The Enneagram

Helen Palmer

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780062122957
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Personalidad en psicología

"Invaluable... both a practical guide to self-understanding and a sophisticated analysis of a complex psychological system of personality types." —James A. Donahue, America It would be impossible for most of us to spend a day without coming into direct or indirect contact with dozens of people family, friends, people in the street, at the office, on television, in our fantasies and fears. Our relationships with others are the most changeable, infuriating, pleasurable and mystifying elements in our lives. Based on the ancient system of the Enneagram, this book will help you to enjoy more satisfying and fulfilling relationships in all areas of your life by introducing you to the nine basic personality types inherent in human nature. This knowledge will help you better understand how others think and why they behave as they do, as well as increase your awareness of your own individual personality. Written by the leading world authority on the Enneagram, it offers a framework for understanding ourselves and those around us, as well as a wealth of practical insights for anyone interested in psychology, counselling, teaching, social work, journalism and personal management. "Provides help in understanding the good qualities of a more evolved life." — San Francisco Chronicle "Explores the mysteries of personality and points the way to the cultivation of extraordinary abilities." — Yoga Journal "A book for both the psychologically sophisticated and for ordinary people as well." — New Realities Magazine "[Palmer's] focus on the practical import of this unique personality system gives her book special power, the power to transform." — American Humanistic Psychology Review

1. Background of the System and an Introduction to Type

The Enneagram is an ancient Sufi teaching that describes nine different personality types and their interrelationships. The teaching can help us to recognize our own type and how to cope with our issues; understand our work associates, lovers, family, and friends; and to appreciate the predisposition that each type has for higher human capacities such as empathy, omniscience, and love. This book can further your own self-understanding, help you work out your relationships with other people, and acquaint you with the higher abilities that are particular to your type of mind.

The Enneagram is part of a teaching tradition that views personality preoccupations as teachers, or indicators of latent abilities that unfold during the development of higher consciousness. The diagrams that appear in this book are a partial view of a more complete model that describes the levels of humanity’s possible evolution from personality through a range of unusual human potentials, such as empathy, omniscience, and love. It is vital that this larger context not be overlooked by focusing attention on the nine character types, because the complete Enneagram is one of the very few models of consciousness that addresses the relationship between personality and other levels of human capability. The power of the system lies in the fact that ordinary patterns of personality, those very habits of heart and mind that we tend to dismiss as merely neurotic, are seen as potential access points into higher states of awareness.

We can easily recognize the value in the Enneagrams that describe personality because a great deal of our attention is focused on the thoughts and feelings that we identify as our self.¹ If, however, our own unique personality, or what each of us thinks of as “myself,” is in fact only one aspect in a continuum of human development, then our own thoughts and feelings must in some way constitute a staging ground for understanding the next phase of our own unfolding. From this expanded psychological perspective, our neurotic trends can be seen as teachers and as good friends who lead us honorably forward to our next phase of development. And if, as the Enneagram suggests, our personality is a stepping-stone to a greater consciousness, then gaining a working understanding of our own preoccupations takes on a double purpose. First, it makes us more effective and happier as a person; and second, we learn how to set the personality aside in order to allow the next phase of consciousness to unfold.

The Oral Tradition

The Enneagram of types is part of an oral teaching tradition, and the material is still best transmitted by seeing and hearing groups of people of the same type speak about their lives. Seeing and hearing a group of articulate and willing people express a similar point of view transmits far more of the power of the system than can possibly be conveyed by a mere written record of their words. After about an hour a group of people who start out looking physically very different begin to seem the same. The viewer can sense the similarities in physical holding patterns, emotional tone, the tension points in the face, and the quality of personal emanation that are the more subtle signs of type. The auditorium fills with a definite presence as the character unfolds. There is a unique feel to each of the types, a distinguishing quality, a presence in the hall.

A group of the same type can initially appear to have nothing in common, because the viewer is paying attention to their differences in sex, age, race, profession, and personal style. Within an hour, however, they begin to look the same: their histories, their choices, their preferences, their goals. What they avoid and what they dream begin to seem the same. They even start to look alike, once your attention shifts from the surface features of apparel and a personable smile. When your attention shifts from surface cues, you can recognize type by falling into an appreciation of the aspirations and the difficulties that the members of a type will share.

The world looks very different to each of the nine, and by lending yourself to the way that others feel within themselves, you can shift out of your own point of view into a true understanding of who the people in your life really are, rather than what your ideas about them might lead you to believe. By lending yourself to the ways of others, a sense of compassion for their situations opens. When you see the world from the point of view of other types of mind, you are immediately made aware that each type is limited by a systematic bias.

