Where Does Personality Type Come From?

Posted by Jean Adeler on Jul 20, 2010

In an interview in the latest edition of Enneagram Monthly (Issue 171), editor Jack Labanauskas poses the question (p. 8), “[W]hat do you believe is the essence of type and where does it come from?”

The answer he got was speculation of a philosophical nature: nature, nurture, spirituality ….

But I wonder if his interest in asking the question wasn’t something less ontological and more practical. There are layers of cause and effect in between having come into this world a human being and being assigned an Enneagram number.

The Enneagram is a model of what is—certainly not the full reality. What is it about this model that causes a particular Enneagram personality to apply to a class of people?

The Structural Enneagram (Enneagram 2.0) says personality is a function of habitually favoring certain perspectives over others. There are only six perspectives represented on the Enneagram, so it’s a fairly simple model. And a useful one because the perspectives can be analyzed in terms of easy-to-understand factors like beliefs, behaviors, and submodalities.

Wasn’t Freud Really Five-wing-Four?

Posted by Jean Adeler on Jul 19, 2010

There are those who say Sigmund Freud’s type was Five-wing-Six. I can’t see that.

Freud created a highly original and complex system. It was a system built around a knowledge of people’s deepest desires, and that knowledge was based on introspection as much as on the revelations of patients. I believe Freud observed his patients and decoded their unconscious productions but also compared those productions to his own internal feelings and fantasies. This is the work of a Five-wing-Four.

I base my assessment also on Freud’s apparent ambivalence regarding the Eight-One binary (a feature of the Structural Enneagram).

On the side of perspective One, Freud’s “god” was his new art and science of psychoanalysis. This ideal was what motivated him. That he was not, for reasons related to his own neurosis, able to comfortably sustain perspective One is reflected in his studies on superego. Some people sense the existence of a force that might be called “superego” but that is wholly uplifting and inspirational, pulling us out of our mundane selves, calling us toward a sort of ecstatic relationship to a larger reality. These people are thrilled to surrender to the demands of such a superego. Freud, on the other hand, wrote about the “punishing superego” and reduced it to some kind of father archetype. Still it commanded him.

On the side of perspective Eight, he would have liked for psychoanalysis to have ruled the world of psychotherapy. For this he needed followers, and he valiantly recruited them. At first, he was only able to find interlocutors, like Wilhelm Fliess, whose naïve interest at least allowed Freud to articulate the first versions of his system. Later, he identified more appropriate disciples, but many of these didn’t want to be anybody’s disciples—they wanted to be masters of their own worlds. Had Freud’s personality decisively incorporated perspective Eight, he might have been satisfied with the disciples and influence he did amass. Freud, however, was afraid of being mastered. He suffered a near paranoia about his followers figuratively rising up and killing him, their father in psychoanalysis. There are stories of him fainting in the company of his followers. Although it’s not possible to prove that his fainting was a defense against the fear of mutiny, there is reason to suspect that it was. One bit of evidence is his own book of speculative anthropology, Totem and Taboo, in which the sons band together to kill the father of the primal horde and take his place.

This push-pull of perspectives One and Eight serves as both obstacle and motivation for a Five-wing-Four.

(Informaton about Freud’s relationships to various followers is available from a number  of sources. One of the most interesting is Francois Roustang, Dire Mastery: Discipleship from Freud to Lacan.)

Jung-Eagram?

Posted by Jean Adeler on Jul 15, 2010

It’s interesting that many people compare Enneagram personality types to a Jungian or Briggs-Meyers typology.

Carl Jung’s major structures are:

Extrovert         v.         Introvert

Sensing            v.         Intuitive

Thinking          v.           Feeling

These have been matched up inexactly with Enneagram types. For example, One has been called an extroverted thinking type.

Of course, it’s possible to map any personality typing system onto any other. And there are several reasons you might want to do that.

If you understand the Jungian system, you might use comparisons to help learn the Enneagram. That’s a technique Susan Reynolds used in The Everything Enneagram Book. Also, you might want to compare and contrast two systems in order to pick the one you like better. If you are writing for skeptical readers, you might legitimize the Enneagram by comparing it to Briggs-Meyers, since that system is widely recognized by people like college guidance counselors.

But there may be another, less obvious motivation for comparing the Enneagram to Jungian typology. It would be handy if the Jungian oppositions could be used to explain how and why the Enneagram works. If they could be reliably mapped onto the Enneagram types, they would provide a rationale that would be attractive to all of us folks with a Five-ish bent. What if personality type Two were as simple as “extroverted, feeling, and balanced sensing-intuitive” (a combination that I made up on the spot).

Well, I think the explanation for Enneagram types is that simple, but the psychological structures that I find undergirding the Enneagram don’t belong to the Jungian typology. As far as I know they are unique to my Structural Enneagram. I call them perspectives, and here they are in brief:

 Associated      v.         Dissociated

Other desire    v.         Own desire

Interpersonal identification      v.        Identification with principle

 

Mel Gibson an Eight-wing-Seven

Posted by Jean Adeler on Jul 14, 2010

I’m thinking actor Mel Gibson’s personality structure may be Eight-wing-Seven and not Six, as others have claimed.

I was looking at old interviews yesterday on You Tube, and I saw him being belligerent – repeatedly. Also insulting. When interviewers gave him a chance to answer to potential movie audiences for his past errors – a kindness, really – he personalized the questions and tried to bully his way out of admitting any wrongdoing.

So that’s the Eight in him. The Seven is too obvious to bother discussing.

According to the Structural Enneagram, Eight-wing-Seven is ambivalent about perspectives Two and Four. Two and Four form a binary, with Two wanting to know what the other person thinks and wants, while Four’s attention is turned inward.

