Capacity to Construct and Use Internal Standards and Ideals

Across the Range

PDM-3 rates each capacity from 5 (healthy) to 1 (severely impaired), describing levels 5, 3, and 1. Paraphrased (Lingiardi et al., 2026, pp. 729–730):

5: Flexible and integrated

Standards are flexible and realistic. They support meaningful striving, a sense of authenticity and self-esteem, and belonging to a culture. Remorse, guilt, and shame are softened by self-compassion and tolerance of human limits, and serve as signals to reconsider behavior. Self and others are viewed with a balance of compassion and constructive criticism.

3: Rigid or inconsistent

Standards may be rigid and concrete, or may shift across situations, driven more by immediate needs than by coherent principles. Moral behavior may wobble under stress. Guilt and shame may be felt as paralyzing self-criticism rather than as signals, or may be denied in favor of a self-focused stance that prioritizes power, self-protection, and gain.

1: Tyrannical or absent

Moral concerns either dominate tyrannically or hardly matter. Self and others may be seen as irredeemably bad or wholly good. People with harsh standards may feel unable to pursue goals, take risks, or form deep relationships, and may expect ridicule; or they may hold an aggressive certainty of moral superiority. Those lacking inner norms seek power for their own advantage and show a striking absence of empathy or remorse.

The manual stresses that high functioning requires not only coherent principles but awareness of how one’s decisions affect others, and that low functioning can look like either excessive conscientiousness about unreasonably strict rules or the absence of inner morality (p. 729).

How It Develops

PDM-3 locates the roots of this capacity in early emotional exchanges with caregivers, through which ego ideals are internalized. Early shame experiences can help form standards, but when shame becomes humiliation because a caregiver fails to attune or to repair a rupture, the child has difficulty building flexible, realistic standards (Lingiardi et al., 2026, pp. 728–729). Standards are later refined through peers, teachers, mentors, and immersion in one’s culture (p. 729). The manual also cites neuroscientific evidence that the brain networks involved in moral decisions overlap with those for understanding other people’s minds (p. 729).

McWilliams (1999, p. 126) summarizes Roy Schafer’s 1968 account of how this taking-in matures: from a swallowing-whole kind of assimilation of a caregiver, through increasingly discriminating and reflective forms of identification; by the oedipal years, she notes, children can say which qualities of which parent they want to adopt.

PDM-3 describes adolescence as a critical time for the elaboration of a mature superego, as sexual and aggressive urges intensify. Guilt and shame can either fuel a personal morality that supports self-esteem or, when teenagers cannot yet make sense of their inner lives, deepen self-blame and self-loathing (Tanzilli & Malberg, 2026, p. 443). Using the vocabulary of moral-development research, the chapter describes young adolescents as still largely preconventional, judging actions by their consequences; mid-adolescents as highly sensitive to peer approval; and late adolescents as able to construct a personal “moral compass” that goes beyond conformity (pp. 443–444). In later life, some people grow more morally rigid, perhaps in defense against rapid social change or personal loss, while others feel freer of social customs (Del Corno & Plotkin, 2026, p. 915).

How It Shows Up in Personality

Problems with this capacity run in two directions, and different styles cluster at each.

• Harsh standards. People with an introjective depressive style project onto the therapist internal critics that the literature has variously described as a harsh, sadistic, or primitive superego (McWilliams, 2011, p. 248). People with an obsessive–compulsive style are deeply concerned with control and moral rectitude (p. 300). Early analysts were surprised to find that patients with the harshest superegos had often been the most laxly parented, and concluded that a child who has to invent an inner authority may make it severe (p. 299). People with a masochistic style may hold ideals that equate suffering with goodness, as in the case of Molly below.
• Absent or self-serving standards. McWilliams (2011, p. 160) describes the famous absence of conscience in psychopathic psychology as reflecting both a defective superego and a lack of primary attachments. PDM-3 notes that when inflated self-esteem comes with aggression and suspiciousness, as in Kernberg’s malignant narcissism, clinicians should look carefully at this capacity (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 722).
• Shame rather than guilt. McWilliams (2011, p. 178) observes that many of Freud’s patients suffered from too much inner commentary on their goodness or badness, a “harsh superego,” whereas many contemporary clients feel empty and worry about fitting in rather than about betraying principles. For people with a narcissistic style, shame, the sense of being seen as bad, may matter more than guilt, the conviction of having done wrong (p. 180).

Level of organization shapes how standards are held. McWilliams (2011, pp. 29–30) contrasts a woman who announces she is evil because she had bad thoughts about her father with one who reports that part of her seems to feel evil when she has such thoughts. Both may be self-attacking, but the first, whose punitive conscience is not experienced as alien, has a far more serious problem. McWilliams says the difference between a punitive conscience felt as alien and one felt as simply oneself has important prognostic implications and was considered to warrant a different level of classification. In our reading, whether a person can observe their conscience rather than simply obey it is one of the markers that separate the neurotic level from more severe levels such as the borderline. The capacity is closely related to self-esteem regulation and empathy.

How Different Thinkers See It

Sigmund Freud

Freud coined “superego” (literally “above me”) for the part of the self that congratulates us for doing our best and criticizes us when we fall short. He thought it formed mainly in the oedipal period through identification with parental values; most contemporary analysts think it begins earlier, in primitive infantile notions of good and bad (McWilliams, 2011, p. 29). Psychoanalysis took on “superego repair” as a goal, helping patients reevaluate overly stringent standards. McWilliams notes that taming tyrannical superegos tended to encourage more ethical behavior, not less, because people with condemnatory consciences often defy them (p. 30).

