Skip to content

The Enneagram

The Enneagram can be described an ancient, mystical personality-typing system that gets us out of our ruts in life. You can think of it kind of like the Myers-Briggs personality typing system, but with a Buddhist element to it, where self-observation is the vehicle we drive to coming home to one’s true self and one of nine divine qualities we are meant to portray in this life. The difference between the Enneagram and something like Myers-Briggs, however, is that the Enneagram is dynamic in the sense that it shows us how to grow upwards in emotional intelligence and become more expansive toward other ways of responding to stress besides with our knee-jerk reactions.

The word Enneagram is a Greek word. “Ennea” is the number nine, and “gram” refers to something written or drawn like a symbol. Sure enough, very simply, the Enneagram symbol is a circle with nine points around it denoting the nine personality archetypes.

Of course, the ancient people didn’t really think of “personalities” in the same way as we do today with our complexes, ego patterns, fears and unconscious motivations- our understanding of human nature has become more and more complex throughout history, and it’s largely thanks to people like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung that we understand human psychology as well as we do today. The ancient people perhaps saw the Enneagram as a system that described nine ways of blocking access to the divine, or nine “passions” or “sins”. But its origins are really shrouded in mystery. Nobody really knows where it came from or how we arrived at such a symbol, but it is possible that the ancient Egyptians worked with it.

Around the turn of the 20th century, an Armenian-Greek man named George Gurdjieff started teaching the Enneagram to his students in France as a symbol he unearthed from his extensive travels to various spiritual schools and monasteries in Egypt and Eastern Europe (although he, too, was deliberately cagey about where he got the symbol). Gurdjieff didn’t attribute personality types to the nine points like we do today, but he offered a kind of doorway to understanding how to work with it in a modern way.

Somehow– it is not clear how– a Bolivian mystic named Oscar Ichazo also got a hold of the symbol in the 1940’s. In a brilliant “aha!” moment, he matched up the nine qualities attributed to God in the Kabballistic Tree of Life to their respective points around the symbol in the correct order, and later, one of his students, a Chilean psychiatrist named Dr. Claudio Naranjo started connected the nine “types” to the different psychological illnesses described in the DSM, a medical textbook outlining all the medical categories for our psychological neuroses. This was an important bridge between the points representing nine divine characteristics to nine constellations of personality types. The Enneagram was transmitted to the Jesuit community in the US at around 1972, and they used it in their spiritual work, but then over the course of the late 1970’s, 80’s, and 90’s, the type descriptions got fleshed out, and it went mainstream: first, a western school emerged under Helen Palmer and Dr. David Daniels in California at Stanford, then an eastern school emerged under Don Riso (a former Jesuit) and Russ Hudson in New York. Today, the modern Enneagram of personality has proliferated all over the world and there are hundreds of books and youtube channels about it, and you can often find a psychotherapist who uses the Enneagram in their practice.

Some well-respected teachers today are:

Different schools have different names for the nine types, so I’ll list the two most common names: first from the Narrative Tradition, then from the Riso-Hudson school. Then I give my own short description.

Type 1: The Improver / The Reformer

The Type 1 is responsible and takes the tasks before them seriously. An example of the One archetype would be the American Puritan. The One looks around at the world and sees mess, disorganization, and immorality and wants to set it right again with discipline and control. They get annoyed by the imperfections in themselves, others and/or society and feel like they are the only ones who care about goodness and correctness and feel like the lot has fallen to them to correct everyone else’s lazy mistakes, which can make them bitter and angry at the burden they carry. They identify so closely with their superego that their id (the part of the ego structure that wants to indulge and have fun) operates out of view from their mind’s eye, so because their burden is so heavy, restraining, judgemental and restrictive, their shadow sometimes leaks out from under the controlled lid of their identity in surprising ways, exemplifying the Jungian aphorism that every light, after all, casts a shadow. Their hearts are in the right place: Ones want to follow their inner moral compass as a way back to god or Source or Universal love; they seem to remember an unconscious memory from before they were born how right, orderly and good God or Source’s creation was, and Ones want to restore creation as a way back to unity with the divine.

