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Personality / Capacities

Capacity for Differentiation and Integration

Two movements make up this capacity. Differentiation is telling things apart: your feelings from someone else’s, what you imagine from what is happening, the person in front of you from the parent they remind you of, today from twenty years ago. Integration is holding things together: knowing that the friend who disappointed you is the same friend you love, and that the self who failed last week is the same self who will try again tomorrow.

The PDM-3 defines the capacity as the ability to distinguish self from other, fantasy from reality, inner representations from outer people and circumstances, and present from past and future, and to see the connections among them without confusing them. Its core is a realistic, coherent identity and an equally differentiated, nuanced picture of other people. It includes a sense of personal continuity over time, both a conscious sense of individuality and unconscious strivings for a continuous self-experience (Lingiardi, Muzi, & Bornstein, 2026, p. 720).

When this capacity is strong, people can juggle complex roles and mixed feelings and stay open to new and ambiguous experience. When it is weaker, experience tends to be simplified or confused. The manual lists signs of identity disturbance: a painful sense of incoherence, striking gaps between beliefs and behavior, overidentification with groups or roles, and difficulty committing to values and goals (p. 720). Everyone’s sense of self loosens a little under stress; this capacity describes how firmly it holds and how quickly it comes back.

Across the Range

The PDM-3 offers three anchor points on its five-point scale (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 721). Ratings of 4 and 2 fall between them.

5: Healthy
The person can appreciate how different feelings, motives, and wishes, their own and others’, are both separate and related, even when they are subtle or ambiguous. They can organize experience across time and across contexts with conflicting demands, such as being a spouse and being a parent. Identity, values, and ideals feel coherent and fit the person’s background, and descriptions of important others are differentiated, realistic, and appreciative of complexity.
3: Mild to moderate difficulties
The person can differentiate and integrate experience, but with some narrowing and oversimplification, especially under stress. Strong feelings or wishes can temporarily fragment or polarize experience, which the manual calls splitting. Some people at this level have an apparently integrated but polarized view of themselves and a less integrated view of others; some have the reverse. The capacity may work better in less intimate relationships.
1: Major to severe difficulties
Inner experience is fragmented, or rigidly compartmentalized and oversimplified, most of the time. In extreme cases self and other may be confused and thinking may be starkly all-positive or all-negative. There may be a severe sense of inner emptiness, little sense of personal values, and confused, unstable experiences of self and others, with impaired reality testing.

How It Develops

Psychoanalytic developmental theory has long located the first steps here. Margaret Mahler described the infant’s movement through subphases of separation–individuation, reaching an initial resolution by about age 3 (McWilliams, 2011, p. 25). In a modern synthesis, Svrakic and Zorumski (2021) describe the differentiation of self-representations from representations of others as a milestone around 18 to 24 months, and the integration of loving and frustrating experiences into stable “self-constancy” and “object constancy” as unfolding between about 6 months and 3 years. Infant researchers have cautioned that babies are far more competent and active than older stage theories assumed (McWilliams, 2011, p. 44).

Identity is a central task of adolescence. The PDM-3 describes it as the synthesis of earlier identifications with, and disidentifications from, parents, authorities, and peers into a new, personal form, along with growing autonomy and separateness from caregivers (Tanzilli & Malberg, 2026, p. 428). The manual’s developmental guidelines follow James Marcia’s theory of identity status, from early teenagers who have barely begun the task to young adults with a coherent identity built on their own choices (pp. 429–430). Cultural context matters: in multicultural settings, some difficulty integrating identity may reflect the work of reconciling more than one cultural world (p. 429). Trauma and dissociation can disrupt the continuity of self (p. 428).

In old age, the manual notes, a sense of identity is not newly acquired; people do well here if they developed it earlier, though reduced physical and cognitive resources can weaken it (Del Corno & Plotkin, 2026, p. 910). In parenting, this capacity shows in whether a parent can see a child as a separate person rather than as someone who exists to meet the parent’s needs (Lingiardi et al., 2026, pp. 748–749).

How It Shows Up in Personality

More than any other capacity, this one tracks the levels of personality organization. People at the neurotic level and above generally have an integrated sense of identity: they feel continuous with the child they were, can describe their own temperament and values with a sense of stability, and describe important others in multifaceted ways (McWilliams, 2011, p. 57). At the borderline level, splitting is linked to identity diffusion, the inability to integrate different aspects of oneself into a coherent whole; attitudes, values, and goals may shift, and a person can look quite different from one occasion to the next (McWilliams & Shedler, 2026, p. 659). The psychotic level involves identity diffusion together with poor differentiation between self and others and between fantasy and reality (p. 660).

Styles give the capacity a particular shape. The PDM-3 notes that people with a narcissistic style may show an apparently integrated but polarized self-image alongside difficulty forming an integrated view of others, whereas people with a schizoid style may lack integration in their own self-experience while holding a subtle picture of others (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 721). At lower levels, narcissistic grandiosity can conceal identity diffusion (McWilliams & Shedler, 2026, p. 688). People with an emotionally dysregulated style may move from one self-state to another without noticing the inconsistencies, leaving themselves and others disoriented (p. 697). The related defenses of splitting the image of others and of idealization and devaluation are ways of keeping contradictory feelings apart rather than integrating them.

