Esquire article about the Enneagram

Esquire article about the Ennegram

Part 2 of 4

Today, at least a dozen main teachers offer Enneagram workshops across the country. More than 30 books about the system have been published, and two of them - Helen Palmer's the Enneagram and Don Riso's Personality Types - have sold more than 100,000 copies each. The demand keeps rising. Last summer, a proposal for a book about the Enneagram's application to business, written by first-time author Michael Goldberg, attracted a half dozen bids from publishers, and the highest one eventually exceeded $200,000.

In August, two prominent professors at Stanford University - psychiatry-department chairman Alan Schatzberg and business-school professor Michael Ray - gave the Enneagram its first dollop of mainstream credibility by cosponsoring the First International Enenagram Conference on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, CA.
(I was there; it was a great historical and powerful event. - wz)

The four-day event was sold-out, attracting more than 1500 people to hear nearly a hundred presenters, who spoke about the Enneagram's application to subjects including psychotherapy, medicine, education, business, and spiritual growth.

Inevitably, the Enneagram's rising popularity has prompted some backlash. Perhaps the most stinging denunciation of the system - delivered by one of the first people to teach it publicity - came at the recent conference. "When you see a person as a type," warned Kathleen Speeth, A Berkely psychologist who studied with Naranjo, "You tend to see some attributes and think you've seen the whole...This is true of any diagnostic system. But it's even more true of the Enneagram, because it is so addictive, so interested, and so easy to get into. You forget that the system (gives) closure where there is none. It leaves out a lot of information. In our secret self - our real self - we cannot be categorized. This is why I think sensitive people recoil from the Enneagram."

Speeth's incendiary remarks generated equally impassioned responses. "To me, she was incredibly myopic," said Dr. David Daniels. "We cannot NOT categorize. Human beings make distinctions to function and to communicate. The solution is not to suppress systems that categorize but to be more aware of their potential abuses in order to reduce and prevent them." Riso responded by turning Speeth's remarks on their head. "Does the system put you in a box?" he asked. "The fact is we're already in a box. The Enneagram show us how our fixations block real contact with ourselves. What the system really gives us is a way out."

It's precisely because the Enneagram delivers up so much information so easily that some critics dismiss it as superficial. Certainly it can be used to asses people's motivations and behavior quickly without necessarily understanding them more deeply. I know, because I've done it myself. Whatever nobler uses the Enneagram may be put to, it's great fun to just sit around with fellow Enneagramniks and gossip about people's types. Is Bill Clinton, for instance, a Three (The Achiever), a Seven (the Optimist) or a Nine (the Peacemaker)? Is he so difficult to categorize because he tries so hard to be all things to all people?

Or take Nancy Kerrigan. Her bland, disengaged response to Tonya Harding suggests she's a Nine, but might she really be an image-conscious Three? And what about David Letterman? Underneath his genial Seven-like demeanor, is he really a fearful, hedonic Six? Of course, this sort of celebrity typing is inherently speculate and imprecise, since people often wear public personae that have little to do with who they really are.

Speculation about types also inevitably extends to how they interact in relationships. While there's no clear evidence that certain types necessarily get along better, some matchups are common. For example, Threes and Sevens - both upbeat and externally focused - are often drawn to one another. Eights and Nines can be another snug fit, the former oriented to power, control, and certainty, the latter accommodating easily to other people's agendas and naturally playing the role of conciliator.

That it's possible to use the Enneagram as parlor game doesn't make the system itself trivial. The notion that human nature expresses itself in fundamental categories or types, after all, is the very basis of modern Western psychology, beginning with Freud's varied classifications of psychopatholoy. Thinkers ranging from Jung to Reich to Horney to Erikson to Kernberg have modified and reshaped Freud's ideas, but in each case partly by offering up their own new and improved typologies.

The Enneagram offers something subtler than other systems by suggesting that personality is not static. When Ichazo mapped the nine basic personality types around the Enneagram, he theorized that they have certain predictable patterns of movement. The Enneagram's central triangle, for example, is formed by types Three, Six, and Nine. Under conditions of great stress, most teachers agree, the Six tends to look more like the Nine, and the Nine more like the Six. The same thing occurs in reverse under conditions of unusual security. The Six, in short, tends to act more like the Nine, and so on. A similar pattern of movement exists for each of the types.

Here, the Enneagram starts to get more complex - and more interesting. Take my own fixations of fear and doubt. In times of stress, the system suggests that I'll tend to take on characteristics of the Three, the type most concerned with status, image, and external success. No sooner did I become familiar with the Enneagram than I recognized precisely this pattern. Whenever I felt especially threatened or insecure, I found myself more drawn to power, external achievement, and recognition. I also got more jealous of those who seemed to have them. In effect, I sought protection from the inner experience of vulnerability by pushing harder for outer confirmation. Sometimes I got what I sought, but only rarely did it bring me much satisfaction. By contrast, when I was feeling most secure and comfortable, I tended to experience the healthier Nine's easygoing capacity to empathize with other people and to see the world from other points of view. In short, I became less suspicious and more open.

By Tony Schwartz, Esquire Magazine, March 1995