Bridging ICD-11 Dimensional Personality Assessment and Psychodynamic Functioning: The Psychic Arbitrage Profile Protocol (PAPP)

The ICD-11 dimensional model of personality disorders evaluates severity and trait domains but does not capture the economic dynamics of psychic functioning: how affective value circulates between registers, through what operations, at what costs, and with what residual resources. This article introduces the Psychic Arbitrage Profile Protocol (PAPP), a dual-component clinical assessment instrument (clinician-rated, 28 items; self-report, 30 items) that operationalises five dimensions derived from a transactional framework of psychic functioning: market accessibility (ACC), psychic liquidity (LIQ), transactional repertoire (REP), cumulative transaction cost (COST), and residual arbitrage capacity (RES).

The article presents the systematic mapping between ICD-11 severity grades and PAPP dimensional configurations, demonstrates how each ICD-11 trait domain translates into a specific PAPP configuration, and argues that PAPP adds differential clinical utility by distinguishing between patients with identical ICD-11 profiles but different functional-economic configurations. A retrospective mapping onto the abandoned DSM multiaxial system illustrates what dimensional information was lost in the DSM-5 transition. An illustrative clinical case demonstrates the scoring procedure, profile interpretation, and therapeutic decision-making. The psychometric validation plan is outlined.

This preprint has been submitted for peer review at Personality and Mental Health (Wiley).