Type 2: The Giver / The Helper

The Type 2 is engaging, friendly and interested in forming and maintaining relationships. The Two looks around at the world and notices that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. They remember that they got positive attention from their caregivers as children when they were helpful and pleasant, so they go into adult life with that same approach, believing that they can get their needs met if they don’t mention them directly (because that would be crass and might break the relationship) but rather, by anticipating other peoples’ needs, thus, hoping their needs will be met in return. Below the attentive and engaging surface of the Two, however, is a vast emptiness aching for love, to feel love- it is a kind of memory they have from before they were born when they were one with Source and consumed with divine love. Being attentive to other peoples’ needs allows them to try and recreate the conditions in which they might get back some of that love, and it often leaves them feeling frustrated.

Type 3: The Performer / The Achiever

The Type 3 works hard, competes against themselves and/or others, and wants to be the best version of themselves they can be. They may be a cheerleader of the human potential in others or they may cut others off at the knees in order to get ahead, it depends on their social orientation toward the other– usually it’s some combination of both. Basically, Threes are so focused on getting ahead that they can sacrifice other things in their lives that are valuable like personal health, relationships, or their integrity to climb the social or corporate ladder to get the spotlight on them- although not all threes want the spotlight, but they do want to finish first. The Three’s orientation to outer success begins in infancy with an early precognitive imprint on their souls of having their mother gaze lovingly into their eyes as infants, and for the rest of their lives, Threes pursue success to hold onto that sense of acceptance and value they felt, anxiously feeling like they need to earn their value to hold onto that gaze. As children, they developed sensitive little antennae to pick up on what their parents valued, and they latched onto whatever “that” was to embody it as adults to obtain that same sense of value. It usually takes a massive blow to a Three’s momentum for them to reflect honestly on their lives and out of the nine types, Threes are most likely to say don’t know who they are; they have forgotten to pay attention to their own likes and dislikes and have completely abandoned who they are inside, taking on affectations and emotions they observed in others and concluded were appropriate for the moment; they live a carefully calculated algorithm to create an admirable image of what it means to be a full human who has reached their potential. Threes seem to operate out of a memory from before they were born of the flow between being created, relaxing into the unfolding of reality and reaching their potential of glory. By attempting to re-create that glory, Threes are trying to re-connect with the essence of God or Source that they embodied before they were born.

Type 4: The Individualist / The Individualist

While everyone else wants to be a shiny version of their ego type, Fours are the opposite- they over-identify with their shadow, and it’s their competence that’s disowned. Fours are creative and they pride themselves on the originality of their work. Fours are not the most common, but there are lots of them to be found in psychological or spiritual self-awareness work, as they have a craving to understand themselves at the deepest level and can fall into a trance of “navel-gazing” to understand and extract meaning out of their feelings. In fact, what they’re trying to do is find their true identity, and their egoic trance tells them they can find it in their intense emotions. They like to be alone to feel their feelings, energetically somewhat to have an “emotional bowel movement”- to come up with something solid they can pin an identity on. Fours believe that once they find their true identity, their path forward in the world will finally open up to them and they can shine, but they get stuck on the treadmill of trying to find their identity out of nothingness because emotions are just passing energy sensations that come and go. Because Fours value authenticity above all else, their identity gets connected to suffering, which their ego has mistaken for authenticity. In fact, Fours are suffering-collectors; they pull the shadows of other people, organizations, and societies onto them, even imagined ones, and, having wrapped it up in their shame and pressed it onto themselves, they unconsciously create a self-fulfilling prophecy in their lives of not getting anywhere. There is a melancholy to a Four- they feel uniquely deficient- they feel like no one understands them, and they don’t quite belong in their family, in their peer groups or in society. But the disconnection they feel is a two-sided coin because Fours also [unconsciously] cultivate it: if I am authentically myself, then I am uniquely myself, unlike anyone else. So the Fours’ identity is attached to seeing themselves as different- they don’t want to blend in with the faceless masses- they insist on standing out in some way, as they feel their uniqueness heightens their value and re-connects them in a kind of unconscious pre-birth memory when their personal manifestation arose from the well-spring of Source or Divine Unity. In other words, their ego is always trying to re-create that divine creativity where they were created as separate from the divine, forgetting that the thing that is separate is still one with the Source.