Melanie Klein

Klein is among the authors McWilliams (2011, p. 248) cites for the idea of a harsh, primitive superego in depression. Her depressive position, in which others come to be seen as separate subjects worthy of concern (pp. 25, 172), can be read as a developmental picture of moral feeling rooted in care for others rather than only in fear of punishment.

Heinz Kohut

In Kohut’s self psychology, the child’s idealized image of a parent, the “idealized parent imago,” is gradually transformed into ideals to be pursued; if the child is traumatically disappointed, the person’s ideals may lack energy (as summarized by Belzen, 2010). McWilliams (2011, p. 299) notes that Kohut and other self psychologists reached conclusions about harsh, self-invented standards similar to the earlier analysts’, from the standpoint of idealization.

Roy Schafer

Schafer’s work on internalization described how identification matures from wholesale incorporation toward selective, reflective appropriation of others’ qualities (McWilliams, 1999, p. 126). In our reading, the implication for this capacity is that standards chosen in this way can be held more flexibly than standards swallowed whole.

Moral development research

PDM-3 borrows the language of moral-development research, such as “preconventional” moral reasoning (Tanzilli & Malberg, 2026, p. 443), and the M-Axis chapter cites Lawrence Kohlberg’s work on moral development (Kohlberg, 1984, as cited in Lingiardi et al., 2026). The psychodynamic view adds emotion to this cognitive tradition: the question is not only how a person reasons about right and wrong, but how guilt and shame feel and what they do.

Examples

“I am evil” versus “part of me feels evil”

McWilliams contrasts two depressive, self-attacking women who have had bad thoughts about their fathers. One declares that she is evil; the other says that a part of her seems to feel evil. The second can observe her conscience; the first is ruled by it. McWilliams notes that the first woman’s problem is so much greater that it was considered to warrant a different level of classification.

Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis (2011), pp. 29–30

Molly’s “automatic”

Molly, a nurse in treatment with McWilliams, had been raised to put others first at all costs, a lesson reinforced by her religious schooling and her training. In therapy, McWilliams gently questioned Molly’s internalized teachings that equated suffering with goodness, and the two clarified how Molly would “go on automatic” under stress, shelving her own needs to care for others. Slowly, behaviors she had never questioned became ego-alien, that is, felt as foreign rather than simply as who she was.

Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (2004), pp. 204, 210–211

Emilia: good or wicked

In the PDM-3 supplement, Emilia’s main concern was the dichotomy between goodness and wickedness: customers and nuns thought her a nice person, yet she was convinced she had been a bad mother and that people who knew her better would reject her. She had joined her late husband’s accusations with her own. In therapy she confronted those self-accusations, and her daughter’s account of her as a tender mother brought relief. Her chart rated this capacity at 4.

Lingiardi & McWilliams (Eds.), PDM-3 Online Supplement (2026), pp. 40–43

History

Freud introduced the superego with his structural model in The Ego and the Id, and the concept gave early psychoanalysis one of its main therapeutic aims: easing harsh, punitive consciences, especially in an era when many middle-class adults had been raised in ways that fostered them (McWilliams, 2011, pp. 29–30). Later contributors widened the picture: most contemporary analysts placed the superego’s origins earlier, Schafer studied how internalization matures, Kohut traced ideals to the child’s idealization of parents, and observers noted a cultural shift from guilt toward shame and emptiness (McWilliams, 2011, p. 178).

PDM-3 frames the capacity in contemporary terms, emphasizing flexibility, cultural context, and the adaptive use of guilt and shame, and drawing on research about the neural overlap between moral judgment and understanding others (Lingiardi et al., 2026, pp. 728–729). Assessment tools it mentions include the values domain of the STIPO-R interview and the antisocial features scales of the Personality Assessment Inventory (p. 736). It extends the capacity to parenting, where it shapes reasonable expectations of children and the ability to hold to one’s values amid conflicting advice (p. 752).

Sources

• Belzen, J. A. (2010). Religion and self: Notions from a cultural psychological perspective. Pastoral Psychology, 59(4), 399–409. doi:10.1007/s11089-009-0204-z
• Del Corno, F., & Plotkin, D. (2026). Profile of mental functioning in older adults—MOA axis. In V. Lingiardi & N. McWilliams (Eds.), Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (3rd ed., pp. 903–925). Guilford Press.
• Kohlberg, L. (1984). Essays on Moral Development: Vol. 2. The Psychology of Moral Development. Harper & Row.
• Lingiardi, V., & McWilliams, N. (Eds.). (2026b). Online supplement to Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (3rd ed.): Clinical illustrations. Guilford Press. guilford.com/companion-site
• Lingiardi, V., Muzi, L., & Bornstein, R. F. (2026). Profile of mental functioning—M axis. In V. Lingiardi & N. McWilliams (Eds.), Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (3rd ed., pp. 709–759). Guilford Press.
• McWilliams, N. (1999). Psychoanalytic Case Formulation. Guilford Press.
• McWilliams, N. (2004). Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Practitioner’s Guide. Guilford Press.
• McWilliams, N. (2011). Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
• Tanzilli, A., & Malberg, N. (2026). Profile of mental functioning in adolescence—MA axis. In V. Lingiardi & N. McWilliams (Eds.), Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (3rd ed., pp. 413–467). Guilford Press.