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Esquire article about the Ennegram

Funny, You don't Look Twoish

Beyond Freud, beyond Jung, beyond EST, lies a personality-typing system known as the Enneagram. And whether you're an overachieving pit-bull lawyer or a hopelessly romantic wanna-be poet, it's got your number.

Part 1 of 4

I'm a six. Still, the discovery of my essential Sixness - embedded in a personality-typing system known as the Enneagram - has revealed more to me about my unconscious patterns, habitual preoccupations, underlying fears, and misused strengths than any technique for self-understanding I've yet come across.

And I've looked at plenty of them. During the past five years, I traveled the country, interviewing more than two hundred psychologists, philosophers, physicians, mystics, yogis, and scientists who have made the search for a deeper truth primary in their lives - and who pursue it through an array of practices and systems. What sets the Enneagram apart is that it contains such detailed, useful information about what drives us to behave as we do. It's valuable not just for those seeking to understand themselves but also as a source of insights into one's friends and family, colleagues, and even enemies.

The word ENNEA comes from the Greek for "nine," and the Enneagram is a nine-pointed figure that has its roots in Pythagorean theory, originally as a model for understanding the predictable patterns of movement within any given system. It was first adapted to understanding personality types by a Bolivian psychiatrist named Oscar Ichazo in the early 1950's. As Ichazo formulated it, each personality type on the Enneagram - he called the figure an Enneagon - is marked by a different central fixation or passion. Around this fixation, he concluded, our individual personalities take shape.

The result is a narrow, habitual, and often defensive way of perceiving the world that deeply influences what we think and feel and how we behave.

"The moment we know our type we have observed ourselves in reality." Oscar Ichazo

Or as David Daniels, a psychiatrist who works with the Enneagram puts it: "Embedded in each type is our basic belief about the world and how we live in it - not just the aspect of our underlying essence that has been most damaged but also the corresponding path of healing. If you are fully developed, you can incorporate all nine types or points of view, rather than skewing toward just one."

As a Six, for instance, my fixations are fear and doubt. What made this discovery so surprising - to me - at least, is that I'd spent so much of my life behaving in just the opposite way: aggressively and authoritatively. I'd long been aware of a vague underlying anxiety and a chronic ambivalence, but mostly these feelings baffled me. I didn't see that these feels covered a classically Sixish view of the world as a dangerous place - one in which people's motives can't be fully trusted, the worst-case outcome is forever expected, external success runs the risks of prompting resentment, and the need for vigilance makes it difficult to every fully relates. A grim picture to be sure, but one that gave sudden coherence to a lifetime of puzzling emotions and behavior.

I also began to understand that other types saw the world very differently than I did, but often just as narrowly. Twos, for example, are rewarded early on for being self-sacrificing, grow up ruled by a constant hunger to win approval from others, even at the cost of suppressing their own needs. Fours, beset by a sense of early abandonment and loss, believe that intense, passionate relationships are the key to escaping depression and finding happiness, only to feel forever let down. By contrast, Fives, intruded upon or simply ignored as children, cultivate detachment and minimize their needs in order to avoid feeling overwhelmed - but often end up isolated and cut off from intimate relationships. In a slightly different spin, Nines, overshadowed and often neglected when they were young, react by discounting their own needs and assimilating the agendas of others.

The Enneagram is not limited to characterizing pathology, however. Nearly all of the system's leading teachers believe that recognizing one's fixation opens the door to healthier states of mind and greater freedom. Unlike most Western psychological personality-typing systems, the Enneagram treats all personalities as inherently defensive structures. "The work of the type is stop being that type," says Ichazo. "The fixation is dissolved by obtaining an understanding of the other eight positions."

Ichazo refers to the higher opposites of the nine fixations as the "holy ideas." The Six's doubt and fear, for example, become courage and faith. Put another way, these higher opposites represent aspects of our essence - who we are fundamentally, beneath the personae we habitually wear."

The personality mechanism is put in place for good, adaptive reasons. Over time, however, we begin to identify with this personality. We think it is us. The Enneagram shows us that there is something else -
a higher self, an essence, a soul - that the personality obscures." Don Riso

At the same time, each personality type gets reflected at different levels - from the most pathological and fixated to the healthiest and most evolved.

Although the Enneagram emerged as a personality-typing system just 25 years ago, its roots are mysterious, faintly mystical, and ancient. The Enneagram diagram goes back to at least the 5th century BC.

Seven of the personality types correspond to Christianity's seven deadly sins:
Anger (Type One)
Pride (Type Two)
Envy (Type Four)
Greed (Type Five)
Gluttony (Type Seven)
Lust (Type Eight)
Sloth (Type Nine)

As far back as the 14th century, in the "Purgatorio" section of the Divine Comedy, Dante wrote not only about the seven deadly sins but also about those of fear and deceit, the fixations of the Six and the Three, respectively.

The Enneagram itself was introduced to the West by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, a Russian mystic and teacher born around 1870. Gurdjieff studied many esoteric disciplines but was perhaps most influenced by the Islamic mystical school of Sufism, from which he is believed to have first learned about the Enneagram. Its nine-pointed star was painted on the floor of his main school in Paris. Gurdjieff's "Work," as it came to be known, was conceived around his belief that most of us are asleep to our true selves, identifying instead with our "false" personalities. Gurdjieff used the Enneagram not to categorize personality types but as model for dance movements suggested by the nine-pointed diagram. His goal was to use these movements to force people of out their habitual patterns.

Gurdjieff also introduced the notion that each of us has a central fixation that drives our personalities. As a bossy, controlling Type 8, Gurdjieff liked to pick out what he called a student's "Chief Feature" and then take steps to force this defensive behavior out into the open. Most people, Gurdjieff theorized, become so identified with their personalities that they lose all connection to their underlying essence. Instead, they begin to behave in rote, defensive ways aimed at compensation for one aspect or another of inner deficiency." The hope is that by naming our own chief feature," writes Helen Palmer, a leading Enneagram teacher, "we can learn to observe the many ways in which this habit has gained control of our lives."

Using the Enneagram to diagram personality types was the seminar contribution made by Ichazo, who grew up studying not only medicine and psychiatry but also philosophy, theology, and mysticism. It was while studying metaphysics with a group of intellectuals in Buenos Aires that he came to his central insights about the Enneagram and began mapping each of the personality types on the nine-pointed star. While ichazo has been fierce intaking credit for developing the system - to the point of suing two other Enneagram authors-other theorists and teachers have, in fact, amplified his insights and made the system much more broadly accessible.

The first to do so was Claudio Naranjo, a Chilean psychiatrist who studied in the US in the 1960s and went on to train under Icahzo in Arica, Chile. After a falling-out, Naranjo returned to the US and began teaching the Enneagram to small groups of students in Berkeley, CA, in the early 1970s. In contrast to the more authoritarian Ichazo, who insisted on typing all students hjimself, Naranjo encouraged his students to figure out their own type-related fixations. Ichazo's training manual contained only brief descriptions of each fixation. By interviewing highly self-aware students about their preoccupations, Naranjo begin to develop a far richer picture of each type. Several of the leading modern Enneagran teachers came out of these groups.

By Tony Schwartz, Esquire Magazine, March 1995