Seven-Eight would prefer to emulate Four’s autonomy and creativity. But his psychological pattern is to retreat into Two’s concern with the other’s desire.

Only, his point is to break away from the other’s control, so he’s going to do just the opposite of what is wanted and expected of him. He’s a rebel. More Braveheart than Hamlet.

Perspectives on Personality–Part 1

Posted by Jean Adeler on Jul 3, 2010

In the conventional Enneagram of personality, the nine points on the diagram indicate nine personality types. Enneagram 2.0 reassigns those points to a different concept—perspective. I’m using the word perspective to indicate both worldview and place from which to view the world. It is your viewpoint, point of view, perceptual position, or mental posture—how you hold yourself in mental space.

For example, perspective Five is dissociated. Dissociated is an NLP word referring to the state of holding yourself outside of experience. From a dissociated vantage point, we are observers, with little immediate kinesthetic experience. We can still see and hear details, but we can make them either clear or fuzzy, close or distant. From the dissociated state we can get a sense of what is going on “out there.” We may even imagine we are watching ourselves as if in a movie.

The dissociated position allows Five to stand out as an individual. Holding himself apart from a person, place, or situation, he achieves detachment. He sees patterns that could not be viewed from the inside. He removes his emotions from the scene and merely witnesses or “objectively” evaluates.

Five looks in the mirror of his environment and begins to construct a separate identity out of it: I am not that but I am somehow (like) that. This mirror identification with the environment is what makes personalities with a Five element so attracted to observing, exploring, and theorizing about the world: they are finding themselves in it. But always from a little distance.

Enneagram Matchmaking?

Posted by Jean Adeler on Sep 6, 2009

Have you ever tried matchmaking Enneagram types? The most outrageous effort I ever saw at charting who goes with whom was the one that advised us to pair up with a person whose type lies in our own direction of integration.

Threes should marry Sixes, Sixes should marry Nines,

Nines marry should Threes. …

Wait a minute. So only one person per pair gets to make a good match?

I know of a longstanding marriage of a One-wing-Nine woman and a Seven-wing-Six man. Thinking along the lines of the traditional idea of the direction of integration, I had wondered whether the woman was getting some kind of inspiration from her Sevenish husband since One is supposed to integrate to Seven. But then, was she a bad influence on him? She didn’t seem like a bad influence to me.

Then I developed Enneagram 2.0, and I could see that this couple had one personality structure in common, and it was through his Six wing. Maybe that was how they achieved rapport. (You’ll have to order my paper to see how his Six wing gave them something in common.)

Another couple I knew consisted of a Two-wing-One woman and an Eight man, whose wing I don’t know. Although they were married for quite some time, there was a lot of friction, and they finally divorced, at the instigation of the wife. He didn’t see a problem with the marriage because he insisted on being in charge and she, at least for a while, enjoyed giving him what he wanted. But when she got fed up with meeting his always escalating demands, she gave up on the marriage.

That couple (Two-wing-One plus Eight-wing-Seven or Eight-wing-Nine) didn’t have any personality structures in common, whether looked at through the conventional Enneagram or Enneagram 2.0.

So it makes me wonder.

I’ve never tried arranging a blind date on the basis of the following generalization, but I do notice that people often form successful relationships with others with whom they share at least one of the primary structures identified by Enneagram 2.0. (Again, order my paper.)

This scheme would still leave a very large population from which to choose. Here’s an abbreviated suggestion of how it would work.

Enneagram 2.0 Type	Shares at Least One Enneagram 2.0 Structure With
9w1	1w2, 1w9, 2w1, 3w4, 4w3, 4w5, 5w4, 5w6, 6w5, 6w7, 7w6, 8w9, and 9w8
2w1	1w2, 1w9, 2w3, 3w2, 5w6, 6w5, 6w7, 7w6, and 9w1
Etc.

There are a total of 18 type-wing combinations. Nine-wing-One would have at least one point of rapport with 13 other combinations, Two-wing-One with 9 other combinations.

And this is not to say that a person couldn’t profit from pairing up with someone who already had access to a personality structure that she or he wanted to integrate. Just that it seems that it would be more comfortable for both parties to build on what they already share.

…  All matter for future observation.

Obama is Nine-wing-One

Posted by Jean Adeler on Aug 23, 2009

Let’s face it, Enneagram type Nine is—like the other eight personality categories—not a single type. There’s Nine-wing-Eight, which is laidback and sociable and relies more on gut instinct than the other wing. And then there’s Nine-wing-One, which is oriented more toward ideas, ideals, and spirituality.

If people are still trying to identify a sturdy pattern that will hold up for all “Nines,” then it’s no wonder they were mistyping President Obama all over the place.

Obama reminds me of Nine-wing-Ones I know personally, especially his intellectual style. Nine-wing-Ones see past the common wisdom to the greater truth of a situation. They bring their well-known desire for peace to bear in their ability to see all sides of an issue, but they also see through to the motivations (sometimes unconscious) of all concerned.

And, sorry, Obama is nowhere near the type Three that some bloggers are making him out to be. Just recall the incident of the shapeless Levi’s at the ballgame. Following are some of Obama’s responses to the criticism of his lack of sartorial sense.

• “I’m a little frumpy.”
• “I hate to shop.”
• “Those jeans are comfortable.”
• “Here’s my attitude: Michelle, she looks fabulous. … For people who want a president to look great in his tight jeans, I’m sorry, I’m not the guy.”

This is not the image of a Three.

I read one blog that worried that, since Obama was a Three, he might be lying … given that Threes may lie under stress. Is it possible they thought he was lying because they didn’t like what he was saying, and since he was lying, he must be a Three?