I am always moved by the power of this teaching when I recognize the central patterns of my own life in the stories of a group of my similars. They are contemporary stories that take place in ad agencies and supermarkets and college classrooms and meditation halls. They are told by people who have my thought patterns and are living out their stories in the way that I live mine. I know that I can count on them for information, for counsel, for the revelation of what they have found out about themselves.

What makes the the telling of personal history stunning is that the self-disclosure of profoundly intimate material is given with the intention of putting oneself aside. The intention behind telling your own story is, of course, to get some clarity about the patterns that drive your life, but in this case, the goal of self-understanding is to learn to observe these patterns internally, detach attention from them, and eventually set the personality aside. The “setting aside” implied by a system that encompasses several states of consciousness means more than simply working a problem through until the suffering is gone. Setting the personality aside means being able to detach attention from thoughts and feelings, so that other perceptions can come into awareness.

The statements in this book are taken from the tape-recorded voices of people who spoke on a panel for their own type. They were willing to appear and to self-disclose so that an audience could learn to recognize type in the oral way. When I interview panels, the focus of attention is always on what makes a type distinctive from the others, so the line of questioning that I have developed is biased toward what is unique about each of the nine points, rather than how they are the same.

It is important to stress the ways that people are different from each other, because so much of the suffering that we experience in our relationships with other people is caused by the fact that we are blind to their point of view. We do not apprehend the reality in which the people who are close to us live out their lives.

For example, it takes real work for a couple who are romantically involved to understand the premises of each partner’s love. If one is a Nine (the Mediator) and the other an Eight (the Boss), how will the Nine know that the way to love and trust is through a series of toe-to-toe confrontations? And how will the Eight know that a Nine partner will tune out direct orders, and stubbornly refuse to be pushed into action, but can easily be drawn out by other people’s needs?

The Limitations of Categorizing People

One of the Enneagram’s problems is that it’s very good. It is one of the few systems that concerns itself with normal and high-functioning behavior rather than pathology, and it condenses a great deal of psychological wisdom into a compact system that is relatively easy to understand. If you can type yourself and the people who are important in your life, a lot of information is immediately made available about the way that you and another are likely to get along. There is, therefore, a natural tendency to want to put each other in one of nine boxes, so that each can figure out what the other is thinking and predict the ways in which the other is likely to behave. We want each other in a box, because it lessens the tension of having to live with the mystery of the unknown, and because in the West we have an addiction to reducing information to fixed categories so that we can try to make cause-and-effect predictions.

The Enneagram, however, is not a fixed system. It is a model of interconnecting lines that indicate a dynamic movement, in which each of us has the potentials of all nine types, or points, although we identify most strongly with the issues of our own. The structure of a nine-pointed star with interconnecting lines also suggests that each type possesses a versatility of movement between points. The nine points correlate well with current psychological typology² and the interconnecting lines indicate specific relationships between the different types that are only now beginning to be examined in the current psychological literature.

The interconnecting lines also predict the ways in which each point or type is likely to alter its usual behavior when placed either under stress or in a secure life situation; so that each point is actually a composite of three major aspects—a dominant aspect, which identifies a type’s world view, and two additional aspects that describe behavior in security or under stress.

Beside the fact that we alter radically under stress or when we are secure, each of us alters in the degree to which we identify with the issues that define our type. There are days when we become so involved with the preoccupations that underlie our particular “box” that we cannot focus our attention on anything else. When attention is glued to a particular set of preoccupations that define our type, we are definitely in a box. We are not free. When we cannot detach attention from a recurring preoccupation, when we lose the ability to observe our own behavior in a dispassionate way, then we are under the control of our own habits and have lost freedom of choice.

But we are not always under the thumb of our personality. We can often shift our attention to see the situation in a different way. In terms of the Enneagram model, we are moving upward in the evolutionary spectrum when we can free ourselves from the habits that limit our point of view and expand our awareness beyond the preoccupations that define our type.

Typing can set up an unfortunate self-fulfilling prophecy. We may learn to type people and then begin to treat others as caricature composites of a list of type traits, which very effectively reinforces type. We are all molded by the ways in which we are treated, and all of us tend to believe what others read into us. All too often we begin to see ourselves in the way that we are seen by others and to take on the characteristics of what we have been trained to be.

