Introduction to the Enneagram
The modern Enneagram theory does not originate from a single school of thought. Instead, it has its roots in ancient wisdom traditions and combines with modern psychology, integrating perspectives from various schools. As a personality structure and personal development tool widely applied in businesses, government agencies, education, and service sectors, the Enneagram rapidly expanded in the late twentieth century.
Many training programs utilize this system to promote psychological health and enhance interpersonal communication efficiency. Although the Enneagram is widely applied in adult self-development, some have questioned its application due to a lack of rigorous scientific research. However, subsequent research results indicate that Enneagram-based training does indeed contribute to psychological growth and self-development, and further explore its clinical applications and future research directions.
What is Personality
Personality is the underlying tone of how we operate in this world, our psychological profile. Just as no two leaves in the world are identical, each of us is a unique individual. Even twins raised in the same family environment can have different personalities, sometimes vastly so. Psychology considers personality to stem from an individual’s stable behavioral patterns and internal psychological processes.
- The psychoanalytic school, founded by Freud, believes that a person’s unconscious and subconscious have a greater influence on personality than consciousness, and that childhood experiences directly shape an individual’s personality.
- Trait theorists in psychology believe that people are positioned somewhere along a continuum of various personality traits. That is, each dimension of personality traits, such as introversion-extroversion, is continuous, not a state of “having or not having,” but a state of “more or less.”
- Biological psychologists place more emphasis on genetic factors. They are more inclined to explain individual differences in personality through innate genetic traits.
- The humanistic school believes that a person’s sense of responsibility and level of self-acceptance are important causes of personality differences. Therefore, this school advocates that for a person to become themselves, they must take responsibility and live in the present.
- The behaviorist school believes that stable behavioral patterns are the result of conditioned reflexes and social expectations.
- The cognitive school explains behavioral differences through how individuals process information. For example, depressed people tend to view their relationships with partners pessimistically, while paranoid individuals often harbor suspicions about their partners…
- Human behavior is often multi-causal or one cause with multiple effects; behaviors are not in a single causal relationship. Naturally, there is no absolutely correct theory in personality psychology; they just provide us with different perspectives for understanding personality. Similarly, a healthy personality is not singular, but flexible, resilient, and capable of growth; while the growth potential and improvability of unhealthy personalities (such as antisocial) are quite controversial.
However, despite understanding these principles, we still find it difficult to know ourselves, let alone control ourselves, and thus inevitably live in troubles and suffering. To escape these troubles and sufferings, many people choose to seek help from professional psychologists. It’s worth noting that many of those seeking help from psychologists are often seen as “successful” by others. Most of them are well-educated, successful in their careers, and have happy marriages. But they are not happy, and the root cause is that they don’t understand themselves.
At the same time, the emergence of these “successful but unsatisfied” individuals has promoted the development of humanistic psychology and post-humanistic psychology. After practice by numerous psychologists, it has been found that the Enneagram is currently the best method for solving such growth obstacle problems in life. If people can clearly recognize their personality type and play to their strengths while avoiding their weaknesses, it can help us better understand and transform our personalities, reduce the troubles and sufferings in our lives, and add happiness.
Personality is a mirror, and the lovers we encounter are often projections of this mirror of self. The partners we choose reflect our needs and inner fears; “Who you are determines who you meet” - it’s our personality that attracts each other.
What is the Enneagram
The modern Enneagram theory divides personalities into nine basic types, each with its unique thinking patterns, emotions, strengths, weaknesses, growth opportunities, and core motivations, primarily centered around specific emotions. In practical application, each person is a mixture of two or more types, which can even derive into hundreds or thousands of different combinations that change dynamically, but this does not change their basic personality type.
The Enneagram emphasizes the interrelationships and dynamic changes between personality types, believing that individuals can develop and transform between different types. Compared to other personality trait theories and models, the Enneagram is a transformative model that focuses more on an individual’s inner motivations and emotional needs, thus having stronger application value in personal growth, mental health, and interpersonal relationships.
In the Enneagram theory, a person is “usually” composed of one basic type(9), one wing(2), and one dominant instinctual variant(3), totaling 54 main variants.
The Enneagram theory does not constrain people, but opens a shortcut to exploring one’s potential. This is also a point where the Enneagram differs from other commercial entertainment-type Barnum effect tests; the Enneagram is a personality system that can truly help people explore, develop, and arm themselves.