How Different Thinkers See It

Margaret Mahler

Mahler studied how infants move from a state of relative unawareness of others, through symbiotic relatedness, to psychological separation and individuation, in subphases she called hatching, practicing, rapprochement, and “on the way to object constancy” (McWilliams, 2011, p. 25). Clinicians used her model to wonder whether early disruptions, such as a parent’s absence during rapprochement, had made separation harder (p. 26).

Edith Jacobson

McWilliams credits Jacobson’s The Self and the Object World (1964) with drawing attention to the self, as distinct from the more functional concept of the ego (McWilliams, 2011, p. 177). As Svrakic and Zorumski (2021) summarize her, self-representations begin embedded in representations of others and share their emotional coloring, so that a frustrating other goes with a frustrated self.

Erik Erikson

Erikson introduced the idea of identity and the “identity crisis” in the 1950s, when it was new (McWilliams, 1999, p. 163). McWilliams notes that identity becomes harder to secure in large, fast-changing societies, where a person cannot rely on a stable role and needs instead a continuity of inner values and feelings (p. 163). The PDM-3 also cites his concept of “negative identity,” a sense of individuality built around social distrust, either-or beliefs, and cynicism (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 720).

Otto Kernberg

Kernberg’s model, on which the PDM-3 draws for assessing level of organization, considers identity integration alongside the quality of relationships and defensive functioning, and his structural interview, now the Structured Interview of Personality Organization, assesses integrated concepts of self and others (Lingiardi et al., 2026, pp. 709, 735–736). He distinguishes the normal identity crisis of adolescence from identity diffusion, a lack of integration in representations of self and others that signals personality difficulty (Tanzilli & Sharp, 2026, p. 469).

Stern and infant research

D. N. Stern’s infant research described “representations of interactions that have been generalized,” one of the concepts the PDM-3 lists among precursors of its personality prototypes (Lingiardi & McWilliams, 2026a, p. 7). Infant researchers including Stern have critiqued stage theories, arguing that babies are more competent than those models assume and connecting difficulties to attachment relationships rather than fixed phases (McWilliams, 2011, p. 44). Bromberg’s image of being able to “stand in the spaces” between different self-states, quoted in the PDM-3, captures the relational version of integration (McWilliams & Shedler, 2026, p. 659).

Examples

“I am the kind of person who …”

McWilliams describes a patient organized at the borderline level who became furious at a clinic intake questionnaire asking her to complete sentences such as “I am the kind of person who ___.” The task confronted her with how discontinuous her sense of herself was. Years and many sessions later, she reflected: “Now I could fill in that form. I wonder why I went ballistic about it.” McWilliams contrasts this with psychotic-level patients, who are more frightened than offended by questions about identity.

Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis (2011), pp. 64–65

Kai’s dream figures

In a PDM-3 case illustration, Kai, a 27-year-old nonbinary person, brought dreams full of abandoned and lost boys tormented by violent male figures. Working to integrate these figures and the conflicts attached to them helped Kai reach a more integrated and less polarized gender identity. The case shows integration as a process of holding together painful parts of experience rather than suppressing them. Kai was rated 3 on this capacity.

Lingiardi & McWilliams (Eds.), PDM-3 Online Supplement (2026), pp. 57, 62

Martin’s uneven integration

Martin, whose case appears in the same supplement, is described as having significant difficulties in most areas of mental functioning along with difficulties in differentiating and integrating representations of self and others, and is rated 3 here. His therapist experienced the relationship in alternating ways, at times cast as a savior in a powerful role, at other times silently challenged.

Lingiardi & McWilliams (Eds.), PDM-3 Online Supplement (2026), pp. 31–32, 36

History

“Differentiation and integration” is one of the few capacity names that has stayed the same through all three editions of the PDM: it was one of the first edition’s nine categories (Stern, 2009) and one of the PDM-2’s 12 capacities (Gori et al., 2025). Over that time, however, the concept has absorbed much of the clinical literature on identity. The PDM-3 version places identity at its core and draws on Erikson, Kernberg’s structural model, and attachment research, noting that the Adult Attachment Interview’s coherence ratings assess the ability to think about attachment experiences without splitting, idealization, or denial (Lingiardi et al., 2026, pp. 720, 734).

The concepts behind it trace back through mid-twentieth-century ego psychology and object relations theory: Jacobson’s work on self and object representations, Mahler’s on separation–individuation, Erikson’s on identity, and Kernberg’s on identity diffusion in borderline conditions (McWilliams, 2011, pp. 25, 177; Svrakic & Zorumski, 2021). Bowen’s family-systems concept of “differentiation of self,” the capacity to stay thoughtful under emotional pressure and allow both intimacy and autonomy without fusion, appears in the PDM-3 as a related idea for parents (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 749).

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