This is why I say that the Enneagram’s problem is that it’s very good. It is relatively easy to type once you know what you’re looking for, especially if you can empathize with another type’s point of view. The system is so good that I have seen people able to pretend that they were psychic because they could type quickly and accurately and could consequently come up with an enormous amount of detailed personal information about someone whom they had barely met. With a good system and a wrong attitude about typing, we can forget that the purpose of knowing personality type is to learn to set it aside in order to get on with the real work of embodying higher consciousness. A small-minded approach to typing reduces the value and purpose of a system that suggests that type is merely a stepping-stone to higher human abilities.

The good news is that typing doesn’t work in the real world. It does not work, for example, for an employer to draw up a list of “do hires” and “don’t hires” for particular jobs. “Do hire a Four (the Tragic Romantic) for a job in an art gallery” makes no sense if the Four has no eye for paintings, even if he or she does have a profoundly artistic temperament. “Don’t hire a Five (the Observer) for a high-visibility job” would be a grand mistake if the Five were busy cultivating some outgoing qualities and were going to go all out to do the job well. Labeling will not serve the matchmaker who wants a formula that says a Three’s ideal mate is a Seven, or that Twos and Fours are incomepatible lovers but make good friends. The Two and the Four may have developed a fragrant chemistry that does not fit the number formula, and that is more than what they, or the matchmaker, can hope to understand. Neither will it work to put together an “ideal work team” based on the fact that Fives make good strategists, Threes are terrific salespeople, and Eights are great in a business turnaround. Labeling and boxing does not work, because people are far more versatile and complex than anything that could possibly be described by a list of character traits.

Why, then, be so concerned about type? If an accurate set of labels won’t eliminate the risks involved in hiring employees or choosing a mate, why bother to uncover type at all? The reason for discovering your own type is so you can build a working relationship with yourself. You can count on the experience of your similars to guide you, and you can discover the conditions that will make you thrive rather than continue to play out neurotic trends. The most important reason to study type isn’t so you can learn to spot other people’s character traits, it’s so you can lessen your own human suffering.

The second reason to study type is so you can understand other people as they are to themselves, rather than as you see them from your own point of view. This understanding of others can help work teams be efficient, infuse romance with magic, and help families to reunite. Although we cannot designate certain types for certain categories of employment and expect them to perform in stereotyped ways, we can learn to see a project from a work associate’s point of view.

In the same fashion, we cannot pick out partners from a list of desirable character traits and expect that they will not also show the less than desirable features of the type. We cannot even assume that either partner will not react, paradoxically, against intimacy by becoming stressed out and confused. What we can assume is that by paying close attention to the ways in which each type opens to love, we can understand that point of view and change our attitudes accordingly.

History

The word Enneagram stems from the Greek ennea, meaning “nine,” and grammos, meaning “points.” It is a nine-pointed star diagram that can be used to map the process of any event from its inception through all the stages of that event’s progress in the material world. The Enneagram model is intrinsic to Sufi mysticism, where it is applied to mapping cosmological processes and the unfolding of human consciousness. In its entirety the system is a highly articulated teaching that parallels the Cabala’s Tree of Life and, in fact, overlaps with the Tree in several ways.³ The parallel is interesting because the Enneagram describes the same terrain as the ancient Cabalist teaching, yet appears to have no written history of its own. We had no translated commentary from Islamic mysticism, yet the system is a model of the mystical premise that humanity is in the process of evolving toward higher forms of consciousness.⁴

What the West knows of the Enneagram began with George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, a spiritual teacher of enormous personal magnetism, who alluded to the Enneagram as a Sufi oral teaching device that he used to recognize his students’ aptitudes for particular kinds of inner life training. There is a large amount of literature concerning Gurdjieff’s work, and it includes a great many references to the system, but without specifics about how he used the diagram to see the potentials in people, or what kinds of information it made available to him.

Gurdjieff’s students worked with the Enneagram’s mathematical properties, but most of what they learned was transmitted through nonverbal movement exercises that were designed to give a felt sense of the stages that different processes go through when they begin and as they are played out in the material world. The movements are an impressive series of dances that are done in large groups. They are designed to teach certain nonobvious features of process, namely, that the rhythm of a process can be sensed through the physical body, and that it is possible to recognize those moments at which adroit “shocks,” or new input, is necessary in order to keep a process on course and alive.

Gurdjieff tried to inculcate a felt sense of the Enneagram as a model of perpetual motion in his students. He had a nine-pointed star marked on the floor of the hall at The Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Students were stationed at the points of the circle marked One through Nine and performed elaborate movement patterns that demonstrated the various relationships between the points and along the inner lines One-Four-Two-Eight-Five-Seven. There are reports from students who discuss their felt sense of the inner rhythms and the natural moments of pause and realignment of forces that are brought about by dancing out the relationships between the points and the lines. They d...