The graphical structure of the Enneagram consists of a circle and nine lines. To draw it, mark nine equidistant points on a circle, with the twelve o’clock position being 9 (Type Nine), and the remaining types decreasing counterclockwise. Types 9, 6, and 3 connect to form an equilateral triangle, and the remaining six points connect in the following order: 1 > 4 > 2 > 8 > 5 > 7 > 1.
Basic Personality Types
In the Enneagram, we are born with one dominant type. This innate orientation largely determines how we learn and adapt to our childhood environment. It also seems to lead to certain unconscious orientations towards parental figures, although why this happens remains unresearched.
Regardless, by the time children are four or five years old, their consciousness has developed enough to have an independent sense of self. Although their identity is still very unstable, at this age, children have already begun to build their inner world and find ways to fit into the world.
This is our basic (core) personality type:
- The basic personality type does not transform into another type over time or due to other factors.
- The descriptions of personality types are universally applicable, regardless of gender; no type is inherently male or female.
- Not all descriptions of the basic type will apply to you; this will fluctuate based on the healthy, average, and unhealthy characteristics of your personality type.
- The Enneagram uses numbers to designate each type because numbers are value-neutral—they only suggest the entire range of attitudes and behaviors for each type, without specifying anything positive or negative. Unlike labels used in psychiatry, numbers provide an unbiased shorthand way to indicate a lot about a person without being pejorative.
- The numbers of the types do not indicate any ranking or good or bad.
- No type is inherently better or worse than any other type. Although all personality types have unique strengths and weaknesses, certain types may be considered more popular than others in specific cultures or groups.
- Furthermore, for some reason, you might not like being a certain type. But as you learn more about all types, you’ll find that just as each type has unique strengths, each type also has unique weaknesses.
- The ideal of the Enneagram is to become the best version of yourself, not to imitate the strengths of other types.
The Triadic Self
If humans could focus on their overall nature, the Enneagram theory would be unnecessary; and if one doesn’t put effort into understanding oneself, everything becomes inaccessible. Great spiritual traditions generally believe that human nature is divided, causing opposition to both self and divinity. In fact, more than lacking unity in our nature, what we lack is the actual manifestation of “normalcy.”
Most surprisingly, the Enneagram symbol system encompasses both the unity (circle) and division (triangle and six points) of human nature. The Enneagram comprehensively explains “who we are” from psychological and spiritual perspectives, while providing a way out of our predicaments as we deeply understand them.
In this section, we can see the main ways in which human psychology splits from initial unity into triality. The nine personality types contained in these three groups are not unrelated, but fundamentally interconnected, with significance far beyond individual personality types.
The triads are an important part of the transformation work, specifically pointing out people’s main imbalances. The triads represent three sets of main content about self-problems and self-defense, while revealing the primary methods of repressing consciousness and limiting the self.
Triad | Types | Main Issues |
---|---|---|
Instinctive | Types Eight, Nine, One | Maintaining resistance to reality (creating boundaries for oneself by tensing the body), often resulting in aggressive and repressive behaviors. Under the mask of self-defense, there is a great sense of anger. |
Feeling | Types Two, Three, Four | Very concerned with self-image (based on erroneous or illusory self-personality), treating one's story or illusory qualities as real identity. Under the mask of self-defense, there is a great sense of shame. |
Thinking | Types Five, Six, Seven | Often anxious (having felt a lack of support and guidance), guided by behavioral patterns believed to enhance security and sense of safety. Under the mask of self-defense, there is a great sense of fear. |
The triads are also often described as the “three centers” or “Body Types,” with Instinctive corresponding to the body, Feeling to the heart, and Thinking to the brain.
Wing System
The Enneagram personality types are presented in a circle, so regardless of one’s basic personality type, there will always be different types on both sides. The types on the left and right are called wings, which modify or blend with the basic personality type, reinforcing certain tendencies. For example, if your basic personality type is Type Nine, your wing could be either Type Eight or Type One. No one is a “pure” type, and in some cases, a Type Nine might even have both wings. However, for most people, the wing tends to lean towards one side.
Wings help personalize the various basic personality types in the Enneagram. Each wing is a subsidiary subtype of the basic type, and understanding wings helps reduce problems one might face on the spiritual path.
