At the highest level of abstraction such mechanisms form, phenomenologically or metaphorically expressed, a pleasure-pain polarity . Active-Passive Existence, however, is but an initial phase. Once an integrative structure exists, it must maintain its existence through exchanges of energy and information with its environment. These modes of adaptation differ from the first phase of evolution, in that they regard how that which exists now endures. To circumvent this limitation, organisms have developed strategies by which to leave progeny.
Some personalities exhibit a reasonable balance on one or other of the polarity pairs.
Not all individuals fall at the center, of course. Individual differences in both personality features and overall style will reflect the relative positions and strengths of each polarity component. Personalities termed pleasure-deficient lack the capacity to experience or to enact certain aspects of the three polarities. The interpersonally-imbalanced lean strongly toward one or another extreme of a polarity. Finally, the intrapsychically-conflicted struggle with ambivalences toward opposing ends of a bipolarity.