and meaning measurable.

McWilliams (1999, pp. 15–16) describes respect for the client’s autonomy as underlying many features of analytic technique, such as returning questions to the client and declining to give advice, and reports that patients looking back on therapy frequently describe an increased sense of agency. In PDM-3, agency and purpose close the M Axis as the last of 13 capacities, in a domain the chapter calls Insight and Self-Direction and the PDC-3 form calls Self-Awareness and Self-Direction (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 712; Gordon & Bornstein, 2025).

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