When considering the dominant wing, each personality type has unique subsidiary subtypes that can be observed in daily life. For instance, in real life, a Type Seven with a Type Eight wing and a Type Seven with a Type Six wing will have very different styles. Each basic type has two subsidiary subtypes, resulting in eighteen different subsidiary subtypes when combining the nine basic types with their wings.
Instinctual Variants
Each point on the Enneagram, besides having two wings, also has three instinctual variants; these variants explain the areas that each type particularly focuses on in life. A person’s dominant instinctual orientation represents the scenarios they frequently enact.
Instinctual variants indicate which of the three basic human instincts was most severely distorted in childhood, enough to influence the prejudices and behavioral patterns within the personality type.
Just as we are influenced by the Enneagram types, we also have three instinctual variants, though only one plays a dominant role. If we describe the instinctual variants as a three-layer structure, the most dominant would be at the top, followed by the middle, with the least influential at the bottom. Moreover, even without knowing someone’s basic personality type, we can still identify their instinctual variant; instincts can be defined and observed based on individual characteristics, and the functions of variants operate independently, unaffected by the basic personality type, thus not considered “subsidiary subtypes.”
Instinctual variants are the three main instincts driving human behavior: self-preservation instinct, social instinct, and sexual instinct. Therefore, each personality type has three variants based on these three dominant instincts. For example, a Type Five could be a self-preservation Type Five, a social Type Five, or a sexual Type Five, and these Type Fives might focus on noticeably different things.
Thus, it can be said that a person is composed of one basic type, one wing, and one dominant instinctual variant. For instance, a self-preservation Type One with a Type Two wing, or a sexual Type Eight with a Type Nine wing. Since instinctual variants have no direct relationship with wings, it’s easier to understand personality types through the “lens” of either the wing or the dominant instinctual variant. However, when combining both, each personality type would have six variations, resulting in fifty-four main variants across the nine personality types.
Levels of Development
Levels of development allow us to observe and measure the degree to which we identify with our personality structure. Additionally, they clearly distinguish the differences between potential types, adding a “vertical” dimension to the “horizontal” classification system of each type.
Ken Wilber, a pioneer in establishing models of human consciousness, pointed out that any complete system of psychology must consider both horizontal and vertical aspects. The horizontal aspect only describes the characteristics of each type, but to perfect a system, the vertical aspect must also be considered.
Although the nine personality types are ingenious, they can only be considered a “horizontal” classification. For a system to accurately project human nature and fully reflect the constantly changing states of each type, it must consider the “vertical” operation and development methods of each type. The levels of development and the directions of integration and disintegration are the answers.
The levels of development for each type are unique yet interconnected; they help us think about where people of each type are “located” and in which “direction” they are moving when in healthy, average, and unhealthy states. This is particularly important for therapy and self-help, as it determines what is most crucial at any given point in the transformation process, and helps understand which characteristics and motivations are compatible with the personality type, thus recognizing the causes of mistyping and other confusions. For example, Type Eight is often classified as “aggressive,” while Type Five is seen as “avoidant,” but in fact, people of any type have both aggressive and avoidant sides. Levels of development help us see how and when Type Eight becomes aggressive, and more importantly, why Type Eight behaves this way. The most profound effect of the levels of development is their ability to measure a person’s degree of identification with their personal personality - that is, how conservative, how closed, or how free and open a person can be.
Each type includes three main ranges: healthy, average, and unhealthy, and each of these three ranges encompasses three levels of development. The healthy state (Levels 1 to 3) represents the high functionality of that type; the average state (Levels 4 to 6) represents the “normal” behavior of that type, which is where most people fall; the unhealthy state (Levels 7 to 9) represents the extremely abnormal manifestation of that type.
Tritype
Tritype is a newer theoretical concept, an additional extension within the Enneagram theory, providing a more detailed and in-depth understanding to help people comprehend themselves and others more comprehensively.
This theory posits that everyone has a primary type, which is the core personality trait of an individual. Additionally, there is a secondary type in each center. The combination of these three secondary types forms a person’s Tritype. For example, if a person’s main type is Type Five (Thinking center), the other two types might be Type Eight (Instinctive center) and Type Three (Feeling center), making this person’s Tritype 583.
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