Type 5: The Observer / The Investigator

Fives are information-oriented, withdrawn and logical. They attack life’s problems from the head and often forget that they have a body to take care of. Fives are looking to map out life intellectually so they can one day feel confident enough to actually navigate it in real life, so most of their energy goes into information and fact-gathering, understanding history, absorbing news, whatever- information enlivens them and strengthens their spirit. They’ll read books and internet articles about experiences before they have them so they can contain the experience psychologically- otherwise, their sensitive nervous systems will be overwhelmed if the head hasn’t gone first to pave the way for the body. Fives have a filter on their early childhood experience of lack, for example, not getting enough milk from the mother’s breast, and they carry that subconscious memory into adulthood, sensing like life doesn’t have enough resources to support them so they retract their needs and live simply, often with a frugality others would find painful and often unnecessary, although of course many Fives do suffer from real lack. Fives fully believe that their intelligence and ingenuity should get them as far as they need to go in life and they look with derision on anything superfluous from bodily self-care to therapy, and physical comforts to luxury. By retreating from life to learn, Fives are trying to recreate the pre-birth imprint on their souls they seem to remember of God or Source’s omniscience- having enough distance on creation to see every created thing in its individual parts, but simultaneously as a unity and a whole. The work for a Five is to take some of the energy going into the head and direct it to healing their heart.

Type 6: The Questioner / The Loyalist

The Six is cautious, skeptical, dependable, and after their loved ones have passed the necessary loyalty tests, staunchly loyal in return. Sixes can be some of the most dependable people in our lives at at work, if only because they themselves are looking for what is solid, logical, and dependable in life; like John Cusack’s 1985 movie (a Type 6 himself ), they are looking for “The Sure Thing” they can find security in. Obviously a Six can have any career, just like any other type, but an archetype for the Six might be the blue collar union worker who works with their hands with “real things” and fights against the power abuse of The Man together with their union, as their colleagues have passed a series of loyalty tests in dangerous conditions at work. Sixes seem to be connected to a pre-birth memory of being one with Divine Essence where they were on the same level as Source- in fact, they remember being Source, and equal participants in divine creation, and as a result, they have a deep aversion to power differentials in society. There is an anxiety about trusting someone who might mis-use or abuse that power. The current trend of questioning why we should listen to fancy doctors who tell us to get shots, or why we should pay taxes to the government when they probably participate in secret societies, or why they need to go to a fancy university to get a useless degree when they will just get brainwashed- these are all very Six sentiments: there are all kind of people out there who are willing to abuse their position as soon as they get a modicum of power, and a Six needs to be on high alert at all times for anyone about to take advantage of them. Better to stick with tradition, the past, our grandparents, and age-old institutions that have passed the test of time. Which is why the Six posture toward new things and people is one of coolness and skepticism, and when unhealthy, even coming up with threats that aren’t there. Paradoxically, however, Sixes are also endlessly searching for a belief system, a person, or an institution that they can depend on because, having lost that connection to Source, they don’t feel like they are qualified to trust their own minds, so they outsource their judgement and critical thinking to those who they see as being solid and worthy of their trust which can sometimes cause the most painful irony of being hoodwinked- exactly what they were seeking to avoid. Ultimately, a Six is looking for security, and until they dis-identify with their personality and learn to trust their own judgment, they will be a jittery bundle of nerves always looking over their shoulder.

Type 7: The Enthusiast / The Enthusiast

Type Sevens are upbeat, energetic, and optimistic. They are looking for the most experiences possible in life. “Life is too short to waste on [whatever boring or negative experience threatening to book itself into their calendar]” is a typical line you will hear from a Seven who’s already halfway out the door at first blush of a routine settling in, or a partner asking for commitment. Sevens experience great anxiety when they feel boredom coming on because the dryness of it feels like a painful death in a hot, dry desert. So they tend to make sure they’re always busy and arrange their schedules so events are back to back to avoid the pinch, the terror of nothing to do. The metaphor is that Sevens see life as a buffet and want to taste a little bit of all the food before them in order to get the richest possible experience of their short life on earth. In order to do this, Sevens need their freedom, and they dearly protect it by staying as free as possible from ways you could be tied down, from marriage to other types of binding contracts, although of course there are lots of Sevens who are happily married, it’s just a question of if their need for adrenaline and new and exciting experiences is being met with their partner. They revel in having options laid out before them, and they choose career paths that allow them to be flexible so they can take off on a flight across the Atlantic if the right adventure comes along or something as simple as an exclusive invitation to see someone’s private collection of rare antiques- Sevens love to be stimulated, and mental stimulation works too, as long as it’s new and exciting. There is something about newness- Sevens know how to work hard, but they can also burn out before a project is done and leave a trail of unfinished projects in their wake. They like careers where they can make horizontal hops from job to job to get a taste of a bunch of different types of work. Variety is key for a Seven. The path toward growth for a Seven is to learn how to sit with sobriety and make peace with their inner calm.

