Is Personality Functioning Unitary or Dialectic? A Dynamical Systems Analysis

Since its conceptual origins in recent diagnostic perspectives, the concept of “personality functioning” has sparked heated debate about the structure and development of personality (pathology). Specifically, researchers have disagreed about whether ‘personality functioning’ represents a single general personality factor as well as whether it provides any meaningful information beyond more established constructs like the five-factor traits. In this brief report, I seek to address these outstanding problems by examining how personality functioning is best conceptualised formally and how it might be related to the five-factor traits.