Type 8: The Protector / The Challenger

Type Eights are strong-willed, tough, and impatient with bullshit- they want people to be as direct and straight with them as they are with them. Eights willingly admit that they are pretty simple people- they say what they mean, they go after what they want directly, they work hard, and they expect respect. If anyone remembers Bam-Bam from the Flinstones, that kid could be considered a caricature of an Eight- all body, with not much thought process going on; of course Eights can be as intellectual as any of the other types, but they identify with their red-blooded, instinctual self first. Of all the Enneagram types, Eights operate from the most primitive of human instincts: the need to physically [or today, financially] dominate over their enemies. This is the stereotypical bully of the 1970’s and 80’s playground who sees weakness in other kids and beats them up; although unconsciously what they’re really doing is trying to beat out the weakness in themselves and toughen themselves up against their own ego that flays them for being soft. As children, young Eights feel very small as they learn how violent the world is, so they grow up with their ego telling them to harden themselves because in order to survive, they need to dominate over others. As they grow into adults, the unconscious memory of feeling like a small child inside never really goes away, so because they fear their own weakness but can’t own it as part of their identity, they project it onto the others around them. If the “other” is a family member (a member of their “tribe”), this weakness will be endearing and the Eight will rise up to fiercely protect their loved one. If the “other” is a threat, the Eight will go after them with as raw an energy as they’re legally allowed to protect their family, livelihood and assets. The irony is that Eights dearly want to be soft and they search for a partner or a loved one who will allow them to let down their tough guy or tough girl persona into the sweet teddy bear that they can be. If they never learn to relax their defenses, though, the Eight can cause much destruction and violence in their insecurity.

Type 9: The Mediator / The Peacemaker

Nines are affable and non-judgemental. They have a largess of spirit that says, “Take a load off.” Whereas Threes are trying to “become someone”, Nines are trying to “become no one” in a sense. They want to relax into the natural flow of life and they want everyone around them to relax too. Upon closer examination of their easygoing exterior, however, there is a defensiveness behind the light-heartedness; they are trying to maintain an inner state of bliss that they have carefully cultivated by shutting out or numbing themselves to certain stimuli or realities that are uncomfortable. A quintessential Nine line might be, “Let’s just ignore the problem and see if it goes away on its own.” Ultimately, Nines create an inner false peace at the expense of true peace which requires that problems get addressed head-on. The natural response when someone is disturbing one’s peace is anger, but because Nines don’t identify with anger as part of their self-image, they project the anger onto the other to disavow themselves of it so they can laugh it off as the other person’s problem. The other person is “causing drama” in their minds, although what they’re really meaning is that the other person is asserting their individual needs and desires, and Nines have turned off from the individuation path in themselves because they learned as children that they were seen and honored by their caregivers when they stayed out of the way and went along with the family’s flow. Causing a disturbance to the vibe by voicing their preferences, boundaries, or opinions would be detrimental to their survival as vulnerable children. There is danger in becoming self-aware because to be in touch with one’s desires, preferences, and boundaries means that they must tear themselves away from the cloth of the collective to assert their individuality so Nines feel safer in self-abnegation. So the pained, angry cry for a Nine under their derision for the individual expression of need in others is, “I’m not allowed to have any problems, so why should you? I put up with not being an individual so sit down and relax.” As they grow into adults, their chill vibe has grown into a kind of campaign against the Sun’s individuation function in other people, preferring to commune with the unconscious Moon, the instinctiveness of the body, the swinging hammock, the beer on the deck after work with a breeze in their hair, the boys at the gym, the innocence of children, their pets who “get them”, the silence or solitude that allows them to retreat to their inner sanctum of peace. The Nine’s path to growth is to get in touch with the body’s sensations that they’ve numbed.